Microsoft Flight Simulator Tweaks
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Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
North Brother Island tourist trap?
Apparently, there is some talk of opening up North Brother Island for public tours.
I’m ambivalent, as on the one side I think it would be nice to allow the public (including myself) to see some old New York history. On the other hand I am not sure there would be any way to prevent these historical sites from being turned into crass tourist destinations (Starbucks?).
In the meantime some pictures from the gothamist site linked above:
Finally back
After almost a year, this site (and its sister site) is finally back up. I have recovered the previous posts before this site was attacked by the malware site davtraff.com.
Attacked by Malware
This site was attacked by a WordPress exploiting malware. Beware of any links to davtraff.com! They are a malware site!
I have cleaned up all malware links, updated WP, and hopefully everything will be back to normal.
RV'ing
I’ve lately gotten very interested in RV’ing. While my circumstances do not permit me to own one yet, I am learning as much as I can right now about RVs and intend purchase one when the time is right.
Sportsmobile is a very interesting company that allows you to custom-design your own RV on a van chassis. They even have a nice on-line tool to do so. Here are some results of my dreaming and playing around with the tool. All use the Dodge Sprinter chassis.
- RB (Regular Body) Design. Very bare and minimal but at a little less than 20K (not including the price of the van)Â the most practical and most likely one I will get.
Sprinter EB Design
- EB (Extended Body) Design.
- LB (Long Body) Design.
WordPress and Comments
I admit I am sometimes very lazy to get things done. I have been ignoring the solutions that are available to prevent wordpress comment spamming, and had effectively turned off comments.
Having taken a second look, I see that Akismet should do for now, and I have activated it and commets again. I’ll see how many spam comments I get before going further.
For those non-bot commenters, thanks very much for your comments! I promise from now on to be more responsive.
Mini Motels
I travel a lot for work, and have on occasion been stuck at a layover over night. Luckily for the most part it was due to mechanical difficulties, which meant the airline had to put me up at a hotel. I recently read that that is becoming rarer as airlines reduce flights and costs. The article I was reading mentioned the Mini Motel, which is intriguing, but probably impractical to lug around on the off chance you might get stuck. (Checking it in, which I almost never do normally, won’t help because most forced overnight layovers leave the checked luggage on the plane.) So unless I can carry it onboard, it isn’t that useful.
Still, might be worth a look as a cheap sleeping bag.
Quotes to live by
There are a few quotes/passages that have profoundly affected me in the way I think or live each day. I think the three most important are the following:
- I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Henry David Thoreau - “Sail forth – steer for the deep waters only, Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me, For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.”         — Walt Whitman
- I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
5 U.S.C. §3331
Slashdot Spam response form
Slashdot is often a place for taunting, ranting, and otherwise juvenile behavior. But there are some patterns and memes that are hilarious (or at least used to be ) that keep cropping up. The following is one the funnier ones, a stock response form for a post claiming to solve spam email once and for good.
Your finding advocates a( ) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!