Anole Feeding Time

This morning, the anole who manages the territory in the front of our house was out surveying his domain and bobbing his head at us. He was brave enough to eat out of my hand. If I haven’t mentioned it before, there’s a nice picture of him over on Susan’s home page that I shot a couple of weeks ago. After lunch I stopped by the office to finish beating the Sony VAIO into submission. It’s now as stable as it’s ever likely to be. This afternoon we had another go at swimming and I managed about 30% more laps than last time. Now it’s off to read a few chapters of the O’Reilly Perl Cookbook

Swimming

Susan and I visited the pool yesterday to swim a few laps. I haven’t been swimming for some time and I’m way out of shape. We’re going to have to start doing laps at the pool regularly again I think! I also managed to mow the grass, or rather, the weeds yesterday. Maybe we should move to a condo on the beach. I could swim during all the free time I’d get from not having a lawn.

More VAIO

Further analysis of the Sony VAIO problems has led me to believe the best possible disposition of such a machine is to encase it in several feet of cement and drop it into the Pacific ocean somewhere near the Marianas Trench. The second best option (not nearly as much fun, however) would be to dig up an ancient DOS boot disk, use fdisk to wipe the master boot record, repartition, format, and install Windows 98. Then, track down and install a few device drivers. Nah, couldn’t be that easy, could it?

Itaipu, Seuss, and VAIO

I’m listening to Philip Glass’ Itaipu as I write this. I find it has a curative effect on brain clouds. I’ve spent a good part of the day fighting with a Sony VAIO computer. Don’t laugh – it’s not mine! I’m doing this for a good friend of mine. A casual survey of usenet will reveal that the opinion of any randomly selected Sony VAIO computer is somewhere between “a dog” and “a very sick dog”. Most people either return them or throw them away in disgust. All that’s needed in this case is to get Windows 95 or 98 installed and working to the extent that the computer can be used for web browsing. The primary difficulty is that the hardware is highly unstable. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss, the Sony VAIO has a bad case of gleeks and should lie flat on it’s back in a bed for eight weeks. But I’m determined to persevere. Stay tuned for more on this one…

ExploreZip Trojan

I see the ExploreZip trojan is making the news this morning. It seems to be trashing Windows systems around the world today. From what I’ve been reading on BUGTRAQ the last fews days, Microsoft’s own email servers have been one of the primary infection points for this one. Hopefully, even Microsoft will realize this time that the Windows security model is just plain broken. In the meantime, it’s nice be running Linux on our servers.