I wonder how many people realize how ridiculous canned soup is?

Soup has been sold for hundreds of years. It's amazing to me that an idea that stupid could persist for so long.

Let's examine the origins of soup. Hundreds of years ago, not starving was the first thing on most people's minds. Even the wealthy put considerable effort in to whipping the slaves to ensure they had enough food.

I wonder if there are people who aren't afraid?

On April 28th of this year, I met a few friends at Ohiopyle to do some whitewater kayaking. To make a long story short, I lost my nerve and spent a good bit of time on the shore trying to pull myself together. After a while I composed myself and managed to get some time on the river, even though I still wasn't quite myself.

But it got me thinking about the nature of fear and how people deal with it.

I'm going to BSDCan this year.

I'm pretty damn excited about it. I went the first year, and had so much fine that I wrote up this nonsense to preserve the memory of the trip.

BSDCan is a great time. You get to meet lots of knowledgeable technical people. The talks are enjoyable, entertaining, and informative. The beer is Canadian. Ottowa is a great city to visit. The cost is low compared to most other conferences.

I can't think of a good reason not to go.

Microsoft has been making a lot of claims as to how much more secure Windows Vista is than any previous Windows. This is a complete lie.

The thing that amazes me is how many foolish people have jumped mindlessly on this security bandwagon. What frustrates and shocks me is that many of these people should know better!

There was some discussion about ssh attacks on the FreeBSD mailing lists not too long ago. It's a frequent topic, and this time I jumped in and made my opinions known. Someone asked if I could make my configuration public and I agreed to, then promptly got swamped with other things.

It's been a few weeks, and I'm finally making my configuration public. I can't find the original thread in which it was discussed, but I'll make an independent post.

Enjoy.

This server's security

The best laid plans oft go awry.

In case anyone was curious, The Month of SPAM isn't going to happen. Not this April, at least.

Too many other things going on in my life. I've too many other projects, all of which are falling behind.

So I'm going to refocus on these other things. Sorry if anyone was eagerly looking forward to the SPAM articles.

I can't seem to make a call with my cell phone.

The cell phone keeps telling me "the number is busy," which is utter nonsense because I just called from a land line and the number wasn't busy and my sister-in-law (who lives there, with my brother oddly enough) said that nobody's been using the phone.

Oddly, the cell phone problem started about the same time it started snowing.

It must have been some time around 1998 when I first started fighting spam.

Back then, nobody cared much about spam. The meaning of the term wasn't even known outside the circles of computer geeks. I even had the ISP of one particular spammer call me names and tell me to find something better to do with my time. After all, the guy sending the spam wasn't hurting anyone, and I could just delete the email.

A coworker, Brian Seklecki, lives within the city of Pittsburgh. Like most cities, Pittsburgh has a recycling program. It's organized fairly well: you put recycling in blue garbage bags and non-recyclable garbage in bags of some color other than blue. The collection folks then know what to do with the bags.

Except there's apparently some confusion about the color.

OpenOffice is a pretty good product (in spite of the fact that comes with a spreadsheet). But there are some issues with how it's designed.

These can be summed up in one sentence: “OpenOffice is trying to be just like Microsoft Office.”

It may not be immediately obvious why this is a bad thing. Lucky for you, I'm willing to explain it.