YetAnotherPersonalHomepage

It is sad that the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) will be sending monitors to the United States this November to keep watch on our elections. Normally they advocate for the rule of law, civil society and orderly political process in places like Central Asia and Southeastern Europe but they’ll be here in the United States. Our debacle in Florida and rampant irregularities in New Mexico (among other places) in 2000 are part of the reason but the hasty introduction of electronic voting machines also has them concerned.

I thought we export democracy (while we import oil and cheap manufactured goods). How naive. How sad it is that we’ve been lumped in with Albania, Bosnia, Ashgabad and Tashkent.

Reuters and other news outlets ran the (not very) newsworthy abandonment of Itanium for their workstations. It’s interesting that having dumped both PA/RISC and Alpha they now abandon Itanium. I wonder what they plan to ship in their “high-end” workstations or if they plan to get out of that part of the market (one funny but unsubstantiated rumor has it that they actually shipped less than 10,000 of the Itanium, not the 100,000 that the Compaq press-releases claimed). They can always point to their Alpha roadmap and say they have a chip until 2006. It will be interesting.

Quite the mess to follow-up on today. Two teams involved in a powerdown did not communicate, or miscommunicated, procedures. That mistake inflicted an NY-wide outage on us. Not good.

Four police cruisers and an undercover car just snagged four men, three who looked like older teens and one who looked like an adult, right in front of our apartment and whisked them away. Whole bust took maybe five minutes. No idea what happened, it seemed to have spilled over from the next street.

I guess I’ll read about it in the police blotter in the back of the Flatbush Life, the local weekly neighborhood newspaper.

I got some really weird spam today. It was injected from CHINANET-SN ( 222.90.86.249) with a faked easynet.net address and header to make it look like it was relayed. That’s not weird. I get a lot of spam originating from open relays in China. What was weird was that instead of offering pirate software, steroids, pharmaceuticals, machine parts or sex, it was a short diatribe on Jesus.

I’m thinking it was someone’s test payload and another wave of spam hawking harder, longer, younger, legal, precision hydraulic parts for cheap or free is on it way.