If you're a baseball fan, ignore George Whinebrenner and watch this tournament. All four games yesterday were riveting, including Cuba's very impressive win over Venezuela (where was the Castro-Chavez bet? Oil or sugar?) and the USA's squeaker past Japan on A-Rod's ninth inning base hit (and a controversial call). And world home run leader Sadaharu Oh's argument with the umps, during which not one Japanese player took the field - that's respect for your manager.

It might be spring, but this is pretty good baseball. Don't miss it.

I'm a SF Giants season ticket holder, so I certainly don't feel happy about this, but baseball has got to suspend Barry Bonds without pay this year. (Assuming an internal investigation confirms the recent SI article and book.)

It can't be good for the Giants' baseball plans this year, but on the bright side, they'll get a bunch of payroll back to spend on a non-steroid user or two.

The jokes write themselves.

Jim Bunning: "Civil liberties do not mean much when you are dead."

Patrick Henry: "Give me liberty or give me death."

Who's the (USA) patriot?

Why we are losing the war on terror.

Money quote: "So catastrophic was Bush's decision to shift his attention and resources to Iraq, when bin Laden was panting at Tora Bora, that one is tempted to rank it with Adolf Hitler's decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941, at a time when Great Britain was prostrate and America was still out of the war (a decision that almost certainly cost Hitler the war then and there)."

Props to Fabris for the speedskating win last night. Much deserved over the bickering Americans.

to save their lives. Case in point: the FAQ for GnuPG for OS X (and Unix). At a time when the world needs PGP/GPG more than ever, is now the time to have a FAQ that only explains a basic task like generating a key in Advanced Topics: How does this whole thing work?

The good news is that GPG for Apple Mail is actually fairly easy to set up. But you have to use the damned command line to do any real PGP task.

Studies show a low total fat diet does NOT prevent cancer or heart disease. Of course over (and under) eating is still dangerous.

Bring on the steak au poivre! In moderation of course.

I never slam the MSM, but it's time. Here's the Washington Post wistfully declaring about AOL and Yahoo's inane idea to charge corporate opt-in^H^H^H^H^H^H spammers to bypass spam filters: "Maybe this is where it starts to change." Fortunately, some guy pointed out the obvious - it's a way to make it easier to spam, not harder, if you pay the corporate owners of the users' mailboxes.

Yet another reason to forget all about AOL and Yahoo, if you hadn't already. (Who were they?)

Virginia is my home state, but I am deeply ashamed of that fact today, thanks to the legal slap in the face of law-abiding gay men and women passed by its legislature.

Opponents of same sex marriage, why would you attack someone like Jay Fisette so personally? Because that is what your friends have done in the Old Dominion.

Well, just a little bit. Olympic champions Cuba will be able to compete at the World Baseball Classic.

Now if only the team would let Livan play...

Finally, someone says the obvious.

Time to get hammered. Oh, but drive safely.

Set up a transparent proxy to block the things? Squid+Squirm+Virilator, and a tiny bit of coding, to recognize every WMF file as a virus by its header till things blow over?

Edit Privoxy to permit binary regex matching?

Hook the appropriate parts of kiServiceTable, per the recent DRM flap, and simply prevent any file with a WMF header from being opened? Just the ones that look funny or all of them to take no chances?

Use the apparently preferred method of replacing the callback for the Windows Executive Object for file access, and have that block WMF reads?

EDIT: As just seen on Bugtraq -- Update Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall with two IDS rules. If it provides full coverage network-wise for the computer this is actually a pretty nice option for individual client systems; the software is downloadable and usable for 30-days, after which it removes some features and becomes free for personal use or (for a limited time) is available for $14.95. It's also in my kit for the occasional friends/family/friends of family visits when I gotta clean a computer up and leave something behind to try to stop it from happening again.

Five days ago I was forced to reauthenticate software I paid for, entered a CD-KEY into, and authenticated over a year ago because the addition of a virtual device exceeded the number of changes I was permitted to make to my computer.

So as far as computers go, this has certainly been a week to reflect on how fortunate it is that my primary platform is the second, better operating system on this computer: one that is broken neither by accident nor by design. And here's to hoping I didn't just curse my luck by saying that.

opportunistic encryption? The idea that hosts communicating with each other can encrypt data by default, and automatically, even if they don't previously know each other?

With the latest (admittedly unsurprising) revelations of illegal spying on US citizens by the NSA, I wonder if this shouldn't make a comeback, and perhaps be added to applications like mail, IM, etc. Per the above RFC it is being proposed for IKE, but this requires host-to-host IP connectivity. Is any progress being made on the same for generally used applications?