It was about 6 below this morning as I rode into work.
Here is a picture of downtown Minneapolis from Ridgeview Parkway:
This hill kills on the single speed and it pleases me to see it look so steep in this picture:
favorite golf course shortcut clogged with drifted snow:
Tracks before going onto the grass where there was little snow:
click images to enlarge.
Taking control of an email account serves as fulcrum for further attacks. If I have access to someone’s email account, I can request password reminders from their other web accounts, impersonate them and read their “private” correspondence. Most email accounts can be accessed from some kind of webmail client from anywhere in the world and there are a dozen broad attack types I can think of right away that are used to steal webmail login credentials.
So…. how about a program that logs and reports on webmail activity? The program would track where and when a webmail account has been accessed. It would provide a dashboard where the user could see if their webmail account:
If I needed this for Exchange Server, I can at least dig through the server logs here. For Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail, I can’t. There is nothing that could tell me if someone in Florida accessed my email in the middle of the night and sent or received email and then deleted the record of it.
Is there a way to hack this together? A browser script wouldn’t do because it would only record my visits. A proxy that sat between me and Gmail and tallied actions wouldn’t prevent someone else from accessing the account directly.
I’ve been trying to imagine some complicated email forwarding scheme that would let me do this, but the real solution is to grab the logs from the source. If they can read my email closely enough to customize ads, surely they can provide some recent activity info. At a minimum, I would want last visit and last failed login attempt.
Long Lake Park: kind of a snooze for cycling. It has well-cleaned trails and the lake is blown clean of snow enough to make it fun to ride across.
Connected to “Rice Creek Regional Trail West” to County road H, where I found a trail of packed snow leading down towards the creek. I stood and stared at that trail for a time before deciding not to go down. I was tired and I expected to find what I usually find at the bottom of unknown snowy paths: A sudden stop. I turned to leave but found myself riding down the hill anyway. It lead to miles of packed snow trails. Formulated a plan of diverting grocery money into a sweet front suspension fork but then hit on the brilliant idea of letting some air out of my gas-station inflated tires. The trail was like a dream after that. I stopped after a few miles, but I can see from google maps that the trail goes on.
Back in Long Lake park, before I loaded my bike back on my car, I decided to explore some adjacent industrial area. I rode carelessly across some railroad tracks and crashed. Rather, I slipped, panicked, and went down screaming like a rutting elk. The studded tires do not dig into railroad tracks. My ribs feel kind of staved right now.
If I concentrate really hard, I can travel back to some pivotal time in the past when a different word or action would have changed history. If it is dark and if I am half asleep, I can establish two well-detailed reference points and draw a brush stroke between them, pin up an interactive membrane that immediately starts to deteriorate. I can crawl inside that crude lean-two of the past for long enough to experience that time again and try to fix things.
The sun cannot follow me back, so it is a shadow world lit from reflected light, missing the heat and full color of this world. Big pieces of wall and floor are missing, leaving me hopping between support beams, clutching to the details that have been rendered properly.
When I come back, I have this horrible, costly longing for the sea air or mountain view or the hand of the person I just left behind.
That is the price I pay for time travel.
What I call time travel, other people might call “memories” I correctly call it time travel, though, because I don’t just remember, I actively try and manipulate things, change the past and supply information to my past self.
This habit sucks the life force out of me. I think the movie that most captures this feeling is “Minority Report”, when John Anderton uses drugs and video images to vaguely hallucinate that he is seeing his son and wife again.
Buddhist teachings would call this a rejection of the present. Why give up the full-on modality of the present for some partial shadow world? It is like giving up a dual-core graphics processor to play ascii star trek on a 1982 WANG computer. Why leave this sunlit world for even a moment to spend time in that dark, incomplete world? This goes for you, too futureman.
I haven’t listened to “This American Life” in years, but I loved this week’s episode.
They had a piece about how the Onion chooses their headlines: A roomful of people analyze humor to death and then they vote on it.
I listened to the Onion piece waiting for them to explain why they didn’t use my submission I sent to them in 1999:
Laxative-Abusing Cheerleader Shits Strawberries.
In addition, there is a great monologue by Malcom Gladwell about his early journalism career.
The 9th wedding anniversary is a good occasion to check your spouse for lice. Kate and I performed this ritual on one another yesterday morning and again this morning. Now I know why monkeys spend their days doing this. Nitpicking brought us closer together. I also applied pesticide shampoo to my youngest daughter. That did not bring us closer together.
The Louse Zapper is a battery operated comb that buzzes until it hits a louse, which gets electrocuted. We borrowed this device from a friend of ours. I zapped one freak of an adult louse plus 7 juveniles on Maureen. It was immensely satisfying.
There is a great fact sheet about lice maintained by the Harvard School of Public Health. The most important and relaxing detail is that lice can’t survive at room temperature for very long. They evolved into human hair specialists hundreds of thousands of years ago and can only live next to the body heat of a human head. Once they are established there, though, it takes a military campaign to get them out.
We only discovered ours because Kate was doing a casual, routine check on one kid and by chance found one (it escaped into the carpet). The lesson, I guess, is that routine checks are the best way to ward of such an infestation and prevent your kids from spreading the bugs to others.
Even though I kind of enjoyed the process and now think of myself as quite an expert, I kind of dread it happening again. It is a lot of work. You have to freeze your pillows, bag your hats and dry your sheets. But don’t worry about having the energy for this work. The ugliness of these creatures, in all their life stages, inspires frenetic hygiene.
In this uncomfortably frank discussion of race in America on Word for Word, Shelby Steele introduces us to the concept of masking, discussing the picture above and Barack Obama:
link: http://wordforword.publicradio.org/programs/2008/02/01/
it oiled some rusty gears in my head and made me consider not just race, but the masks that I wear.
Just bought Mark breakfast for his birthday at the Longfellow grill on Lake street. saw some people there I hadn’t seen in a long time. THey said they saw me on TV.
On the way home I rode my bike on the trail along the Mississippi river down near the crew barn under the lake street bridge. The trail down there is wonderfully glazed with ice. My bike did great up until a steep incline leading up to the steps leading back to the river road. When I stopped and put my foot down, I started sliding backwards uncontrollably towards the steep bluff. I had to sit down and then lay down and hold onto a tree to keep from sliding down the bluff. I finally turned the bike around and hopped back on and whizzed down that icy hill until I came to part of the trail that had turned into a frozen waterfall. I stopped and stared at that for a while. Then, I rode down it and wheeee immediately fell down. When I stood up, the pinky of my glove was sticking out sideways. When I felt it, I was disturbed to find that my pinky WAS in there. I bent it back to the right position and it went ::POP:: just like Claire Bennet’s neck in Heroes. It hurts now, but not so much that I can’t type with it.
is it weird that I start to write the blog post in my head before I hit the ground?
I sometimes read the BOB email list. The BOB list concerns itself with bicycling, bike commuting, bike repair, and bike equipment. They like older bikes and leather seats.
It is all things bicycling and if you miss a day, there will be about 100 messages to catch up with.
Someone pointed out a recent thread about the Coming Global Shitstorm. It was the usual predictions about people running around killing each other, but with the twist that bicyclists, especially those with classic steel frames and high spoke counts, would somehow have an advantage in a post-apocalypse situation. The interesting part was that a woman spoke up:
It sounds like there are a LOT of “endgamers” on this list.
I do find it curious that it’s been almost entirely
MEN who’ve been doing all the “endgame” postulating
here, and elsewhere.Not sure why I’m particularly sensitive to it all just
now. Perhaps it’s that I work in a field that’s SO
male (don’t believe me? See how many bike shops are
run by women, and how many mechanics are women, and
how many women work in an area of bicycle R & D that’s
NOT connected to apparel, and, well, I’ll stop now.
I’m still working in the bike industry and yes, I know
what I signed up for, so it’s all fine by me).But still, it’s fascinating that these “endgame”
discussion almost NEVER come up in my dealings with
other women, in or out of the bicycle scene.There may be something to that.
In the meantime, I’ve about approached my limit with
this thread, and I think I’m going to take a break
from the list for awhile.
Is she right? Is the CGS a male idea? What drives the fear/fantasy of collapse? The people that like to discuss it seem to really savor the possibility.
My interest, I think involves
1) fear: What should I do if things came apart?
2) curiousity: What will it be like, what cool headlines will I see? Will there still be an internet?
3) break from the routine: Sous les paves, la plage
I think many men secretly live with one foot in fantasy world where there are no phones and desks and car payments and the world is a series of campfires with rabbits cooking over them. (Hell, I know I do!) Then every news story gets turned around to mean that those rabbit hunting days are right around the corner.