Closet Realizations

Today I did laundry and was hanging up my shirts. Now, this time I had left laundry longer than usual so I was literally washing EVERYTHING.

As I'm hanging things up, I'm trying to space things out a bit in order to allow things to dry reasonably quickly (Dress shirts and pants get hung up wet. This saves both drying costs and, more importantly, ironing.) but I'm having trouble making room for it all.

So I'm looking at my 44" of closet space, wondering what to do, when I realize that I have ANOTHER 44" behind me, completely unoccupied. OK... dress clothes on one side, casual clothes on the other side. Lots of room now.

So why was the other side empty? I guess I was saving it for someone. Even though I've been separated for 4 years now I guess I haven't quite gotten used to it yet. The thing is, I moved into this place as a bachelor.

I guess today I realized that I'm a single man and, between the demands of business and parenthood, am likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. I might as well enjoy the extra closet space.

Why I buy Silver...

Recently I told you about my discussion of precious metals with a professional trader. That's what got my interested. From there I started to research things. Reading, reading, reading. Here's some of what I've learned so far:

• Silver has been recognized as money for close to 4000 years (the English Pound was originally composed of 240 silver pennies, weighing a total of one pound).
• Unlike gold, silver is one of the most versatile industrial metals. While gold is mined and hoarded, silver is consumed.
• In 1980, there were approximately 4 billion oz of silver inventories above ground. In 2007 there were maybe 1 billion.
• Most of the silver which has been consumed (mostly in consumer electronics) is very difficult to recover.
• Historically (400+ years), silver has traded at a ration of about 15:1 with gold. Today it's closer to 50:1.
• There is 4-5 times as much gold in inventory than there is silver.

These and other factors have led me to believe that silver is due to make a big move over the next few years.

More to come...

A random encounter can change your life...

... but you already knew that.

Let me tell you about MY random encounter.

In early March I was at Union Station waiting for my train out of town. While waiting, a man came up to me and asked me if I knew what track his train would be on. I said that I didn't know but pointed to the screen where it would display 10 minutes before departure.

I saw that he was carrying a trade show bag, so I asked him what show he was in town for (just to pass the time). Aparently, there was a mining show in town and he's a professional precious metals speculator. Well, it's always good to know a little bit about everything just in case you're expected to have a conversation about it (example: Classical Music - Bach was a very good contrapunctalist (Not you Andreas :-P)). So, I led off with the one thing I know about precious metals... "Cool, gold's way up there now isn't it?"

Well, that opened the flood gates. His statement was that yes, gold is up in the stratosphere, he expects it to undergo a small correction soon and then head for the moon. But what I REALLY ought to be keeping an eye on is silver.

Well, I listened to his reasons (to be covered in another post) and started my usual process... read and think. Read and think. Read and think. Act. Read and think. Etc., etc.

Two weeks later, I made my first silver purchase. Suffice it to say I was convinced at what I saw. I see precious metals as defense against inflation (in 1964, a gallon of gas was about US$0.30. A 1964 dime was 80% silver and 20% copper. Today, 3 80% silver dimes are worth close to US$4... the price of a gallon of gas). Realistically, this isn't really inflation but devaluation, a symptom of inflation. Also, in the event of a currency crisis gold and silver and especially legal tender coins should be exchangeable for goods and services or whatever currency is in use. If the shit truly hits the fan it'll be worth a whole lot more than the paper we're using now (unless we need toilet paper... $5 bills will be good for that at least).

So, based on someone asking me for directions in a train station I've become interested in precious metals as a way of preserving and increasing my wealth. Some may call me a conspiracy theorist (well, some called me that before), others may call me a survivalist (ok... I have a rough idea of what I'll do if we see a complete breakdown of society).

I just think I'm the same old nut-job you already know and love... ok... know and tolerate.

Expect to hear more from me on this one.

I don't know what this person did... but... WTF??

I asked a client to send me a log file today... I wasn't prepared for what I received.

The e-mail comes in with two attachments. I open them and they're both like this:

RnJvbTogPFNhdmVkIGJ5IFdpbmRvd3MgSW50ZXJuZXQgRXhwbG9yZXIgNz4NClN1YmplY3Q6IEpv
YiBMb2c6IEJFWDAyMjU2LnhtbA0KRGF0ZTogTW9uLCAyNSBGZWIgMjAwOCAxMDowMToyNiAtMDUw
MA0KTUlNRS1WZXJzaW9uOiAxLjANCkNvbnRlbnQtVHlwZTogdGV4dC9odG1sOw0KCWNoYXJzZXQ9
InVuaWNvZGUiDQpDb250ZW50LVRyYW5zZmVyLUVuY29kaW5nOiBiYXNlNjQNCkNvbnRlbnQtTG9j
YXRpb246IGZpbGU6Ly9DOlxEb2N1bWVudHMgYW5kIFNldHRpbmdzXFNVWkFOTkVcTG9jYWwgU2V0
dGluZ3NcVGVtcFxsb2dFOTguaHRtDQpYLU1pbWVPTEU6IFByb2R1Y2VkIEJ5IE1pY3Jvc29mdCBN
aW1lT0xFIFY2LjAwLjI5MDAuMzE5OA0KDQovLzQ4QUNFQVJBQlBBRU1BVkFCWkFGQUFSUUFnQUVn
QVZBQk5BRXdBSUFCUUFGVUFRZ0JNQUVrQVF3QWdBQ0lBTFFBdkFDOEFWd0F6DQpBRU1BTHdBdkFF


Hmm... looks like Base64 encoding... No problem - I run it through a decoder and get this:

From:
Subject: Job Log: BEX02256.xml
Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:01:26 -0500
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html;
charset="unicode"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Location: file://C:\Documents and Settings\SUZANNE\Local Settings\Temp\logE98.htm
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.3198
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What?? MORE Base64 encoded text?? At least I now know that the data is HTML and this aberation is courtesy of IE7... Decode it AGAIN and get this:

ÿþ?
?
????J?o?b? ?L?o?g?:? ?B?E?X?0?2?2?5?6?.?x?m?l??
?
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?
??B?O?D?Y? ?{?
?
? ?F?O?N?T?-?S?I?Z?E?:? ?9?p?t?;? ?F?O?N?T?-?F?A?M?I?L?Y?:? ?A?r?i?a?l?
?
?}?
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?P?R?E?.?W?W?_?I?N?D?E?N?T? ?{?
?
? ?M?A?R?G?I?N?-?L?E?F?T?:? ?1?0?p?x?;? ?W?O?R?D?-?W?R?A?P?:? ?b?r?e?a?k?-?w?o?r?d?


What's with all the question marks??? Wash those out and I get:




Hey! Look! Semi-valid HTML code! Feed that to my browser and I get the log I'm looking for!

How the hell did a user end up with a question mark infested, double-Base64 encoded log file? I'm sure you can't do that by accident...

I am an Engineer....

I've been doing a great deal of thinking about my profession and myself lately. Interviewing other engineers, interviewing non-engineers. It's been a bit of a revelation. I hope this makes sense to most of you....

I am an Engineer; this means I can't look at a new device without having to know how it works. This doesn't mean that I want to know that pushing this button then this button will make it do something cool. I need to understand how the device actually works. If I don't have a basic block diagram in my head with 5 minutes I'm off to do research.

I am an Engineer; this means I'm always conscious of my methods for doing things and trying to find more efficient ways do to them.

I am an Engineer; this means I always insist on people explaining what they are doing and won't let them stop until I understand. This applies to everyone, especially repairmen. The furnace guy HATES me.

I am an Engineer; this means when I'm walking or driving I worry about my routing and whether it is the most efficient. Is it shorter to drive the classic "L path" (following the opposite and adjacent sides of a right-angle triangle) or should one make lots of small turns trying to approximate the hypotenuse?

I am an Engineer; this means that I'm lazy. Very lazy. I will spend 20 hours, figuring out how to do a 10 minute weekly process in 30 seconds, and another 20 figuring out how to never have to do it again.

I am an Engineer; this means that I think I'm pretty damn smart. I also make a point of surrounding myself with other people whom I think are pretty damn smart. If I choose to associate with you, I probably think your smarter than average, you're also likely to be an engineer.

I am an Engineer; this means that I'm always thinking about something. Whether it's something altogether new or a modification of an existing device there's always something rattling around in my head. Things come to me at the most inopportune times and while I'm better at filing them for later I will occasionally blurt out a new idea in mid conversation and ABSOLUTELY HAVE to explore it right away. This sometimes makes me miss meals (though you'd never know to look at me) or a night's sleep. Any time is the right time to innovate. This has been detrimental to most of my personal relationships.

I am an Engineer; this means when I was given a plastic screwdriver at age 2 I immediately began unscrewing anything I could get it into. This includes electrical switch plates. My crowning achievement was the disassembly of my crib. As my father was working nights I had to show my mother how to reassemble it.

I am an Engineer; this means that I follow a basic scientific method for most things. All engineering began as science. Engineering is merely APPLIED science. The science that actually works outside the theorists head. Proven, applicable, repeatable science.

I am an Engineer; I see that the world in composed of two typed of people. Scientists and Engineers and Everyone Else. I'm not referring to professional scientists and professional engineers. I'm also referring to the people who are curious about the world, who have to understand everything they encounter. Those people are the scientists and engineers, even if they're janitors or McDonald's workers. Just as those employed in engineering jobs who want to learn by rote... if X happens do Y. They are not engineers.

I am an Engineer. Not because I have chosen to be but because I have to be.

The Greatest Game Out There

Ahh... the political season is upon us again.

After a quite summer and a real sleeper of a Provincial Election (The only excitement I saw during the election was when a voter at the poll refused to tell me his name -- that's another story) we're back at it full force.

Harper has made a strong opening move with this week's Throne Speech. In my opinion, he's forcing an election. Let's look at his recent statements plus the throne speech:

• He has stated that if the opposition parties vote to pass the Throne Speech, they have an obligation to pass any and all legislation mentioned in the speech. (Also known as, "I double-dog dare you to vote this down!")
  
• A clear abandonment of the Kyoto Accord.
• Scrapping the gun-registry.
• Several violent crime and anti-terror bills which were voted down in the last session have been combined into a single omnibus bill and is first up on the order paper. This bill has been specifically designated as a matter of confidence.
• Extending the Afghan mission to 2011.

Naturally, Layton and Duceppe immediately stated that they would not support this while Dion has been conspicuously absent. Ignatieff gave a brief interview where he spoke lots, but said absolutely nothing.

Layton and Duceppe can bluster with impunity. If an election were called tomorrow, or 6 months from now will make very little difference to them... what do they have to gain or lose? A dozen seats? Out of 304? Most likely insignificant. It would take a near-complete collapse of AT LEAST one the major federal parties (ie: Liberal and/or Conservative) to install Jack Layton at 24 Sussex as anything higher than the gardener and, with respect to Gilles Duceppe the numbers just aren't there. Quebec only has 75 seats.

Edit: I suppose it IS possible... assuming that the Bloc sweeps Quebec with 75 seats and the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP each win 74 seats, the Green Party wins it's first seat ever, then 10 more (maybe some Independents and fringe parties too) we could have a separatist Prime Minister.... and I thought I had has conflicts of interest in the past!

75 Bloc
+74 Liberal
+74 Conservative
+74 NDP
+11 Green and Other
-----
308 Seats

But, back to the original topic, it looks to me like Harper is trying to goad the opposition into forcing an election. He can then use the Throne Speech as his campaign platform. What could be better than having the Governor General make your first campaign speech? He can then play the wounded man and talk about how he wanted the parliament to work, he wanted to do what was right for Canadians, he was sabotaged by an opposition who are only thinking of their own opportunism. Bullshit! As I said to Paul Martin in 2005, treating a minority government like a majority is a good way to ensure your next job is Leader of the Opposition.

All that being said, Harper has the most to gain, or at least the least to lose at this point. Lets face it, the Liberals are bleeding from every orifice right now plus a few others they've just found. I'm sure Dion is looking for a way to oppose the Throne Speech while still letting it pass (I foresee a flu epidemic in the Liberal back benches in the next couple of weeks). Even if this works, he'll still have the Crime Omnibus coming up for vote in as little as three weeks, back to square one.

The short answer though is, that if we're going to the polls anytime soon it's 100% Stephen Harper's doing. How much do you want to bet that most people won't get that?

Running a DoS... on myself

For a few days I had a client whose main NetWare server would practically hang every afternoon for about 1/2 hour(The server did this for a few days... I didn't have the client for a few days). It was the craziest thing until I saw what was actually happening...

This server is one of those small biz servers that does practically everything. File, print, GroupWise, FTP, routing, BorderManager Reverse Proxy, iFolder... get the idea?

When the server was misbehaving, I happened to look at the BorderManager screen and saw that is was going nuts... hundreds of requests per second. Shutdown BorderManager and activity returned to normal, start it up and within a minute we'd be back in the thick of it.

Now, this was by no means a "standard install". In order to secure the system (there's a fair bit of organizational paranoia and an inordinate amount of money - not for IT - considering there's only 25 users) with no real budget we had setup BorderManager reverse proxy for a web server they had inside the network. We also configured it for GroupWise webaccess which ran on the same server as BorderManager (but a different IP). Of course, this affected ALL web services on that IP including... wait for it.... iFolder.

It just so happened that the SQL server would do a regular database dump every afternoon into... you guessed it... an iFolder. This wasn't a problem until we added the BorderManager proxy. Suddenly, we had an 800MB file being transferred accross a 1Gbps link to BorderManager, then being retransmitted (again at 1Gbps) to another IP on the same NIC. In essence this file upload was trying to transmit itself 3 times over (1 - SQL to BM, 2 - BM to Apache (send), 3 - BM to Apache (receive)).

Essentially a DoS on myself.

A question for all the twins out there...

I was thinking the other day... in the case of identical twins, do you really know which twin you are?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not questioning whether or not you're a separate person, of course you are. Is it possible though that when you were an infant and your parents hadn't figured out how to tell you apart, since they hadn't known you that long, and they mixed the two of you up? Maybe you're not the elder one after all?

Just a thought... courtesy of Ian's Damaged Mind....

Single Letter Domain Names

Yesterday, I was having lunch with my friend/colleague Andreas when the subject of single character domain names came up. Between us the only one we could think of was x.com which redirects to PayPal.

This morning I did a non-comprehensive WHOIS and found the following:

q.com: Qwest
x.com: Paypal
z.com: Nissan

In addition 0.com through 9.com are registered to VeriSign but don't appear to be in use. All the other single character names are listed as IANA_RESERVED since 2001.

My brain does it to me again...

This morning I was dropping Benjamin off at school when I saw a poster in the hall for "Elements and Emotions". This is supposedly an art show being held at one of the local high schools, but my brain took the title and ran with it...

Hmm... elements... hmm... emotions...

Suddenly I start thinking of things like Hydrogen Happiness, Selenium Sadness, Arsnic Anger and Iridium Indifference. Then it truly hits me. Hard.

The Beryllium Blues (insert standard blues riff here)

I'm an alkaline metal,
Used for space industry.
I'm the lightest metal,
but toxic to humanity!

I've got the blues, I've got the Beryllium Blues...

Somebody shoot me now!