Capricious Me » 2008 » January

Hehe Mike cooked dinner tonight all alone with no intervention from me, to make up for making me wait for him because he needed a ride home. :-D He made roasted potatoes and steaks. Mmmm… Maybe I’ll post pics later.

I just got my workstation hard drive replaced. I’m using a Dell workstation that was purchased in 2005. It had a 120 gb hard drive that started to “misbehave” and all the e2fsck in the world couldn’t fix it. Luckily there’s still warranty on it, so the awesome sys admins got me a replacement within like 2 days. I got a 250gb drive instead, because they no longer make the 120gb ones. (I love the constantly shifting standards in the computing industry!) Seems like I need a new fan now. It’s a quiet hum for a while and an hour or two into it, it starts making these horrible grinding noises that makes me think it’s going to explode into cloud of dust. Except the fan’s clean and there’s no dust. I spent a while reinstalling and reconfiguring everything. It’s pretty awesome that Ubuntu’s made these things so effortless. And on that note, I can’t wait for the next release of kubuntu, which I think will have kde4.0 all figured out for it. It’s present in the Hardy Heron alpha releases already… I would test it myself, but I tend to have pretty bad luck with alpha releases. Esp. when the nvidia driver’s involved.

24! Season 5!! AMAZING start. AMAZING. I’m disappointed to see that sniveling, pathetic and pompous ***** still in ******, but OOF that was a great start. I’m starting to like platypus a whole lot more. As for Jack Bauer… I still don’t like him as much. Season one was SO good… season two was really good too (esp. with the reappearance of **** ******, not so great with the Kim stuff) but season 3 was so disappointing and season 4 was even worse, with the exception of the platypus moments and one incident. But season 5… ooooh that was best episode so far in three seasons. Ok. I’m going back to watch the 2nd episode, but one of these days I will get a rant out. (e.g. Convenient character with CS degree saying that she figured out a file’s encrypted by taking its checksum.)

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of comment spam originating from Google groups. (Of course, the problem is not limited to Google. MSN and Yahoo groups are also part of the problem.) I’ve been observing this for a few weeks now, and there’s two groups that have amused me in particular. Their posting styles are very similar, which makes me think that the second group came about because the first got shut down. Anyway, they use a rather salacious and lewd first line, usually some key phrase that you’d automatically categorize as spam, and a follow up “excerpt” that seems to be pulled from some news headlines or news stories. Sometimes the first line and excerpt meld together to form something funny. For example, a first line pandering towards those who seek entertainment involving creatures of the barnyard variety was followed by a line about Dolly, the cloned sheep.

From the two or three Google groups that I’ve observed, and other groups that I’ve looked through in the past, it should be easy enough to identify the groups created by spammers. These groups usually have one or two members (most often, just one) and that one member posts frequently. Once you identify these groups, just do a reverse look up to see what pages link to these pages to weed out the unpopular groups from the spam groups. The spam groups should have some variation of their URL posted across many sites, as opposed to unpopular groups, which should have sparse linkage at best.

Why are these groups up for as long as they’ve stayed up?

(Crossposted to the UCD Seclab’s blog as well)

Back from Tahoe and somewhat sore…

( Pics and rambling. Just click. )

To see just pics, click here.

Last night was An’s birthday. We went to Mikuni’s to celebrate. Their BBQ white tuna with the red or white sauce is the most awesome deliciousness… EVER.

After food, we came back to the apartment to continue the birthday fun with some Cranium Turbo. My team was lagging so much in the first half and then all of a sudden we caught up and overtook the other two teams. We won. People left, but we tried Scene It anyway (2 girls vs. 3 guys) and we won again. (in case of confusion, I was on the girls’ team.) The guys really REALLY wanted to win, I suppose, so they started playing again against us and were winning initially, but then we caught up and beat them thoroughly.

Tonight was trivia night at the Silo… our team, The Traveling Salesmen (you won’t truly appreciate that name unless you’ve studied a bit of algorithms), won. Woo!

yay! we got power back last night, but internet did not work until this morning. Now everything’s back to normal. Weee! Food in the fridge is surprisingly fine and mostly unaffected. Phew.

I’ve rediscovered Ritz crackers. So yummy!!!

Watching the newest episode of desperate housewives… I still hate Susan Meyers. So selfish!!! Bree’s family are still awesomely funny. I love that Bree tried to fix Andrew up with a contractor just to get her roof done… and I love that Andrew went along for it for a big screen tv.

I hope the writers’ strike doesn’t affect the 5th season of the Wire… or the 2nd season of the Tudors. The Tudors has some interesting takes on what happened in the past… and who did what, but it’s damn good any way.

I went home this afternoon to check on the status… still no power to the apartment and still no power to the multiple traffic lights at the two four-way intersections. Safeway still looked dim as well.

According to Davis Enterprise, “seven large, 60-foot-tall transmission tower poles which tumbled along County Road 102 between Davis and Woodland” is partially responsible for the power outage. Now that the storm’s done, it should be safe for work crews to go fix the problems. I didn’t have much hope for it yesterday, since the winds were supposed to be pretty severe today as well. At least I haven’t heard many sirens today… apparently yesterday a man got trapped beneath a fallen tree and several big rigs actually got blown over.

Isn’t California supposed to have awesome weather?? Aren’t the winters supposed to be MILD?? I feel cheated!! At least Boston never tried to bullshit you with the fake “I am sunny! Sunny all the time!!*”

Glad I don’t have to stay in the dark without electricity though… There’s supposed to be another storm tomorrow, so I guess that’s the latest that power will stay out for my apartment. Eeek. Hopefully our fridge isn’t all melted and nasty tomorrow…

*Except for two or three months of solid rain in Northern California.

Sometime between 9 and 10 this morning, I heard my computer go “whewwwwwwwww” and the light from my bedside clock turned off. The rainstorms had blown out the power!! Everything worth doing requires electricity… and a computer science person without her computer is going to go mad eventually…

Had to shower with help from a flashlight, which wasn’t too bad. I went to Safeway to get some food that didn’t require refrigeration or cooking, but most of Safeway was dark.

Eventually, I came over to Mike’s place, which still has electricity. On the way, two of the major intersections didn’t have lights. I saw a PG&E truck, which gave me some hope…