Category: Tech

Not my week

Work has been totally clobbered this week by a major outbreak of the Conficker-A worm. It got hold of some valid Windows Domain credentials and wreaked havoc. I was at the office until nine tonight, and we’re nowhere near the end of dealing with this mess. The XP desktops were relatively easy to take care of — get rid of server service, run the removal tool, then enable Automatic Updates. The Windows 2003 servers were much tougher to clean up, because DHCP client and RPC were clobbered. I’m sure you’re fascinated by this. But I had to leave the fun tonight because I promised Bismo I’d meet him at a bar, where a couple of other guys from work were playing in a band with a buddy of theirs.

Speaking of getting clobbered, Bismo and I found ourselves as reluctant participants in a bar brawl! By the time the pile of lunkhead steroid users plowed into us, the two guys who were actually throwing punches were being held down by others, so for me it was only a matter of pushing back, which was surprisingly easy to do. But there was no avoiding becoming involved. The fight broke up, but only temporarily, when the two antagonists started going at it again, apparently at the urging of some woman who either looks older than she is, or is trying to look younger than she is. Once things heated up again, the cops were called, and before they arrived the troublemakers cleared out.

The tyranny of technology

Doing my part to help move the economy along, and move myself along, I bought a Garmin 305 GPS for running. J&R had it for a fantastic price on one of their typically tempting close-out deals.

Garmin 305

The damn thing works! Too well. It revealed that my 8-mile running route is actually 7.63 miles, and my 6-mile run is in fact a mere 5.5 miles. Therefore, my pace is slower than I previously believed.

You know what that means. I need to do more running and less blogging!

From Moon to Mars?

On NPR this morning I heard author Daniel Wilson suggest that by now, 40 years after landing on the Moon, we could have made it to Mars. But I’m sure he knows as well as anybody that the reason America went Lunar roving was not for its own sake, but to beat the Soviet Union in the space race. With that goal accomplished, the pressure was off.

My opinion is that a journey to Mars is still too ambitious and costly an undertaking. The scenario postulated in “2001: A Space Odyssey” is what I favor — a Moon base with a way station. The future was indeed set in 1969, but it was the Arpanet going online, and not Apollo 11, that changed everything.

Which reminds me. Way back in my first month of turning my old web site into this web log, and I wasn’t yet embedding audio, I said that Buddy Holly recorded only three songs in stereo. That is incorrect. There is a fourth recording, called “Moondreams”, although this particular dub doesn’t bring out the full stereo effect.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/JUL/Moondreams.mp3]

And back on the subject of Mars, my son Eric has of late taken an interest in the early works of David Bowie, who has a song on “Hunky Dory” called “Life On Mars?”.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/JUL/LifeOnMars.flv 400 300]

Whoever posted “Life On Mars?” on YouTube disabled embedding, so I had to work around that. I got the poster picture of Bowie looking like Keith Richard playing the Cavern Club from a 1972 issue of Rolling Stone magazine.

To the Moon! Bang! Zoom!

It was forty years ago today that Apollo 11 lifted off. A month ago, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter left Earth for the Moon. Congratulations to Professor Harlan Spence of Boston University, whose CRaTER payload is on the LRO, studying the long-term effects of radiation on humans. (I doubt that one of those effects is to turn people into super heroes, like the cosmic rays that created the Fantastic Four!)

The LRO will drop to an orbit of 30 miles above the Moon and take pictures of the Apollo 11 landing site. I’m really looking forward to seeing those. I wonder if anything’s been moved? 😉