Walking on the Moon

This is the kind of thing we have to put up with.

and now, hometown hero.  Rod Van Meter.

Well, certainly I read him partially to feed my raging fanboy jealousy. And then there’s something like his piece on Roddenberry’s induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, which convinces me both that he’s a writer and that he’s a great guy.

A guy this decent deserves to be Cosmic Boy. Of course, I’ve always thought of myself as more of an Ultra Boy.

I wrote a short review of The Great Gatsby, which deserves a long one. Fortunately, many others have handled that for me. Mine is up in Bell, Book, and Candle.

And I noticed that for the last 8 years my pages have had Jane Austen’s name spelled wrong. That’s the way to critical credibility.

I don’t have a TV. Some people ask me why that is.  I’ll let Tatsuya Ishida explain with a fine cartoon he apparently got the inspiration for from watching me in grad school.

Today’s the anniversary of a bunch of cool and amazing things:

• Thor Heyerdahl began his act of manliness
• The first night organized baseball game was played
• A spectacular airframe failure
• The first space tourist went up
• James Doohan was buried in space

It’s also the birthday of Lee Falk, Ferruccio Lamborghini, Harper Lee, Carolyn Jones, Saddam Hussein, Terry Pratchett, Jay Leno, Kari Whurer, Penelope Cruz, Jessica Alba, and me.

Wikipedia doesn’t mention that last one.

It’s the first birthday in a while that’s had any kind of real implications. I can’t stand an hour and a half at Special Training any more and I have to get flight physicals more often. I can still drink, be sued, and vote, though.

Brenda took me to lunch and I got a haircut.

For the first time since installing Akismet I had to moderate a spam post today. Not bad.

This weekend I finally put the Moon here onto a sound network footing. I pay some phone company for 3 bits of Internet (8 addresses less one for broadcast and one for network number). Until recently my desktop/server has been also doing duty as a router/firewall, meaning I really had 2 2-bit subnets each of 2 addresses.

I actually used more of the address space by doing various bits of network black magic, which I don’t condone.

Last weekend I picked up a WRT54GL wireless router and VLAN switch. I’d burned Linux on a couple of these for work and decided it was a good piece of hardware to help straighten out what I laughingly called my network “architecture.” We won’t go into the 10 Mb/s hub that was still central to the thing.

At any rate, the router came last week and I spent a few hours this week burning OpenWRT onto it and configuring it. Now I have a sane network architecture that has the new router doing:

• Proxy ARP to keep my DSL provider confused
• Firewall
• Single IP address on both sides of the firewall
• ssh access
• and a gratuitous use of cron and ntpclient to keep its date correct

None of that was rocket science, though it was good clean fun. And I’m delighted to have a more orderly and sane network layout that lets me use an extra address and reboot my server without kicking anyone else off the LAN.

I’m so happy with it I decided to share.

I have recently learned that if you type “origin snail mail” into Google, my name is associated with the number one hit.

You may wonder how I’ve come to know such an odd fact. Well, I’ve been contacted by some fellow who is claiming that he came up with the word “before there was an Internet.” In 1990. (I have internet code that’s older than that and I’m no great shakes.)

I’m not worried about this whack-O, of course. I’ll just send him off with a hearty shove. I’m just worried about more in the woodwork.

Sigh.

If anyone out there would like to write a nice long essay on the origin of the phrase “snail mail,” I’d be delighted to Google bomb it for you …

Remember a few years ago when GWB and company mailed out all those up to $300.00 checks as a little bribe to support their tax policies? Well, I got a check and never cashed it. I meant to cash it and make a charitable contribution or burn it as avgas or something, but I never quite remembered to. The first check expired and they sent me another, with the interest on my $300.00 dutifully added in. We went round on it a couple times, and I’ve still never cashed it. I think they’ll still mail me a cashable one (the last one has also expired) if I call a number or something.
But, despite the fact that I’ve never taken a dollar of the bribe, they send me a 1099 for the interest every year. This strikes me as hysterically funny.