verbosity

Big Montana

Intralot has been awarded the contract to operate the Montana Lottery for the next seven years. Intralot USA also operates the Nebraska on-line games (Powerball, Pick 5, 2by2, Pick 3); Our Greek parent company Intralot S.A. runs gaming systems all over the world. I currently work for the Nebraska operation, but my unofficial roles (as I see them; they're unofficial after all) are Network Engineer and Systems Jack-Of-All-Trades for all our USA operations. As such, I'll be configuring the core networking for the Montana operation, and will be involved in the systems setup as well. Thus, I'm likely going to be spending a wee bit o' time up in big Montana; Specifically, the state capitol Helena. It's much smaller my current residence of Lincoln, which is rapidly becoming too small to bear. As such, I'm looking forward to some quality entertainment.

On the bright side, perhaps I'll get to meet the author of the Second Best Page in the Universe, though I get the impression he lives in Missoula, which is over 2 hours away from Helena (though Nothing is close to Anything in Montana).

For reference: The Best Page in the Universe

Bear Arms

The NRA has filed suit to block the unconsitutional siezing of firearms in New Orleans. Why did they wait until the 22nd to file suit though? The confiscations began as Katrina exited.

The New Orleans deputy police chief said "No one will be able to be armed. We are going to take all the weapons."

Not only has he completely overstepped his authority, pretending he can override the constitution, but he's doing far more harm than good. I've got a common saying for ya, Chief: When possessing a gun is made illegal, only criminals will have guns. Heard that one before? You obviously don't understand it. Have someone explain it to you.

Daily Wisdom - 26 Sep 2005

When Changing the port, the peripheral equipment could not shift to the new port, and run smoothly. Under this situation, please kindly unload the equipment and install again.

Kindly, mind you. Don't you be unloading without kindness.

Gallery Dos

My photograph gallery software has been upgraded to Gallery 2.0. This doesn't mean much for viewers of my albums, but it gives me greater flexibility and power in maintaining my collection. I'll be applying a new visual theme to the albums once I have a chance to review the options.

Mad Style

I've imposed a maximum width on my journal pages. If you have a wide display like me, many of my paragraphs previously stretched out to one line a piece. Not very readable. Fixed.

I also changed the template so that viewing an individual entry is much more pretty. I have yet to fix the comment entry view.

Also new is my "Bit" section in the upper-left. My plan is a hybrid built from stealing Andyrut's Random Thoughts and the lyric-mouseover at the bottom of Tycho's news posts. There's no archive of old "Bits" yet, as I only have one bit right now. For those curious, it's a "Yes" bit.

DIEB-THROAT

Oh how naive I was when I hoped that Ohio's 2004 votes for president would go to Kerry. I already knew that Diebold voting machines would be used, that Diebold is based in Ohio, and that the Diebold CEO wrote that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." I also knew about the US-CERT alert regarding a backdoor account in the Diebold voting software. I even wrote a piece about all the problems with the Diebold approach.

An anonymous Diebold insider has shed even more light on the likelihood of vote tampering. The piece is sensationalist, and one should always digest such information with a small grain of conspiracy-theory salt, but nonetheless there are very worrying things said by the insider.

Before this article, I was already convinced that votes everywhere were not counted with any reasonable level of accuracy, and I suggested that tampering was likely, but now I give you at least a 32.33% chance of tampering, repeating of course.

Stolen: magnet

To the person who stole my "Support Magnetic Ribbons" car magnet -

You are either:

1. Impressed by my magnet, but too cheap to buy your own at only $3.00 USD with no shipping fee.
   
2. Ignorant and devoid of humor.
   

Either way, your morals are severely lacking. Don't steal, mmkay?

Picasa

If you've read the comments on many of my photos, you've no doubt seen me complain that my Olympus C-2040 Zoom doesn't fare so well in low-light conditions. Focus is often hard to obtain (I'm too lazy to try and manually focus using a digital interface), and when I abstain from using the flash I often end up with poor color. Google's Picasa to the rescue. Not only is it a phenomenal program for digital photo management, but its image-editing functionality is extremely easy to use. "I'm feeling lucky", an automatic all-around adjustment, works surprisingly well. It wasn't sufficient to fix a few problem photos of mine, but a bit of experimenting with the color tempature slider and the neutral color picker made considerable improvement to these pictures:

Also impressive is the speed with which you can flip through photos. Blows the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer away, which is acceptably fast in the foward direction but a dog in reverse.

Overnight in Omaha

The only safe way to spend the night in Oma-hole: Chili and booze at a friend's house.

PAX 2005 Photos

Photos from the 2005 Penny-Arcade Expo (PAX) are up:

PAX 2005

As with my Philly / New York trip, the photo comments are a bare-bones narrative.

Klaatu Barada

While watching TRON a few weeks ago with some n00b who'd never even heard of it, a cubicle sign in the movie caught my eye.

A little research revealed that the phrase "Gort, Klaatu barada nikto", known by many due to its heavy use in Army of Darkness, is a common Sci-Fi in-joke originating from a phrase in the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Wireless mishaps

My Harley's security system appears to conflict with certain garage door opening systems. Perhaps I'm drawing the wrong conclusion, so let me lay out the facts:

1. Bike is parked in front of friend's house on street. Security system auto-arms after time delay expires. Wireless key fob is not used.
2. Carpool leaves house. Wireless garage door opener is used from mid-driveway to close garage door.
3. Carpool returns, wireless opener is used from street near where bike is parked to open garage door.
4. I attempt to disarm my bike's system. Pressing the button on my key fob results in no response from the bike. I try from various ranges and angles. Button was pressed many times from right next to the bike to inside the house. I disassemble the fob, clean and adjust the battery and contacts to no avail.
5. Carpool departs house to head to my place. I knew there was a manual override procedure, but I did not have the procedure or my passcode with me, despite them being on a convenient wallet-sized card that should have been in my pocket. BOYSCOUT_POINTS - 1
6. House garage opener does *not* work when attempting to close the door. Keypad on house is used to close door.
7. Opener again fails when returning to house. Keypad used.
8. I use the manual disarm on my bike, head home. Wireless fob still fails back when at the house.
9. I look up and execute the procedure to reassociate my fob with my bike. Fob now works perfectly.
10. Garage door opener still doesn't work. Reassociation probably necessary.

At #4, I suspected a dead battery in my key fob, even though it's only a year old. When the garage opener suddenly failed at #6, while possible that the battery had died in it too, the probability was rather low. #9 shows that the battery in my fob was fine.

My conclusion? The garage and bike systems conflict in some manner, and caused both to reject their respective remote units. A far shot, but I don't have any other theories at this point besides wild stuff like EMPs or solar flare CME's. It would not be surprising to find that both systems are of the same basic design, such as the common KEELOQ as shown in AN662. Even so, if my theory is right, it's still suprising and disappointing that the systems failed in the manner that they did. Unauthorized remotes should not be able to interfere with the operation of a valid remote: Denial of Service. Bad designers, no cookie.

I'll be repeating the "experiment" soon to try and confirm my theory. With manual override procedure in hand, of course.