We'll be out for a while. Cel will be available. We've got SWAT teams deployed in the neighborhood; two are around my mailbox and they're loaded for bear. The suggestion was made to either leave for a few hours or stay in the house - and stay away from the back of the house.

Things are marginally improved from yesterday, at least in the fact that I'm not wanted for committing some type of mayhem. The prospect was quite attractive at numerous points, but I refrained. And yes, I think I deserve credit for that.

Verizon dispatched techs to the site, then reported they'd dispatched a tech - singular - to the site, then ( Read more... )

Some people do memes; I do polls. In this particular case, I really do want to find out what you all think about a number of different things. I'm making some plans for the future, and people's opinions will make a difference in what I do. Or, with some of these, I'm just nosy, or being weird. I apologize for the length in advance...and each of ( Read more... )

Hmmmm. The Encryption Pad product I found is entirely cool and exactly what is needed - if they only had it for a platform other than Win XP. This means if I want to put coded messages into my journal that multiple people, including those on UN*X and Mac, can read (in other words, not PGP, since I'd have to use everybody's key individually), I'll ( Read more... )

From golum: Holy shit, Secret Squadron. Somehow I don't think they'll say, "drink Ovaltine". And I never thought I'd say this, but "Go Wired!" Film at 11Still nothing in the news as to why guys in combat gear were toting rifles around on I-95 yesterday - and that's quite unsettling. I'm going to play a hunch and say that later today or early ( Read more... )

Too many things going on, only a few of which have to do with work, and several are of a personal nature which I don't really feel comfortable writing in a publicly accessible journal, filtered or not. But then, there's nothing that bad at all; it's just busy and a bit complicated ( Read more... )

On the morning of the 11th of September in 2001, I was my usual workplace - in the basement of the FDA's HQ, the Parklawn Building, in Rockville. I watched the events of that day unfold on the big screen TV in the Network Control Center with the other engineers, about half of whom were either ex- or reserve military. There was no weeping, no ( Read more... )

First, though: I happened to score a six of Saranac's specialty brews from my favorite shop. It was stuck in the back of the cooler by itself in a blank case...kind of one of those odd finds. Inside, though, hoo boy! Their ESB, their Caramel Porter (with some actual caramel in the brew as well as caramel malt), a Mocha Stout, their Märzen, ( Read more... )

A few things that I wish to make known, most of which are on my Web site:

• Please follow the link from my info or Web pages, or here, to Eyes on the Screen. This is an airing of the Civil Rights Movement documentary Eyes on the Prize across the nation on 8 Feb; we are establishing one in Columbia. Not only is this documentary extremely important ( Read more... )

Maybe it's my new camera (which I will post about later), or maybe it's the fact that I'm technically on a security assignment, but I've been getting much more heavily into secrecy, cryptography, spying, and similar paranoid stuff of late ( Read more... )