Monthly Archives: January 2010

COF hacked

Steve at the Crotchety Old Fan has been hacked. Someone got onto his site and screwed it all up. Google has removed him from their index and he’s not getting any traffic from the search engines. I’ve been reading Steve’s blogs every morning for about a year now and he feels like a friend, although […]

Passwords

I am in the process of cleaning up a database that has user passwords. I just did a check to find the 50 most common passwords out of a database of about 50,000 users. It is pretty sad. Who uses bubbles as a password? User Password Count 123456 441 password 158 iloveyou 63 sunshine 50 […]

J. D. Salinger Died Yesterday

I, like most readers of my generation, read Catcher in the Rye as a teenager and have probably reread it few more times since. There’s not much to say about the man, and that’s how he wanted it, but there are supposed to be a dozen or so unpublished books locked in a drawer somewhere […]

Bees are Coming

I ordered two 3 pound bee packages that will arrive some time on March 25th. They are coming up in a truck from Georgia. We’ll all be waiting for him in the parking lot of the Palisades Mall. The price is good ($80 each). I spoke to Adam Fuller of AZ Apiaries on the phone […]

Apple iPad

$499 base price. 3G is an extra $130 + $30 a month unlimited data. Damn! I want this thing. I have to think of way to come up with $650 bucks. This is truly amazing. Down size is no multitasking and no phone. It runs at 1 Ghz, so I can expect an operating system […]

JOHN W CAMPBELL – Who Goes There?

There is a signed copy of John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Who Goes There? for sale on eBay for $1,500. This is the story that the movie “The Thing” was made from. Campbell, of course, did more to shape modern SF than anyone and should be remembered for his work as an editor. I am not […]

XXX Heinlein

Steve over at the Crotchety Old Fan has one of those omnibus posts that covers soup to nuts. Included in it is the factoid that if you want to get lots of traffic, just include the phrase XXX Heinlein in your tags. He mentions me as a someone to vote for in the Hugo awards […]

Final Season Of ‘Lost’

Lost is coming back. I thought it was dead. Erica watches this, but I have had no idea what the show has been about for the past few seasons. Erica doesn’t know either. I usually like time travel stories and I find paradoxes intellectually interesting. “Lost”, however, is just plain impossible to follow.