the frig blig

The season called spring officially kicked off nine days ago, coinciding with the vernal equinox. All that week you could see industrious Seattleites busily digging in the dirt preparing their gardens. Then yesterday afternoon, snow fell from the Seattle sky — big old clumps of flakes. It caused several fender-benders before it ended after about an hour and a half.

This is the first time I’ve seen it snow in Seattle this late in the season for the 17 years that I’ve lived here.

This afternoon I got out my bicycle, pumped up the tires and pedaled a mile-and-a-half to Stone Way hardware for a porcelain light fixture. My first bike ride of 2008 it was. While I huffed and puffed in my lined black gloves, old memories of my bicyclist past hooted at how out of shape and unbikerly I have become. Well let him hoot; it felt good to be back in the saddle again.

S was busy whipping our various garden spots into shape — the pea chair, the raspberry patch and the vegetable plot. For her spring means spring break, and she intends to be productive with it this year.

S asked her friends for tunes that, when heard, made them get up and dance. The list was begun with several of her own picks, and as I was anointed the compositor, I added a few of my own. Here then be the list:

13_step_boogie - martin sexton
ants_marching - dave matthews
burning_down_the_house - talking heads
dannys_allstar_joint - rickie lee jones
every_little_thing_she_does - police
fever - peggy lee
Funky Town - lipps
gloria - patti smith
go_go - galactic
grazin_in_the_grass - friends o distinction
im_gonna_be - proclaimers
jump_jive_an_wail - louis prima
misirlou - dick dale
PrettyGirls - brisbanes
stoned_soul_picnic - laura nyro
st_thomas - sonny rollins
the_angels_wanna_wear_my_red_shoes - elvis costello
you_can_call_me_al - paul simon
you_cant_always_get_what_you_want - rolling stones

From Vincent Chow dot Net

S celebrated her dive into 50 with friends from far and near who made it an event to remember.

When my employer assigned me a new Latitude D430 laptop I noticed it had a fingerprint scanner between the left and right touchpad buttons. And it came with Embassy Wave security software, which replaces the Windows GINA among other things. I decided to give it a try.

Once installed I successfully registered my index fingers, setup my account to authenticate using my fingerprints OR my password (just in case), and was happy to be able to login by swiping my finger across the scanner rather than typing in my password. Sweet!

Unfortunately I found that I was unable to register my fingerprints for any other account. This is a problem — I have two local machine accounts (one admin, one nonprivileged), I also have unprivileged accounts in two different AD domains at work, as well as use the admin accounts in each of those domains. But the Embassy software only allows my fingerprints to be registered under a single account. A conceivable workaround would be to use a different finger for each account — this would get me ten accounts. But I would have a problem remembering which finger to use for which account.

Long story short — I uninstalled Embassy and reverted to the 20th-century authentication method of choice: passwords. Yes, I use a different password for each account, I’m not sure why I find that acceptable but remembering different fingers not. An illogical quirk I suppose.

So what about linux fingerprint authentication software (this D430 dual boots FC8 & XP)? lsusb lists the device as a SGS Thomson Microelectronics Fingerprint Reader; googling this reveals a linux driver called thinkfinger, which installs easily and cleanly via yum. So now I’m off to RTFM…

…a quick documentation read reveals that it uses thinkfinger which appears to require enabling PAM authentication, which appears to mean setting up an LDAP server…which is overkill for my little home network. So no fingerprint authentication for me!

S and I accompanied our friend N from SLC on a hike along the riverbank near Darrington yesterday morning. Moss-draped trees graced our path as we walked and gawked.

OK when I was a boy ketchup came in glass bottles and you could watch the bottle’s contents go down as you used it over time. Hence when it was almost empty, you put it on the shopping list and got a new bottle. Simple, right? So simple it didn’t even seem remarkable at the time.

Today, ketchup comes in an opaque plastic bottle dyed the color of ketchup. So it always looks full. And the only way to get a clue about how much is remaining is to judge by the bottle’s weight in my hands. So it’s way easy to run out before it gets on the shopping list.

This is progress — not. I figure fewer bottles probably break during shipping now, but hey — why not use clear plastic? There are umpteen million food products that you can buy in clear plastic containers: milk, mustard, salad dressing, salsa, horseradish — OK you get the picture. What’s up with the opaque ketchup bottle?

This morning’s NY Times OP-ED article What I’d Be Talking About if I Were Still Running quotes Senator Joe Biden decrying how the US is ignoring terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan while funneling all it’s military efforts into Iraq:

In six years, we have spent on Afghanistan’s reconstruction only what we spend every three weeks on military operations in Iraq, says Biden.

Well Senator, get a clue. (Or maybe Biden should be excused for confusing rhetoric with reality.) All of the speeches about fighting terrorism are pretext for foreign invasions to satisfy military contractors and multinationals.

As long as terrorists attack the US, the US government will reap the benefit of being able to ‘retaliate’ — this means they can invade any country they can muster enough propaganda against (for instance, Iraq). The benefit of this arrangement cannot be overstated. In a peaceful world the feds are forced to deal with domestic issues, which often means assisting citizens. This is the last thing most feds want.

A big percentage of President Bush’s buddies and backers are oil companies. They have every reason to be pleased with this administration’s performance. Oil profits are at an all-time high.

Should oil be discovered in Afghanistan, you can bet our national priorities would change overnight. But meanwhile, keeping potential future terrorist attacks simmering in the pot is a big asset to foreign policy hawks’ future plans. That’s why the feds funding formula favors Iraq.