October 2004 Archives

Keene, NH celebrated their annual Pumpkin Festival this past Saturday. We missed the 'fest in 2003, so in an effort to regain the good favor of our dear friends (who live in Keene and host a part around the festival each year) we quested for the Great Pumpkin so that we might impart some of his divine providence upon the hallowed town of Keene. Well, we couldn't find the GP itself, but we did find one helluva huge pumpkin. We hauled it up to Keene (and I mean hauled, as it weighed in at nearly 200lbs) where it towered over a total of 30-some-odd other pumpkins that were gathered amongst guests, beers, and an assortment of knives and saws. After a few hours of gutting and carving, we transported the whole lot down town where they were checked in by the official Pumpkin Festival pumpkin-counting committee.

I felt that 30-something pumpkins from a single party was impressive (did I mention that one of them was HUGE?), but the town still fell a tad short of the previous year's record of 28,952 pumpkins with a hair over 27,000.

For those of you who have never been to a pumpkin festival, this might not seem that impressive. But remember: in order to be counted the pumpkin has to be carved and lit in full jack-o-lantern fashion. The tower-o-lanterns, shown here, is one of five such towers, and each is connected with massive lanes of two- or three- tier scaffolding. All packed with pumpkins. It's truly impressive.

Last night, after five o'clock, in an effort to stop partisan bickering in the workplace, and to spread what I find to be informative and helpful points regarding the upcoming election, I printed several documents from FactCheck.org and placed them in the office cafeteria, right next to some other documents that were left for public consumption (mostly solicitations to buy children's books and old take-out menus).

This morning, I arrived (early) to find that the FactCheck documents were selectively removed from the other papers and shoved unceremoniously into the trash. It appears that someone here is afraid of the truth.

So I, in turn, encourage readers to go to FactCheck.org and read all of the articles there. I personally found it very enlightening.

[EDIT: I selected a few articles that I thought pointed out misleading points that are in the forefront of the media. This includes a discussion on Kerry's "Flip-flopping", with his comments such as "Wrong war, wrong place, wrong time" put back into context. It also included an analysis of various numbers, including jobs, healthcare costs, etc. IT WAS POINTED OUT TO ME THAT MY SELECTION OF ARTICLES MIGHT BE CONSTRUED A PARTISAN. Well, if it was, it was unintentional. If it was, it was still a collection of data from what is generally agreed to be one of the least-partisan organizations available.]

As a network admin, I often need to use tools outside of the realm of the "home user". However, since switching to the Mac 100% (sometime around OS X 10.1, prior to that I used Windows also) I have been denied some of the most common tools — such as a COM port and the HyperTerm application (a terminal emulator that comes with Windows), primarily. However, my company's available software licenses for NA's "Sniffer" don't do me any good, as it is a Windows-only application. So, there's a need for a good (and cheap/free) packet analyzer too.

Here are the solutions that I found. They worked for me, and hopefully they will work for other Mac-using network geeks as well.

A new short story has been posted under "stories" (or you can link directly to it here. It is the second part in what I am now calling the "Dark Horizons" trilogy. The first part is "Paper Cranes", and the last part is as of yet unnamed. However, the third story will tell how the characters Alex Crane (from part I) and Rudy McNally (part II) meet, and discover the source of the terrible and unearthly storm that devastates the midwest. Expect part III in another month or so, as I'm not getting much time to write these days.

The Earth is humming. I heard about this first on NPR, and later found some more articles about this very fascinating topic, including this one. However, it took me much longer to find a media file of the hum itself. I mean, the Earth humming is one thing, but what song is it humming?. I finally found it here.