Aliens

No, not aliens like Swedes. Aliens like invaders from another planet. And I have proof. Our friends were visiting the Stump Farm and space aliens landed. You can clearly see in the picture that I am looking at space aliens while everyone else smiles for the camera.

I suck as a blogger. Sure, the pay is great, but the motivation to actually poke data out there is slim. I guess stuff has to actually happen to you that is of general interest. I will let you know if that happens. Meanwhile I will continue with things that are of a narrow interest to almost no one.

The first item of narrow interest is that my old friends from the mother country (for those of us of European lineage anyway) just popped by for a visit. It isnt every day one gets a representative of the Queen visiting your little metal shack in the woods. In tow were 2 of the cutest little British kids you have ever seen. I resisted the urge to make them quote lines from Oliver Twist or give them a tophat and make them do the Dick Van Dance.

And I just cant help commenting on the newest plan of the local Sheriff Department. (For those of you not keeping score, our sheriff was the one that just happened to have 2 tanks handy for loan when the Feds burned up the Wackos in Waco.) Yes, this should probably be filed as a rant, but the local sheriff is using county tax money to give away a bit of "security software." I use quotes, not becuase it isnt security software but because I dont think folks are getting what they think they are getting.

This thing is a keylogger. There are plenty of keyloggers out there for free... and they are generally thought of as hacker tools.

The idea is that you set traps for your kids and catch them being naughty. While that has its good and bad points, what I forsee is this:

1. The kids know more than their point and click parents, resulting in the parents not monitoring what they think they are monitoring.
2. A keylogger? are you kidding me? I forsee the parents installing this crap (that I am paying for with my taxes) on a shared family computer, then being shocked, SHOCKED that their own userids, passwords, bank account numbers, PINs, and various other bits of personal information are being stored. Businesses that allow VPN logins from the internet will find that if they are not using one-time passwords, they are getting hacked. This will all be a nasty bloody mess in about 18 months, funded by the taxpayers. Thanks a whole bloody lot.
3. And if you want to get truly paranoid, go stand on a grassy knoll and think about this: " Police Chiefs, Sheriffs, District Attorneys and Prosecutors,buy your own customized version of our ComputerCOP Parental Internet Software for distribution to the parents and guardians in your community." Now they may not be doing anything here, but the idea of the cops getting a customized keylogger installed on my desktop smells a little big brotherish. I dont know why they dont just park out front of the houses and sniff the WLAN like everyone else does.

November 12 - November 19, 2007

A batch update. This is laziness at its pinnacle. I am refining my laziness to a sharp point: Rush jamming on the jukebox, ass in chair. If I had a ponytail, it would be flopping back and forth. This week was a hodge podge of stuff: old friends from out of town were in. Flyboy Og and Johnbob were here. Johnbob even took me for a spin in his areo plane. See, here is a picture out the rear on takeoff:

and another out the front during takeoff:

Oops. You cant see so good out the front.... Just Johnbobs head. Lucky Johnbob. He just joined my Quitter's club. I think I will make him President, so I dont have to make all those annoying public appearances. He will be my puppet governing body for the club.

I also spent a good portion of time doing cleanup. It seems my parent's vacant lot in town was in violation of city code. (I.e., it was overgrown.) The city has a unique money-making scheme for notifying you of the violation. They stick a tiny 8x10 inch sign in the lot with some text on it like: "if you dont clean this up in 10 days, we will. And oh, we are going to bill you and how." So I spent 2 days dragging pickup load after pickup load out of there. Then I needed to get a tractor over there. Lucky for me, I have one. First I spent a day (and about $100) putting a brake controller in my Nancy truck. There aint no way I am pulling a tractor without brakes. I went and rented a trailer... only to find it had surge brakes, not electric brakes. Ah, well, I have a controller for next time. Let me assure you, they name them surge brakes for a reason: there is a constant surge, like a sine wave, of the trailer coming forward, applying its brakes, rolling backward. Wash, rinse, repeat. Anyway, the lot is finally in compliance with the law.

And I also resurrected FrankenFurniture (©Franken Enterprises). I have created Franken Runtstool. This is a stable, if not ugly, platform for refilling your birdfeeder or birdbath. Long live FrankenFurniture.