Just when I think I've seen it all...

My Bride's Mother-in-law sets up table for the entire extended family. This is the first time that all the kids and grandkids are at the house since she finished putting the new floor down. Every stool, chair, and other sitting apparatus was surrounding the tables in the rarely used formal dining room as a huge mass of people crammed together.

She put white sweat socks on the foot of every chair that was not part of her formal sitting room....

Half-height white sweat socks on each and every leg... You know, to protect the floor...

It has been a long time since I've blown soda out of my nose laughing. Just had to share. (grin)

Packing up the car, waiting to do the drive to North Dakota this morning. Looks like there was reasonable weather to boot. Not only am I home, but work finished up without leaving a sword hanging over my head. A clean bowl for the new year!

I enjoy the white elephant gifts more and more as time goes on. Not sure if others play the 'pick one from the pile or swipe an open gift', but had a lot of fun with it this year. The framed SCOX stock certificate was one of the objects of lust and desire with coworkers, the (folding) titanium spork became a hot item as well. The best part was some people did not quite seem to get the idea that *anyone* could snag a gift. I think a couple of them conspired to 'swap' gifts, not realizing we were drawing numbers - as a result some guys ended up with gift certificates to have (somebody's) nails done and a few other gender specific items got tossed into a mixed group. Good fun.

We were putting cash in cards and my Bride realized she spent one of the crisp bills I picked up. (Not a gift card person - if I'm giving something like money, I like the real stuff that can be used anywhere, anytime) I watch her feverishly run around the house, checking my wallet, her purse, then tear through a stack of Christmas cards. I look up and ask what she was doing. She replies, "I'm re-gifting a $20". Struck me as funny, as we had been talking about the etiquette of re-gifting stuff the other night.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!

A couple weeks ago I hooked up with a group of friends to do the 'real' scuba dive trip. Shore diving, boat dives - burning up between two and three tanks of air a day. The previous trip was just a fluke of having a work gig in the right place, with extra time. A couple high points for the week:

Just started the initial descent down to 45' of a 90' dive, waiting for one of the folks who was having problems getting his ears to equalize. My dive buddy and a few others are staring out over the sandy floor of the ocean while the dive master is looking up at the guy who is slowly descending. A 5-6' grey reef shark approaches us - but the dive instructor had his back turned to it. It came within 15-20' or so with all of us pointing behind him before it curved away. As it circled back, then wandered away, it had my full attention the entire time. Saw scorpion fish, barracuda, and a few other interesting things - but sharks are a special kind of scary for me. Nobody had a spear gun this trip (grin).

One of the last dives went OK. Nothing terribly deep or exotic, but a much smaller crowd on the boat. The boat was heading back and the captain gets a call on his cell phone. Captain tells us to stop changing out of the wetsuits and mumbles something to the dive master. We go screaming out into open water, he kills the engine, and we jump in without a ton of air left in our tanks (800-1200 psi). We dive about 20' and hang there in what seemed like 200-400' of water. Not sure, but the short of it is there was *nothing* to see even with a 100' visibility or so. A minute or two we wait doing nothing... just staring at each other. I wander over to the dive master doing my best 'so now what' charade. He scribbles on a slate table - "just wait". So for a few minutes more we just hang there. Then the dive master points a direction.... I see something big. Something 'submarine' big. A humpback whale swims by, checks us out, then continues on the way...

So way cool... Would not have thought about it, but swimming with a whale is must do on the lifelong checklist.

Upside down Christmas tree, FTW. I understand the history, why back in the day folks would hang them from the large vaulted ceilings and what not. No problems with the historical aspects of it. (Heck, if I had a castle, might give something like that a try) What I don't get are the plastic trees on a stick, plugged into the base upside down. Or worse, listing to a customer complain about the live tree they chopped off the tip, planted it in a tree holder, and then wondered why it kept breaking and falling over. (Ultimate solution? Cut the top third of the tree off, and then reshape it as a cone with the hedge trimmers...) Guess I don't appreciate haute couture, or need some better crack to see what these markadroids were thinking. Course I know what they were thinking - how can we charge a premium for a commodity item? Put it in upside down!

Just too funny. These folks are serious. Look around, you will see them... Argh.

Well barnacles. My Bride left her shiny new MacBook out, so I opened it up to check my email this morning. Noticed some odd artifacts about the size of a dime on the screen with any sort of bump. So, less than 48 hours later we are sending it in for repair.

Figured I would try one of these Apple stores with the 'genius' bars first. 12:00 we drive over. They lead us over to one of Macs and had us create an appointment. 12:30, we show back up for our appointment. The guy takes a quick look at it and confirms something is not right. Takes it back to the manager to see if we can just swap it out, and find since we bought it on-line, we can't - different part numbers for retail. (grrr) He did confirm it was horked, and created a note in Apple's system so when we called in they might not have to go through the full script.

An hour on the phone later... (they did do the entire script anyhow) they agree that it sounds like it is indeed horked, and will send out a box for us to ship it back in.

I did not realize how much my Bride enjoyed the G4 laptop until I had to ship it out for a gig. I boxed the Mac up and shipped it out - and as I packed it up she wandered out asking, "will it come back?", complete with the puppy dog eyes...

Hmmn. Her last laptop, a 75mhz/16M is getting a bit old, and the untethered net access in the house changed the way she likes to surf. Work laptops are just not the same as her own. Waited till they got Windows running on a Mac and was planning to wait till the Adobe CS:3 came up to switch... but seems Apple takes a bit off of the never-seeming-to-fluctuate prices on black Friday. Well, ye haw, seems they knocked a franklin off the 13" version she was after.

So, ordered away. I had called Adobe a month back about installing CS:2 on OSX as we had the Win32 version. They said they would do a one-time switch. Cool. That covers the bread and butter applications. Had been planning to wait for the CS:3 update this Spring, but what the heck. With external keyboard, mouse, and monitors, it will be faster than the desktop she is using today for photoshop/illustrator.

Office is a bit more of a question. I have multiple seats of office - 97, 2000, etc for Windows. More than good enough. I also have Office 2004 (mac) on my work g4, but it is an open question as to how long they intend to support it. It also feels a bit off. I'm going to head down the Wine road, rather than get a 'native' version of Office. Plunked down $40 for http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/ the mac version of crossover. I'd rather have Win32 apps run inside OSX, than go the dual boot route. Hope it works as well as their Linux kit does.

• I was the only one who did not have a spear gun. Very disquieting.
• A folding pocket knife with a one inch blade (mostly for fishing line, etc) does not constitute a weapon.
• Being reminded to punch a shark in the nose if they attack did not ease my mind.
• Diving deeper than 90' quickly puts you in 'there be dragons' section of the PADI charts. Seems the Navy charts work by trading a higher pucker factor for more depth/bottom time.

While I was diving, they were hunting for supper. A very seasoned group of divers, so I was in good hands. Without any sort of load, I still used more air (and probably felt the workout) than anyone else. Nothing like ascending with only 10 bars left in your tank to keep you close to your dive partner. He had been tracking my air usage the entire time... Saw a ton of stuff and many firsts for me. Swan with wild dolphins, a sea turtle, an octopus (who became supper), shipwrecks, (baby) shark, and all sorts of tropical fish. Many of those 'lifetime checklist' boxes filled - very cool.

The only time we ever delete comments is if the comment contains malformed HTML that is somehow causing Slashdot to fail to display properly. Comments are not deleted on the basis of content. [snip]
--CmdrTaco

"The only time we ever delete, blah, blah, blah"?
I'm going to go with "Um, no."

Working my way to Boston for what should be a cream puff gig for a few days. Love to put some faces with the names for the Bostonite clan. Wednesday night perhaps?

Older, but could be fun. I'm about an hours worth of downloading before I know for sure, but Mech Commander, Mech Commander Gold, and Mech Commander 2 ISO's are being offered for free (http://www.mechcommander.org/downloads.html)

Just chatting with a friend of mine about learning to dive and dates for the lessons. Not only did I just discover that today is indeed Friday, but it is also a week earlier than I expected. Argh.

Couple of funny things from the home front.

Minneapolis had some rough weather tonight; complete with a fair bit of thunder and a tornado warnings. My little one became quite concerned there was going to be problems, and when she found out our net connection was down (no weather radar) and the satellite dish was rained out - she quietly prepared for the coming apocalypse. Her precious blankets were downstairs and she had a travel bag packed next to her bed. When asked, she stated it was her tornado bag. She would make sure her stuff made it to the storm room, while we were to make sure the dog was carried downstairs so *when* the house collapsed, he would be OK as well. Interesting to see what she selected as 'must have' gear.

Went to a local parade a couple weeks back. Packed up the entire brood, fearless dog wonder included. The dog is skittish around people, but did really well. Then the a large collection of motorcyclists who could afford chrome (but not mufflers) did a gig. Dog cowered in fear under my chair, not amused in the least. Way to many high school bands later, we walked back to the car. Someone parked a Harley near the sidewalk and as we walked by our little Benji gave it a low growl that surprised all of us. Heh.

Yay, the old dog (G4) gets a new battery. Wish my thinkpad got the same upgrade.

https://support.apple.com/ibook_powerbook/batteryexchange/

Computer model |Battery model number | Serial number range
12-inch iBook G4 | A1061 | ZZ338 - ZZ427, 3K429 - 3K611, 6C519 - 6C552
12-inch PowerBook G4 |A1079 | ZZ411 - ZZ427, 3K428 - 3K611
15-inch PowerBook G4 | A1078 and A1148 | 3K425 - 3K601, 6N530 - 6N551, 6N601

I've been using mozilla/firefox for a good chunk of time. I've also been with the same company for five or six years, and change laptops more often than some folks see the dentists. Between a mix of operating systems and frequent hardware changes I ended up using Microsoft's Webmail client rather than the 'thick client' outlook. Bonus (for me) is Firefox would store my passwords so when IT cranked down the time between logins, no worries...

Until I did a fresh install of Firefox 1.0... then no more 'save password' dialog on Webmail. If I logged into OWA with firebird .8, it would store the password. Upgrading to firefox v1.0.7, then updating to 1.5.x would keep anything I set in .8, but that was a real pain.

Today, I figured out what was going on. Looks like Firefox 1.0.x implemented the HTML 4.0 AUTOCOMPLETE="off" specification, which OWA uses. It also does not looks like there is a handy way to ignore the 'forced' autocomplete flag at the site level.

http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/forms.html#remember_password

works. Like to have a nicer plugin, and might just roll up my sleeves to do just that (now that I know why and a way to work around it) I love the smell of a fresh install in the morning!

Wow. Just wow. One of those things that could be locked down, but I doubt is by most folks. Nice writeup at http://www.pandora-security.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2093

--- snips ---

I will now walk you through the process of obtaining SYSTEM privileges.

To start, lets open up a command prompt (Start > Run > cmd > [ENTER]).

At the prompt, enter the following command, then press [ENTER]:

C:>at

If it responds with an "access denied" error, then we are out of luck, and you'll have to try another method of privilege escalation; if it responds with "There are no entries in the list" (or sometimes with multiple entries already in the list) then we are good. Access to the at command varies, on some installations of Windows, even the Guest account can access it, on others it's limited to Administrator accounts. If you can use the at command, enter the following commands, then press [ENTER]:

C:>at 15:25 /interactive "cmd.exe"

Lets break down the preceding code. The "at" told the machine to run the at command, everything after that are the operators for the command, the important thing here, is to change the time (24 hour format) to one minute after the time currently set on your computers clock, for example: If your computer's clock says it's 4:30pm, convert this to 24 hour format (16:30) then use 16:31 as the time in the command. If you issue the at command again with no operators, then you should see something similar to this: ...

When the system clock reaches the time you set, then a new command prompt will magically run. The difference is that this one is running with system privileges (because it was started by the task scheduler service, which runs under the Local System account). It should look like this: ...

You'll notice that the title bar has changed from cmd.exe to svchost.exe (which is short for Service Host). Now that we have our system command prompt, you may close the old one. Run Task Manager by either pressing CTRL+ALT+DELETE or typing taskmgr at the command prompt. In task manager, go to the processes tab, and kill explorer.exe; your desktop and all open folders should disappear, but the system command prompt should still be there.

At the system command prompt, enter in the following:

C:> explorer.exe
A desktop will come back up, but what this? It isn't your desktop. Go to the start menu and look at the user name, it should say "SYSTEM". Also open up task manager again, and you'll notice that explorer.exe is now running as SYSTEM. The easiest way to get back into your own desktop, is to log out and then log back in. The following 2 screenshots show my results (click to zoom):

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