This is the final post in this blog. I have moved it from the domain existdifferently.com over to original.existdifferently.com as an archived resting place. I will be re-using existdifferently.com. It may be for another personal blog or something else entirely. Regardless, although this is my oldest, original blog, my life is very different now than when I started and it’s time for a fresh start! However, I’m also a packrat, so I will likely never get rid of this archive entirely. (Whether I leave it publicly available or not I haven’t decided.)
Mon, 2008-03-24 (Mar 24)
Fri, 2007-03-09 (Mar 09)
Parisian: Highest Prices?
We were strolling through a mall with my in-laws about a month ago and my father in law pointed out the irony of this sign.
If I ever own a store, remind me not to advertise to customers about our most expensive prices ever!
Or at least, remind me to hire someone (my wife’s good at it!) to proofread the materials!
Because it’s a guarantee, I wonder if I were to buy something (hypothetically), if the price went up would I have to return it and pay the higher price to keep them honest?
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Sun, 2007-03-04 (Mar 04)
WordPress 2.1.1 Dangerous, upgrade!
The official WordPress development blog is reporting that WordPress version 2.1.1 was compromised by a malicious hacker and anyone who downloaded that version in the past several days needs to upgrade immediately to version 2.1.2. Many more details at that link; I checked the two files they mentioned (feed.php and theme.php in the wp-includes folder) and I got one of the infected versions! If you do a “diff” and compare an infected file with one from the 2.1.2 download the infected line becomes obvious. The vulnerability, as far as I can tell, allows an attacker to easily execute any command on the system that’s allowed by the user PHP is running as by using a specially (but easily) crafted query string.
I’m still running 2.0.3 here as I write this, but I’m going to upgrade to 2.0.9 soon; I can’t run the 2.1.* series yet because I don’t have MySQL 4+ installed on my server yet.
Thanks to a post from security blogger Martin McKeay that was my first warning!
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Tue, 2007-02-13 (Feb 13)
VA loses doctor and patient data – again!
You’d think they’d have learned by now, but nope, 1.8 million records from patients, and doctors, too this time, have been lost or stolen from a VA research facility.รย They aren’t sure if the data was lost or stolen yet, but, “A VA research assistant was using the physician data to analyze VA health care providers and compare them to non-VA providers, according to a statement from the department. The research assistant used the hard drive to back up information contained on an office computer, and the data is not believed to have been encrypted.” according to that article from GovExec.com.
This is the VA’s third data breach in less than a year, and I can only imagine the negative press and blog coverage this one’s going to get! At least the VA should be the most secure organization for data by the time they’re done cleaning up (again) after this mess! (Maybe that last sentence would drip with less sarcasm if this wasn’t their third breach.)
This seems to be a pretty new story, one of the earliest ones I see in Google News after a quick scan is only 19 hours old, but most places have only written about it in the last 6 hours or less. I do see a couple of stories like this one from yesterday (Feb. 11th), but they just now appear to be getting widespread.รย Should see some comments from security bloggers like Martin McKeay and Bruce Schneier pretty soon, I would imagine.
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Mon, 2007-02-05 (Feb 05)
Colts Win Superbowl!!!
The Indianapolis Colts won the Super Bowl! Yay! Whoo-hoo!!! Just needed to say that :-) Peyton Manning is the Super Bowl MVP, no surprise.
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Mon, 2007-01-22 (Jan 22)
Colts go to the Super Bowl!
Yay! The Colts beat the Patriots and are going to Super Bowl 41! I wonder if I can get more people to read my blog if I say that? We’ll see if it gets me higher rankings in Google or something. It is pretty cool though, I watched a lot of the game and coming back from being down by 18 was amazing! I’m not much of a sports fan, but it feels good for the local team to get that far, and I know all my coworkers will be super-extra-heavy-duty-excited this week :-) I think the Colts won because Nathaniel was “watching” the game for his first time ;-) Peyton Manning might have had something to do with it too, but I mention that mainly to get higher Google ratings by mentioning his name.
My dad grew up in Chicago and the Bears are going to play the Colts in the Super Bowl, so it should be an interesting game! Jim Belushi’s funny TV show According to Jim ought to be interesting in the next few episodes due to this development as well, since the show’s set in Chicago and Jim’s a big Bears fan.
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Fri, 2006-12-29 (Dec 29)
Thu, 2006-12-28 (Dec 28)
Mon, 2006-12-25 (Dec 25)
Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas to everyone! My son’s not born yet, and if he continues to hold off, we’ll have a nice day with family after we get some sleep! I’m personally looking forward to the food :-)
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Sun, 2006-12-24 (Dec 24)
Geek Wedding Favors
At the site that had our wedding favors featured, I discovered wedding favors I wish I had had at my wedding! Ironically, I have a binary clock in my office, just like the poster of the entry!
Favorable Favors
Our wedding favors were featured in a blog about wedding favors and decorations! They found my picture of them on Flickr and posted about it back in October of this year (almost a year after my wedding). Cool!
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Sat, 2006-12-23 (Dec 23)
Baby Coming!
So, my wife, Ruth, and I have a baby on the way! I know, I haven’t updated this blog recently and haven’t mentioned it since July 1st when we found out, but he (it’s a boy!) was due on Dec. 20th. He’s not here yet, but Ruth will be induced on Tuesday evening, Dec. 26th if he hasn’t shown up yet. At this point, he could still be a Christmas baby, but we’ll see. I just set up a blog for him this evening so we can post updates and (of course) pictures. I’ll be linking there after he’s born and we decide on a name, because we’re not naming him until after he’s born and we’re going to register a domain name at that point. The hospital has an internet connection in the delivery rooms and I have a laptop, so the blog should go up pretty fast after he’s born!
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Tue, 2006-10-24 (Oct 24)
Firefox 2.0 is out
Yep. Mozilla Firefox version 2.0 was released today.รย I’ve been running it since yesterday.รย I agree with Martin McKeay about tabs resizing vs. scrolling I think, I’m not sure yet.รย I probably won’t try the Tabbrowser Preferences plugin he mentions yet, I’ll try and get used to the new way for a while first.รย The spell check in form fields is nice, although writing this post is the first time I’ve seen it in practice.
One thing I missed at first was the del.icio.us plugin which wasn’t updated for Firefox 2.0 when I installed it, although I just checked and they appear to have released version 1.2 today with updated compatibility.รย Firefox refuses to install it however, perhaps the old version is cached?รย I’ll have to play with it, but the fact that they updated it makes me happy!
My favorite thing about 2.0? The look of the tabs and buttons look much more polished. The search function is improved, spell check I mentioned, phishing protection is good but I haven’t seen it in action yet (not likely to see it unintentionally!), RSS support slightly improved, and maybe something else I forgot.รย Oh yeah, they seem to duplicate IE7’s new features and look in nearly every important way. Which is good, in my opinion…I tried IE7 the day it came out (last week), too, and although I’m sticking with Firefox, IE7 is much improved over IE6 and compared to Firefox 1.5, I was a tad jealous!
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Mon, 2006-10-02 (Oct 02)
Toss some Phish in the Tank!
Created by the guys of OpenDNS goodness, PhishTank is a new site that lets you submit emails you’ve received and lets the community verify whether or not the phishing site is working, and if so it lets application developers query to see if a particular URL is a phishing scam or not!รย As this grows, it should provide a resource for programs like Mozilla Thunderbird and others to detect scams and help keep the less-informed users out there better protected.
I like the fact that you can submit phish, help verify phish others have submitted, but also you can tell when phish you’ve submitted have been verified by others and what the status is.รย Nice to be able to get some feedback to know you’re helping to make a difference with your submissions!
They also have a blog (who doesn’t) if you want to read the musings of the site’s creators.
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Wed, 2006-08-30 (Aug 30)
Vista Public Beta for Download!
You can download the Windows Vista Pre-RC1 Beta version here, limited to the first 100,000 downloads! No registration required, it’s publically available. You’ll have to burn it to DVD to install it, and it’s a big download (2.58GB). My copy is downloading as I write this, but I’m not sure if I’m going to test it out or not. I might get a chance to! Not on a system that matters, of course :-) Thanks to 4sysops.com for the link!
UPDATE: Apparently, according to the Windows Vista Team Blog, the download can only be activated if you install with a key as being an existing beta tester. So…not as nice as it would appear, since they never mention this on the download page!
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