Safe Internet Day

I find few concepts as boring as "Safe Internet Day." Except maybe "Is Open Source as Secure as Closed Source?" I mean good grief. If it weren't for my incredibly uncomfortable shoes digging trenches into my Achilles tendon, I would have fallen asleep just thinking about writing the above sentence.

How about a pretty chart and a map with like scans and stuff on it?

Still pretty boring.

To hold off the stultification, I've decided to rename the blog. Also, there are other blogs out there about being alone, or cheese, or being alone with cheese, that I feel would dilute my burgeoning brand. And maybe not everyone gets the Omar reference.

So the new name will be:

"Another Set of Teeth" - from "Teeth" by the Mekons

What, no, not another set of teeth
each crisis bites, but not so deep.
What, no, not another set of teeth
And through the shadows we always creep.

I think "through the shadows we always creep" is part of the CISSP Code of Ethics, but I'd have to look it up.

Grackles in a Pancake Mine!

This morning, city officials decided to shut down a significant portion
of Austin's central business district due to the discovery of a covey of
dead birds.

Meanwhile, Gotham panics when confronted with a strange pancake smell.

I'm not going to second guess the response to the pile of avian rats on
Congress Ave. Nor will I try to determine which eldritch spell summoned
from the Permian Basin was used to extinguish these fowl lives.

I will however, try to figure out under what circumstances a bunch of
dead birds would require the closing of a central business district.
What sort of risk assessment process went on here?

1. PANDEMIC! O.k., the birds may have had a virulent version of avian
cedar fever. Some of the carcasses have been sent to our Aggie brethren
to be tested for bird flu. We'll get the results in a week or so. Then
we will close Congress Ave. again? If the folks in the hazmat outfits
scooped up the carcasses, pureed them, placed them in 3 oz bottles and placed them in one quart zip top bags, what is the risk?

2. NERVE GAS ATTACK! Then these truly were the grackles in the
coalmine, who gave their lives for us. Only the bad guys released the
gas at 3:00 am on a Monday morning. He should at least wait until the
Lege is in session, so as to terminate some Bees as well as birds.

3. A DISTURBING MESSAGE IS BEING SENT! - Homeland Security necromancers
find an ancient passage in the code of federal regulations that speaks
ominously of the scents of phantom flapjacks aligning with the mass
suicide of capital city trash birds. Maple Alert!

4. JUST ANOTHER GRACKLE MUNDY - My just-don't-have-to-work day.

5. YUPPIE TERROR - Rich fella or fellette from out-of-state, encountering the foul stench of grackle fecal splatter, sets out a Williams-Sonoma bowl of hand-tooled Vermont pigeon poison. Problem solved. (A real Austinite, or any grad of University of Texas would use a shotgun, just like the pros.)

So what did we learn? I'll have to think on that some more.

photo courtesy of Ikayama