Thursday, November 18, 2004

Christmas Condoms

As Christine says, nothing says Christmas like a box of condoms.

Tuesday, November 9, 2004

Post-Election (Re-)Entry

Post-Election (Re-)Entry: Right, so...where were we? I've been awfully busy with work, marrying off one of my best friends, seeing to some home improvement, occasionally snogging with a statuesque copper-topped fella. The usual.

Of course, the recent election didn't turn out as I might have liked but...well, life goes on. I've chosen to look on the brightest side of things I can: at least I'll get another few years of use out of my t-shirt.

I guess you could call me a fashion victim of sorts.

Thursday, October 21, 2004

Rolen on the river

This is a good place to be right now, thanks to Messrs. Rolen, Pujols, Edmonds, Suppan, Isringhausen, Cedeño et al.

With apologies to my friends in Boston, I do wish the Yanks had made the series, because it would have been a sweeter thing to kick their collective ass instead of the Sox.

Ah well. We'll see y'all on Saturday.

Tuesday, October 5, 2004

Vice-Presidential Debate Moments

Favorite moments from last night's vice-presidential debate: I liked the part where Dick Cheney reprised his knee-slapping performance of "Putting on the Ritz" from Young Frankenstein. This was topped only by the end, where John Edwards wandered out into the audience and helped undecided voters communicate with their dead loved ones.

Monday, September 20, 2004

Download Lance Arthur

Y'know, that new A9 search engine thingamabob is pretty nifty. Until I fiddled with it a bit today, I had no idea that Lance Arthur was a musician (I knew he was a rock star, natch) and that I could download his "tracks".

Of course, I was even more flabbergasted (and is there any other type of gasted to be but flabber?) to discover that I could "Download Lance Arthur", apparently in toto.

O brave new world!

Sunday, September 19, 2004

Sky Captain (Almost) Made on a Mac

Earlier this evening, Jeffrey and I saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow — a ripping good yarn, by the way — which, along with giving me my recommended regular dose of the scrumptious Giovanni Ribisi, was (nearly) made on a Mac.

Just so.

The movie also features a classic last line on a par with Some Like It Hot. It was the second best eight bucks I spent today.

Monday, September 6, 2004

Fahrenheit 9/11

I figured I was pretty much the last person in the country with a desire to who would think of spending part of this afternoon watching Fahrenheit 9/11.

I was wrong.

I was fortunate to get a seat for the second showing of the day. All three screenings wound up being sold out. The film has its flaws, to be sure, but it's worth noting that it was the first occasion I can remember since I saw the original release of Star Wars almost three decades ago that, as the credits rolled, the audience gave the movie a standing ovation.

Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Broadway, made on a Mac

Broadway: The Golden Age, Rick McKay's documentary featuring constellation after constellation of legendary theatre stars, was made with Mac.

Just so.

Monday, August 30, 2004

Richard is getting very old and very gay

Richard is getting very old and very gay.

Don't fret, sweetie. I turned down a late-night (11:00!) party last night too. And I adored Uncle Mame. If you manage to avoid going as batshit nutso as P.Dennis, you'll be just fine.

Monday, August 16, 2004

Games I play

Back from Los Angeles (and San Diego) and already distracted by the games. No, not the Olympics per se, but a few related websites:

Chris is asking the question on everyone's mind after Friday night, "Opening Ceremony or Gay Circuit Party?".

Who cares, really, when there are so many Hot Olympians?

Meanwhile, I'm sticking with a game that's more my speed...WEBoggle. Damn, that's addictive!

Monday, July 5, 2004

Happy Birthday, Fiona!

I ask you, have you ever seen such beautiful girls?!

Welcome aboard and happy birthday, precious little Fiona Jane! Seven pounds, 14 ounces and 22 inches worth of love for Johnny and Jen to dote on. (And dear, that's the last time anyone is entitled to inquire of your weight. Slap any boy who asks subsequently.)

Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Luddite lamentation

This is just one of those days, one of those days when you wish you had never seen a computer, never discovered the amount of frustration and pain it could bring into your life.

What good, I ask you, is having a backup (and a backup of a backup) of your files if the capricious gods inside the machine decree that all shall be laid barren?

I haven't really lost that much, in the grand scheme of things. All easily — if slowly — recreated. But I'm afraid to begin again, lest the whimsical evilness inside the box take everything away once more.

Otherwise, everything here is good.

Love,
Sisyphus

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Wardrinking

And then things started to get silly: Potentially giving new meaning to the term "PDA" in a gay bar and opening up broad new vistas of euphemistic possibility involving the word "laptop", the preternaturally gifted Scott has come up with the perfect blend of my two greatest loves: beer and WiFi.

He calls it wardrinking.

Instead of driving around in your car looking for open wireless connections (i.e., wardriving), you go to bars and see if there's an unprotected hotspot you can use. I'm even considering putting together a list of bars in Boystown where you can do this. It raises the concept of "drinking and blogging" to a whole new level.

Wow... I believe I've just come up with the idea for the first true technorati bar crawl.

And then he goes and makes it even better by completing my fave trifecta with the addition of Star Trek. Frankly, I've never wanted him more.

Free the Man Purse

Double standards: Still sucking after all these years. I am pleased to be among and to support my brethren afflicted by satchel-based discrimination. Join us. Hear our rallying cry: "Unhand My Man Purse!"

For the second time in the last six months or so, I have been forced to check my bag. The first time, I was at a Yankees game and they told me I couldn't bring my bag into the stadium. I complained as I saw women carrying similarly sized bags through the gates with no problem. When I asked a security guard why I couldn't bring my bag in, he explained that purses are allowed but bags are not. I told him my bag was a purse and he asked if I was a woman.

Preach it, brother Matt!

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

George gets head

Dubya's bald head fetish: OK, given the secretive Yale background of our "president", I can halfway understand his obsession with men's skulls. If they exist, though, for the sake of my sanity and digestion, please let's not see pictures of George W. Bush grabbing guys' bones.

Thank you.

Monday, April 26, 2004

More thoughts on challenge questions

More thoughts on challenge questions: Lest I be accused of Google-bashing (as a couple of correspondents have lightly inferred), so far I think GMail is the tits. As I've discovered (and as Matt Haughey points out), the ability to compromise a webmail account by answering another person's "challenge question" is not unique to GMail. Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail seem to have similar problems.

The basic problem is that we, the fallible humans, when given a chance to secure the account, pick poor challenge questions, queries that are easily researched by uncovering information we've made available about ourselves. My mother's maiden name is out there on the web, tied to my own name, and vulnerable to a simple Google search. So is a lot of personal information about me, much of it published right here — and freely so — on this very website. So I've chosen a challenge question for GMail that's unlikely to be answerable by anyone but me: the full name of my first love. Considering even he didn't know he was my first love (I never 'fessed up) and I've never spilled the beans to anyone (when describing my romantic past, I start with my second love), this is extremely uncommon knowledge.

So really, it's incumbent on us when securing our accounts — webmail, banking, website FTP or what have you — to think creatively about crafting the questions, passwords or other security measures we use. (Dan Budiac has been thinking about this too.)

Even assuming we all pick inscrutable, arcane questions as our first line of defense, consider that the task of making forgotten or misplaced passwords easily recoverable for the user isn't an easy one, for Google or anyone. For a lot of folks, once it becomes widely available, GMail will become a lot of people's primary or only e-mail account. They can't rely on the notion that many or most users will have a secondary account to which they can send a new password.

What are the options? At the university where I teach, if you forget your password, you have to request a new one in person at the Registrar's office and provide a lot of ID or you request one on the web and it's sent by postal mail to your home address. I'd have to jump through similar hoops with my bank (which will take a phone request, but still mails the new password) and charge card companies. I doubt Google, large and powerful though they may become, is prepared to run a tech support phone line for people to recover their passwords for a free web service.

I don't know what all the answers are and, aside from suggesting we choose unanswerable-but-by-us challenge questions, I'm fresh out of ideas. Maybe it's multiple tiers of challenge questions, maybe it's something with cookies and smart cards. Maybe it's something else.

What I do know is it's a toughie and I'm glad I'm just a user who can prod more savvy minds than mine to consider it.

Browser Window Lock

Browser feature request: I keep a lot of windows open on my desktop: word processing files, web pages (in one or more different browsing applications), e-mail, instant messages, other document files. More and more of my work is done using web applications inside a browser and, given my fumble-fingers, I often hit the keystroke for closing a window accidentally, consigning to oblivion a lot of work that's not easy to retrieve.

I'd like a way to "lock" a browser window or tab so that it couldn't be closed without my confirming that's really what I want to do.

For example, I don't like the distraction of the radio while I'm working, so I often keep open a browser window to the nifty St. Louis Cardinals GameDay play-by-play webcast. But one slip of the thumb and it vanishes, leaving me to dig through the site to find it again and relaunch. Likewise with applications I'd love to keep open most of the time, such as Movable Type or GMail.

For now, my solution is inelegant: I do most of my browsing in Safari and keep Firefox running with my chosen web apps in the background. Still, at least once or twice a day, I manage to accidentally close windows in the wrong application. "D'oh!" has become a common utterance around my office.

Can't someone put in a checkbox that means "Don't close this window unless I both press Command-W and answer affirmatively to a dialog box? Or does this feature exist and I'm just missing it?

More GMail observations

More on GMail: I've had some further opportunity to play with GMail and continue to be impressed with the overall elegance of the system. While some have raised concerns about accessibility and privacy, I'm willing to accept that this is a beta product and an opt-in service and wait to see what the final version(s) looks like before nailing it to the cross.

In general, once you become accustomed to GMail's organizational metaphors (no folders, for example, but a labelling system and robust keyword searching), you want the rest of the world to work that way too. My company's internal webmail application feels like stone tools by comparison and although I've been using Eudora on the desktop in more or less the same fashion (little rigid organization but using the search facility extensively), Google's approach just feels a lot more intuitive and usable.

The ads don't bother me or intrude in the least.

They've begun phasing in support for Safari, too, which rocks my socks. It's not perfect but, hey, beta. (The opening screen still claims "Gmail does not currently support your browser" but if you click through to "sign in anyway", most of the features — including keyboard shortcuts — work just fine.)

Finally, today I received my first and so far only piece of spam at my GMail address (after posting my address here three days ago). It was not automagically filtered into the spam box.

Thursday, April 22, 2004

GMail Security Flaw

GMail security flaw: I just discovered a rather serious security flaw in Google's GMail service, currently in beta. If I wanted, right now, I could access the mailboxes of at least a dozen people, alter their user information, send e-mail using their address and otherwise generally fuck up their accounts.

I won't, of course. But if someone as essentially tech-clueless as I can do it, I rather imagine more savvy and unscrupulous parties are ready and waiting to exploit this weakness.

Further: It's not a technical flaw with the GMail system. It's a combination of poor user interaction design and a little social hacking that opens up the system to potential abuse.

I was poking around the GMail site, just to see if by some miracle they'd opened sign-ups and not told anyone. (They haven't.) But I clicked on everything that I could, including the link under the login panel asking "Forgot your password?"

That takes me to a page where I'm asked to "enter the email address you use to login." At random, I picked the address of a friend I knew had recently obtained a GMail test account and submitted it. I then had to pass one of those tests where a graphic of a word or nonsense phrase is displayed and you have to type it into a box to prove you're a human and not a computer.

After doing that, I'm presented with a security question, presumably one chosen by the GMail user to further verify their identity and help them recover their password. This is where the system starts to break down. Several people have custom questions, unique to them and requiring somewhat intimate information about themselves. In the case of the random friend's account I'd plugged in earlier, it was something I knew about them off the top of my head. If I didn't, though, I'd easily be able to ascertain the answer by reading their website.

I gather that "What is your Mother's maiden name?" is one of the default security questions. It's a bad one. In the case of at least three friends, I didn't know it but was able to easily obtain it by plugging their names into, yes, Google and having the information spit back to me from publicly accessible genealogy websites.

Now having a security question isn't a bad thing, per se. It's just not very tight security, particularly when many of the people using the service are, themselves, web publishers and have chosen particularly poor questions with easily researched answers as the key to their account. But it still requires a little effort; it's not as though a simple computer program could batch through dozens of accounts and compromise them. It requires a thinking, Googling human to get past the security question.

Ah, but when you do! In other systems, passing this hurdle would generate an e-mail to a second account, either revealing the password or containing instructions for resetting it. With GMail, though, I'm immediately presented with the option of resetting the password. Input a new password twice, click submit and voila: I'm in charge of another person's account.

This makes GMail extremely insecure.

There are two ways to address this. First, if you're using GMail right now, I'd suggest choosing a security question to which only you know the answer and which is not answerable by Googling for information about you. (Good advice always, but particularly in this case.) Mothers' maiden names are right out. Names of first pets? Suspect, when a lot of us have taken and published the results of "What is your drag queen name?" quizzes on our websites. Old phone number? Probably tucked away in a long-forgotten, never-updated online database.

The second is for Google to tighten up the process by requiring password changes to involve an e-mail challenge or some other means of resetting an account password. Knowing a person's GMail address and a little personal info about them is too low a hurdle to put the reset mechanism front-and-center where it is now.

At last count, I could easily compromise the accounts of six friends, six prominent webloggers, a Google employee and one random fellow I've never met or heard of.

I haven't and I won't. And another Google employee has graciously invited me to take a test account, which offer I'll accept, even though I wish the service worked with Safari so I could really get under the hood.

In the meantime, I won't be trusting GMail for anything critical and I'll be picking a completely unanswerable (except by me) password security question. I'd advise you to do the same.

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Too racy for Walgreens

My recent headaches are only partially sinus- and allergy-related. I've been clutching my skull in frustration and disbelief, too, at news of matters large and small. This story is emblematic.

Johnson doesn't understand how anyone could be offended by his photo of Ammell. He doesn't even care, really. He just knows that he lost a friend, and now his best photograph is only in his head.

Tuesday, April 20, 2004

420

Happy 4/20: It's my favorite spring holiday! I'll be taking a long "lunch" today in celebration and mailing off my annual donation to NORML.

Monday, April 5, 2004

Come November, let’s retire the side…

The Cardinals have invited the "president" of the "United States" to throw out the first pitch at this afternoon's season opener.

What, there weren't enough rich, white guys on the field already?

Apparently the Redbirds are following a trend of "outsourcing" a job that could be more ably handled by Messrs. Ankiel, Isringhausen, Morris or Simontacchi (yum!).

I've decided to call that first baseball Representative Democracy and the Rights of the American People, since George W. Bush has been throwing those out for quite a while now.

I can barely wait until November when we can send this team to the showers.

Still, it's a beautiful day for a ballgame. What say, Ernie? Let's play two!

Thursday, April 1, 2004

Mixed Signals

If you think men send mixed signals in real life, you should join gay.com, where it's elevated to an art.

Tuesday, March 2, 2004

Joey, 1999-2004

He was a very good dog. Good dog.

So often we're teased for treating our pets better than the humans in our lives. How fortunate we are that our animal friends treat us better than humans too. They treat us like animals, which is the greatest sign of respect and love I can imagine.

If you have a four-footed friend in your life, give 'em a big hug for me.

Thanks to everyone who sent along warm notes and positive thoughts over the past few days. If you can and are so moved, make a small contribution to the WCA Rescue Committee. It won't keep bad things from happening to good dogs, but it will insure they don't go through the rough patches alone.

Saturday, February 28, 2004

The waiting is hardest

A few things I've learned or remembered today:

1. When a loved one is in the hospital, it really doesn't matter whether they have two legs or four. The silence created around the house by the absence of their footfalls is louder than any noise they can possibly create when present.

2. Five years may not seem like a long time but how many friends can you say you've known for their entire life?

3. There are some damned scary two-word combinations in the English language. "Nuclear winter" is right up there. "Bush re-election" is charting high with a bullet. "Renal failure" is number one on my list just now.

4. No one has brought more joy into my life on a daily basis since 1999. If there's anything at all like karma in this world, he's gonna pull through this just fine, because he's paid his dues.

If you've any spare positive thoughts over the next few days, Ken and I would appreciate it if you sent them out into the universe in care of Joey. Thanks.