The problem with black market flu vaccine is that sometimes the dealers mix in a little heroin to get you really high, so you come back for more.

* * *

A blonde goes to the doctor to get her flu vaccination...

Edwards: We've had 5 million people fall into poverty.

Cheney: We've taken 5 million people off of the income tax rolls.

I just heard on the radio an interview with Ed Koch, washed-up former mayor of New York City, ranting about Moore's latest film being propaganda. (He wrote something in some paper, too, but I can't be bothered to find it and link it.)

Allow me to offer a critique of those who are giving this film -- which I have not seen -- negative reviews. It isn't a matter of Moore blurring the line between fact and opinion, rather it is that Moore isn't being romantic enough. Romantic in the sense that senior Bush officials can go on national television and say the most patently absurd things, things based on passionate convictions and an utterly convincing belief in evil, whereas Moore's opinions/facts appear to be, well, simply a mixture of facts and opinions. Which is another way of saying that Moore is being too intellectual, and we must never never ever be intellectual in how we talk about terrorism, September 11th, &c.

Inside: electronics geekery, reading update, the usual diary crap.

Bonus: feel free to chatter about the possible LA HuSi event.

I've been sampling from the Modern Library top 100 list for the past twelve months, and it seems like a good time to take a snapshot of where I'm at. Of the place where I am.

For the intro, the top ten:

1. Ulysses, James Joyce - Own a copy. Attempted to read, twice.

2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald - Read in past year.

3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce - Read some time in the murky past.

4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov - Read a few weeks ago. Own a copy.

5. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley - Read some time in the dim past. Own a copy.

6. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner - Read on a cruise to Alaska, last July.

7. Catch-22, Joseph Heller - Read some time in the crepuscular past.

8. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler - Read in the past year.

9. Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence - Got through about 70% of this before becoming weary.

10. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck - Read in the past year.

Kind editor, insert Amazon links asap.

Now that Rumsfeld has announced that there will be more, and more shocking photos and even videotape footage of the prisonse.cx scandal, I am looking forward to the late night cable ads for "Soldiers Gone Wild", where they splice footage of teasingly obscured naked Iraqi prisoners with more titillating scenes featuring the "Women of Abu Ghraib".  Call now and we'll send you volumes I and II of the outlawed classic, "Bumfights", free with your order.

I have this idealized notion of what authority represents.  If you have authority over someone, that means that not only are you relying on that person to do something, you are also ultimately responsible for the thing that is done.  So you are either responsible for other's actions, or you are incompetent because you have no clue as to what is being done in your name.

There is a growing trend in the use of graphical security codes, or non-machine readable passwords, to protect websites from data harvesting/password cracking.  These are dynamically generated images, a series of letters and numbers that have been automatically filtered in some way to make them legible to humans but troublesome for OCR programs.  

These things have been around for a while, I remember seeing them on Yahoo! mail at least three years ago.  I must admit, I'm tempted to try my hand at hacking them.  Just this afternoon I installed phpnuke onto a site and discovered they use a security code.

Tuning into 1580 on the AM dial this morning, it appears that Air America Radio has turned into yet another I Love Jesus Spanish Station [YAILJSS].  How odd.

Of course there is more to the story (not a permalink), this appears to be a financial dispute, and not a "Didn't We Tell You Liberal Radio Would Fail" kind of thing, but how you interpret the situation all depends on how you... er... spin it.

Inside: Orkut! Murphy Brown! J.D. Salinger, Barbara Kingsolver, and Dan the Automator!

Bonus: Scoop suggestions!

I am very disappointed.  Here they have a really interesting mechanic: you control two characters, Mario jumps when you hit A, Luigi when you hit B, and you have to navigate them over a chunky, hostile landscape.  Then they tack on a Pokemon-style combat system.  Then they tack on dozens of cut scenes and bosses, so that you only get to spend ten minutes actually playing the RPG/platform portion of the game before having a boss battle and/or minigame shoved in your face.

All of the reviews on GameFAQs are like, "10+++ Best Mario game evar!"  What's wrong with these people, are they a bunch of twelve year olds or something?

About a week ago there was a challenge to hack user accounts.  It sounded interesting, so I wrote a simple script and have been running it against a certain to-remain-unnamed site.  I found a password in the first 1000 attempts.  (Note: the target site is not a scoop site.)

A few months ago I realized that I would consider myself a gray hat, i.e. neither a white hat (hacking in the interest of security) nor a black hat (hacking for personal gain).  One reason, I suppose, is that being a good, white hat hacker is a thankless thing to do.  I have, on occasion, been accused of doing bad hacker-ish things that I had nothing to do with, so if I'm going to take the blame for things I haven't done, I might as well have fun.

Inside: a hacking confession, what I'm reading.

Or: How I lost my ratings privileges on Kuro5hin.org

I wrote this script a few months ago. You'll need some kind of webserver with php support, and the Snoopy php web client.