Kit's Blog

The memoirs of someone who isn't out of the ordinary

     It was a beautiful summer day in my little neighborhood. The temperature was somewhere between where you'd like it to be and where you've never seen it before, meaning that it wasn't too bad. Some kids were off to the side playing in their sprinkler and I was walking along as one little droplet trickled down the pubic hair of the bitch in front of me and landed on the sidewalk. No, it wasn't from the sprinkler. And no, by bitch, I don't mean a less-than-agreeable person, I mean a dog. I was barefoot, and I walked right through it. I didn't give it a second thought... or even a first really, because at the time I didn't notice. I returned home after walking back from the bookstore, and slipped on my sandals for something a little farther away, and have since had the worst foot odor known to man.
     This is one of those narratives where I seem to have both a godlike perspective and a memory that crushes all those that oppose it. Well, I'd like to think so anyway. To be honest, that's just my guess; I have no clue why the hell my feet smell like shit on a stick left in the sun for a week. But I guess it's all a good example of the way things just have a tendwncy to go for me. ...huh? Oh, internal editor's warning: there's going to be some typos in this. Like back there a sentence or two, where I misspelled "tendency" as "tendwncy"? Yeah, I'm typing at the public library and well, someone thought it would be funny to snap off everything past the quote button. There doesn't seem to be much left in the way of uh... anything but letters and numbers and space. I'm actually copying the new lines from another document because I couldn't figure out any other way to do it without the enter button. So uhhh... yeah, watch for that.
     I guess all this can be really traced back to that one day where I was goito and this lady was like "Back off!" and so I was... wait... what happened? I typed like three paragraphs! Where the hell did? Oh god damnit! The little timer thing popped up to tell me that I have five minutes left and didn't go away until I smacked something right. God damnit. I really need to learn how to touch type, anyway howmuch time to I have left? A minute?! Wait, where the hell can I save this? uhhh... uhhhhh.... I didn't bring a floppy I don't fucking have one of those USB drive things.... uhhhh shit! shit shit shit Hey! Lady! Listen can you make this thing last like.... another ten minutes? .... Well fuck the other people I'm writing my memoirs! .... Listen I've only got a seco

Summer Reading

     So I have to finish more than 800 pages of reading by monday... I'm fucked.

I have no wisdom teeth

     So today I had my wisdom teeth out. Wasn't all that big a deal, now I'm just sore and recovering. Hopefully by the end of tomorrow I'll be fine. Basically my computer decided to kick the bucket and this time it looks like it's for good. It's actually not all that surprising considering the fact that it was essentially a jerry-rig built to last no more than a few months and it's not been running for more than two years.
     What was its downfall you ask? Heating issues with the harddrive. After almost 36 hours of continual scans in an attempt to salvage the drive the thing still gives out after attempting to load "giveIO.sys" I could start taking more drastic measures to try and save the thing, but I feel like I'd rather not risk the data. There were 24 corrupted sectors found after all those scans, so I imagine that it would need a full system re-install which could threaten to break everything. So I'll be mildly computerless for a while. Sorry for any incovience.

Fixing up the old blog

     So I'm currently under a time constraint. And I have to shift my entire server over to a new one by the thirty-first of August. My web host, powweb, says that for the most part it should be a painless process... unless you have a lot of server-side scripting. Htaccess files are particularly painful. So what does this mean for me?

A shitload.

     My website relies heavily on server-side scripting and htaccess files to properly move you around to different areas. Hell, even Scuzzstuff is redirected to a different part of the server through htaccess files. In addition to this, the Berkely database that this blog operates on is starting to show it's first signs of fatigue. After well over 1400 comments (many of which ended up being spam), the thing no longer properly registers comments at all, and my mt-blacklist seems to be unable to successfully scan more than 67 comments back without crashing. One of the entries had become corrupt, but I managed to work around the issue and it is now (if only temporarily) repaired. And although it pains me to say it, this blog may be moving onto a MySQL server. You may ask "why is that painful? MySQL has way better support and is far more stable." But here's the thing, after being around this great, big internet of ours a few times, there's a few things I've realized:
     1) Anything that updates with great frequency is often a bad idea. This, of course, has exceptions. Anti-Virus software that updates with great frequency is good. Database securing software... not so much. Though it shows a great dedication and commitment in some cases to update frequently, more often than not it show instability or incompetence in the base code.
     2) Anything that's not on the same system (things that have to connect remotely to one another) are often liabilities. I've seen far too many websites that give the warning "Error: could not connect to MySQL database" or "Error: MySQL: Too many simultanious connections" to trust the system completely. Powweb offers MySQL servers that are on different machines than the HTML sever in order to maximize the number of databases offered and the security by having separate machines.
     3) Anything you can't have a direct, file-backup of is normally risky in and of itself. Though there is a way for MySQL servers to produce file backup copies, it requires that the entire system is in operation. And the time that you export a backup (in a bad situation) may actually end with a corrupted database if you fail to do so properly. I can set up all sorts of safety nets, it just bothers me.

Anyway, all of this doesn't change the fact that I'll probably switch over just to be sure I don't end up with no blog because the Berkley DB collapses under the strain. Hell, I may even upgrade to a version of movable type past version 2.661! They've got up to something like 3.2, with built in ad-blocker, but I must say I've grown fond of this old system, and may not switch over. My blacklist has grown enormous and cumbersome, but boy is it effective as hell. Anyway, we'll see what happens in the next 12 days.

Reanimate your feet

Catchy... annoyingly so.

     Anyway, I've been working pretty hard at a combination of summer reading and helping to create next year's Japanese curriculum, so it's been hard to get around to other stuff. But fortunately it will leave me with money at the end of the summer, which will be nice. Besides that I haven't really been doing much, so there's not much else to say.

And now that I'm 18...

     Not much has changed. Except now I have Half-life 2: Episode 1. It's pretty good, basically just more of the game that's being elaborated upon. It seems like the developers are still working on getting their creative flare back because the gameplay is rather bland. The level design is interesting in places where skill isn't involved (inside the citadel you simply hold down the fire button and you kill anything in sight), but the levels look nice but aren't very fun to play when you have to kill enemies. Clearly episode two will have some of the fun stuff back in it (like I already said: portal), and I hoping that it's an indication that the gameplay of HL2 itself will be improved as well.it seems like the designers are finally having free time to fuck around, which will probably mean that they added in the stuff I love Valve for.
     Besides Half-life, I also have an ergonomic mouse of doom. It's called the "Zero tension mouse," and it looks like someone grabbed a chunk of gel, lopped off the half he couldn't grab, and added buttons, and let it harden. The thing is massive, and surprisingly comfy. It's actually getting to the point where my right arm isn't used to having it's muscles strained the wrong way and it complains about normal mice (meaning that it hurts). Anyway, here's a shot of it:

     And last but not least, I'm listening to Godspeed You Black Emperor. In one of their very few pieces with words, this line comes up: "I woke up one morning, and fell a little further down. For sure as the valley of death, I open up my wallet and it's full of blood." Good stuff.

Half an hour to commit a crime

     In just a short thirty minutes I will be 18 and therefore unable to commit a crime and have it appear on my permanent record. I should do something horrible to commemorate this.

...Well I'd actually probably be tried as an adult because I became 18 before my court date.

Probably not then.

Sigh...

Just because I have nothing else

Quite frankly, i think its a brilliant idea. Sure there could be hackers and all that, but there can be hackers for bank accounts too right? its just REALLY REALLY hard because they're so secure. at least i dont hear about it being a problem. same deal could be created here. if the government puts its top people on secure microchips for people, you can bet it'll probly work. and honestly, i seriously doubt that a chip would cause any medical problems, if implanted correctly in surgery.
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Posted by Ben at July 31, 2006 05:48 PM

     Unlike a bank account, this system is full of insecurities. The way an RFID chip (I'm assuming this is a passive tag to increase the life to a maximum and to remove the need for a battery) works is that when a scanner (transponder) sends out a radio signal of a certain frequency (this signal would have to be universal or else it wouldn't work as an ID system), and the chip activates, sending out an identifiable signal.
     This signal could, at best, be a series of numbers and letters. Something easily identifiable and repeatable. There's no way to make the system more secure then to assume that most people wouldn't have scanners. At best, you could encrypt the numbers that the chip gave off, but then all you'd have to do is give off the encrypted numbers off another chip and it would work.
     As far as the medical thing goes, I was just saying that it's damn near impossible to have a 100% perfect procedure that wouldn't be rejected by someone. I mean, there are people allergic to sunlight, I can't imagine that there wouldn't be people with poor reactions to this. A good example is women who are allergic to silicone getting implants. Sure, it's good for 99.9% of the people who get it, but what about that .1%? What could we do for people like that? Give them tattoos? I mean, the system would sort of break down if even one person couldn't have the surgery.
     As far as the "hackers for bank accounts" thing, allow me to redirect you to a few sources:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3527969429626585489
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_fraud
Not as difficult as it would seem. In America, there was a robbery that ended up stealing over $5,000,000 in cash from different ATM machines. I couldn't actually find a link to it, but I believe that to date only one of the members was caught.
     As I said, I can't really win this because if something more "perfect" came along, like iris scanning (but even then think about "Minority Report" again, it's creepy to wear your identification on your sleeve), I doubt I could hold back the tide of support for it. I just don't like the idea of having something that identifies you regardless of whether or not you'd like to be identified. Yeah, we need our ID for a lot of things, deal with being responsible.

Oh, and in case you were wondering? E-passports that use the RFID technology that you're recommending has already been cracked in less than two weeks:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71521-0.html?tw=rss.index

All I can say is I think it's a bad idea.