Some animals live the wild life, some just pretend to.

Take, for example, these dogs.

African Wild Dogs. They look tough. They probably think they’re tough. But the reality is they’re just spoon-fed zoo animals. Some handler lowers in food and they eat. They’re basically not that different from actors: well fed to provide a fantasy experience for some tourists. And maybe wait for the off-chance some chubby kid will fall over the fence.
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Finally cracked down and started implementing the php tests I’m doing here before I screw up my professional sites. Definitely still some bugs and broken links to work on but overall I’m happy with the progress. Also took down the Christmas decorations; I figured it was time. To those with links directly to the blog, please note that due to the change in language, the page name has changed. To make this and future changes (god forbid) easier, I renamed it index.php and dropped it into its own directory. Please set your links to http://howlingpoint.net/life/ and let the server do the rest. The archives are unchanged so permalinks should continue to work.

Morning swim gave me plenty of time to think about a very enjoyable Friday evening. A highlight of the evening: a great conversation on the nature of unconditional love and the coincidence that the words dog and god are so similar. Even more amazing: these epiphanies were fueled by nothing stronger than mocha and cocoa. Note to humans: you weren’t faring well in the comparisons.

Year-end admin stuff for the business is keeping me occupied.

Also busy (happily so) with file transfers and software (re)intallations onto the new desktop unit brought by Santa. It’s a PC with a speedy little Celeron chip, lots of memory and plenty of drive space. CD burner too. Quite a shock jumping directly from Win 95 to XP though. I’m looking at it the same way as when I jumped from Mac to Windows: all the features have to be here somewhere – it’s just a question of figuring out where they were hidden or what they were renamed as. Now that I have drive space to spare again lots of toys and gizmos are coming out of the closet and off the archive disks. A little clean-up, a little dusting, and voila! just like new. AIM is back up after an extended absence: new address is howler358. Just realized that I need to come up with some new graphics here soon before the Christmas decorations get too stale. If I get my act together (ha!) I may be able to install the oft-promised and long overdue PHP upgrades to the site at the same time. In short, while the site will be busy, with lots of flashy new stuff to see (hopefully), there probably won’t be a lot of words of substance (as though there ever were) through the weekend at least.

And by the way, it’s beautifully sunny here and even during the Christmas-New Year’s hiatus the firm policy of poolside lunches has not been relaxed. Some standards have to be maintained even during the holiday season. White Christmas is tolerable from a distance; pasty-white Chuck at Christmas is not an acceptable option.

Lots of fun today with many generous and thoughtful gifts being read, listened to, played with, and generally enjoyed. Thank you all. But somehow I lost about an hour and a half this afternoon laying on the floor watching Pongo alternately stalk, study, approach, sniff and thrash the tiny stuffed reindeer with the squeaky thing inside. It’s amazing how much joy the simple things can bring.

“I don’t know what to do!” cried Scrooge, laughing and crying with the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoon* of himself with his stockings. “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A Merry Christmas to everybody! A Happy New Year to all the world. Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!”

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843).

* La·oc·o·on – NOUN: Greek Mythology A Trojan priest of Apollo who was killed along with his two sons by two sea serpents for having warned his people of the Trojan horse. (per Bartleby). To put the citation in context, check out these images of the priest being strangled by the serpents. But don’t get too distracted by the language; indulge in the spirit of the quote and have a great holiday.

I pretty much stayed out of the fray on Lott’s foot-in-mouth disease. As a Californian, I’ve never voted in an election where he was a candidate. Allthough I occasionally vote for Republican candidates, his statements as a leader of that party only confirmed my impression of that group (that they are occasionally the lesser of the evils on the ballot). In short, there was nothing new and no reason to give credence to his existence. Until this:

“When you’re from Mississippi and you’re a conservative and you’re a Christian, there are a lot of people that don’t like that. I fell into their trap and so I have only myself to blame.”

Hey Trent. The fact that you’re a white, conservative christian isn’t the problem. The fact that you’re an old racist is. Close-minded bigots like you who want to push their beliefs on other people are the problem. You are the problem Mister Lott. You and the $%^ing freaks like you.

Spam is a thousand times more horrible than you can ever imagine,” Shein said. “The entire Internet mail system is under a denial-of-service attack.”
. . .
At one point, The World was under attack by 200 servers simultaneously “spewing the same spam at us,” Shein said. “Little guys with scripts don’t break into 200-plus servers and use them to spew at you. It seems like it’s beyond what spammers are likely to be making on this stuff.” Sophisticated stealth techniques and coordinating multiple servers seem to Shein to be beyond the resources of small spam businesses.

Great article on the true cost of spam [via Ipse Dixit].

Although not as busy as the fat old man who will circumnavigate the globe Tuesday night – Wednesday morning, lots of running around the last few days. Making sure people get to their cruise ships and airline flights in plenty of time to get out of here for the holidays. Amazingly enough, hoping these people leaving San Diego (and SoCal generally) are going to be getting some of the sunshine that I’ve been lacking of late. I’ll be trying to hide out for a few days myself. Keep my head down and the volume up and spend some quality time with the furry beast that matters.

For all those who think Admiral Poindexter’s new computer system represents the coming of big brother, Denver brings us a reminder that our large sibling’s really been here for years.

The Denver police have gathered information on unsuspecting local activists since the 1950′s, secretly storing what they learned on simple index cards in a huge cabinet at police headquarters.

When the cabinet filled up recently, the police thought they had an easy solution. For $45,000, they bought a powerful computer program from a company called Orion Scientific Systems. Information on 3,400 people and groups was transferred to software that stores, searches and categorizes the data.

Of course, it wasn’t just for their own use. They shared the data. With someone who leaked the data. Eventually the documents ended up being public.

The best thing about the Denver system was that they didn’t limit themselves to people suspected of wrongdoing: “In addition to their intelligence files, the police entered in the database the names of troubled, but unprosecuted, students in Denver schools, along with the names of those who obtained permits to carry concealed guns, and, inexplicably, people who had received honorariums from the Police Department.” It looks like they just kept information on anyone who crossed their path.

And then got sloppy and let it get leaked. So which is worse: collecting private data about ordinary citizens going about their lives, or sloppily leaking that private data about ordinary citizens going about their lives?