How I learned to stop worrying and love the cat

Oscar had a scratching problem. Everywhere, all the time. Furniture, cabinets, the rug, my head. Here’s Oscar, so you can think about his adorable face scratching up the house as I talk about how I solved the problem.

Now I should caveat and hedge a bit, and say “solved” is a relative term. As often happens with animals, you eventually reach a place of mutual understanding and self-sacrifice, and have to be content with that.

Continue reading “How I learned to stop worrying and love the cat”

What high-end clients pay for may surprise you. For example, according to my ongoing interviews of several hundred sex workers, approximately 40 percent of trades in New York’s sex economy fail to include a physical act beyond light petting or kissing.

— "Skinflint" by Sudhir Venkatesh in Slate

Geeking Out

Harvard deals with GSAS hack fall-out

They’re gonna announce the details at CoB. I still think its a simple Joomla vuln. See previous post. Also, a decent bit of coverage from some no-name web site and the coverage in the Harvard Crimson. Last couple of weeks people were working overtime doing Nessus scans and the like. Here’s what I got this morning:

Subject: Important Notice — SECURITY ALERT

*** Important Notice — Heightened Security Alert for Harvard Managers
***

We expect the GSAS to announce details later today on the hacking
incident involving one of their web servers. This announcement will
likely attract attention both within Harvard and beyond. We are
concerned that hacking attempts may increase following this kind of
publicity and therefore write to suggest that you all be on a heightened
alert status over the next week.

This incident will also likely raise many questions about security
practices and solutions so one should anticipate a spike in inquiries.

Please let me know if you have questions.

Berkman used to have some fairly decent security monitoring, but in the last couple years its been loosened a bit for flexibility — keeping those things running reliably and with an acceptable level of false positives in a constantly changing environment is difficult. Which just shows you, in any organization with many competing priorities and limited resources, convenience will win out over security the second you turn your back. The best security strategy is one with many levels of protection. Harvard UIS does some sophisticated border analysis, and organizations like FAS are waking up to the need for additional proactive intrusion *testing* in addition to monitoring. With all of these layers, the success of any individual attack is dramatically lessened, but never eliminated, especially in a large, disparate, and sprawling organization like Harvard.

SciFi has produced a hilarious and awesome eight minute summary of the first three seasons of Battlestar Galactica in preparation for the premiere of season 4. If you’ve seen all or part of seasons 1-3 and have forgotten what was going on in the eternity since last season ended, this video is for you.

[N]ine-to-fivers have the connotation of someone with no passion, who’s just there for the paycheck. The spectrum is a lot wider than either you’re a nine-to-fiver or you’re a workaholic. That’s a bullshit dichotomy.

— "Fire the workaholics" by David Heinemeier Hansson at Signal vs. Noise

Sally, having swallowed cheese,
Directs down holes the scented breeze,
Enticing thus with baited breath
Nice mice to an untimely death.
— Geoffrey Taylor

Infinite Jest

I’ve tried, but after 150 pages I’m giving up — first I just tried skipping all of the parts that I found tedious, but then I discovered that if I skipped those parts (alcoholism sections, drug addiction sections, tennis sections) there wasn’t much book left. I found the first chapter incredibly captivating, was occasionally intrigued by the Quebecois separatists (and anything about US-Canada relations), and want to know more about Hal and the rest of the Incandenza family, not to mention the Entertainment, but I just can’t wade through another 850 pages to get there. If you’re going to give it a try, though, this Amazon review (spoiler free) is going to help you, along with the advice that you need three bookmarks (place in the novel, place in the endnotes, and page 223) and might want to take some notes as well. Also, Kottke has some good stuff about the book.

Forget all the razzmatazz over Obama. The Democrats have only one option for president

Some of the author’s points are things I’ve been pondering since Obama’s Texas/Ohio debacle. Is Clinton, despite all the odds, the more electable candidate? She has been getting consistently better results among older voters, Hispanics, and women, constituencies that are more important in the general election than young people and black voters. And she’s doing better in primaries and in larger states, while Obama’s support is in smaller states and caucuses. She’s also a fighter, and very willing to go negative which, while divisive and undesirable, is often a good way to win elections. At the end of the day, straight electability trumps hope in my book, as much as I think he is the more inspiring candidate.