Some Blithering Idiot   Riding to the rescue, one issue at a time

Note:  This is cross-posted to the DEF CON Forum as well as to Reddit, to encourage discussion in the official community spaces.  The original material (with cross-links to the other sites) may be found at my personal blog here.  All content here is my own unless otherwise noted, and does not represent DEF CON or […]

Pride in ownership. Well, it’s been a few years since I’ve been posting here.  It’s time to blow the dust and rust off, and get serious about it again.  And for this impetus, you can thank the World’s Richest Person(tm), Elon Musk. On 25 April 2022, Uncle Elon solidified his bid for Twitter, in the […]

YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST: I’m giving myself a 40th Birthday present. In mid-January, I will be signing off of Facebook, potentially permanently. As I hit the big 4-0, I realize that there’s a lot in my life that is toxic, and dragging me down mentally and emotionally. Facebook is one of those things for […]

Stamina. As I predicted in previous posts, I slacked off.  Not much excuse, and I shall not bore you with details.  However, I have found it interesting to write my thoughts down again, for posterity and in the hope that it brings amusement to some.  Not that I expect that there’s anyone still reading me […]

Effort. Like a lot of geeks of “my generation,” I am an avid reader of the website Slashdot.  I have been a reader since its early days, and its tagline of “News for nerds.  Stuff that matters.” still resonates with me — even if I don’t always find the content relevant any more.  However, it […]

Kids these days. Some days, I begin to wonder if one shouldn’t have a license to procreate.  Was I that poorly behaved going to Wal-Mart?  Would I scream at the top of my lungs continuously because mom moved the cart, or I didn’t get to buy a toy?  Would I go to the restaurant with […]

Flash-bang. Looking over the very brief summary of Google Analytics that my WordPress plugin gives me, I was somewhat amused by the graph… Also amusing to note:  some of these visits are me logging in to admin the blog or to write.  Also, for the geeks in the audience, the uncompressed TIFF of this image […]

Consistency. I’ve tried to do several “journal” type projects over the years.  I’ll freely admit, pretty much of them have all fizzled out.  Sometimes due to lack of time to make the effort, but a lot of the time I just don’t have anything to write about.  I’ve noticed that a couple of days into […]

Friendship. In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard struggles to master a greeting in an alien language.  The last time it was attempted by a starship captain, he botched it, and the aliens withdrew from contact for decades.  At the end of the episode, Picard delivers it flawlessly, and the alien […]

Transitory. I live in Montana: a vast, sparsely populated state, where often times the distance between places is not measured in linear measurement but in drive time, where the nearest neighboring cities are multiple hours away, and where the nearest “major” city of any note is a solid day’s drive away.  Obviously, this means that […]