fnokd!

Did you know that November 14th is GIS Day?
I’ve experimented with PostGIS some, so I’m interested to see what’s going on. Here in Asheville, we apparently observe GIS Day on the 9th, with some stuff going on at AB-Tech.
There’s a talk on open-source GIS, so I’m curious to see if GeoTools or uDig are […]

If you Google around enough, with diligence and creativity in your search terms, plus a dash of willingness to check out page 12 of the results, you just might find some value provided by your government.
For example, I’ve been trying to spruce up the overgrown, dreary and downright treacherous shrubs, bushes and vines littering my […]

Does causing a bajillion machines to reboot constitute a DDoS attack?
The reason behind Skype’s downtime this week looks somewhat like this image of a malicious DDoS attack, no?
Attacker: Microsoft
Handlers: Windows Upgrade Servers
Zombies: Windows users!
Victim: Skype
Just sayin’.

My friends Trish and Pete have been thinking about home-ownership lately.
This made me ponder my own abode, and went surfing around. My little village here has nicely digitized quite a bit of their real-estate records, and made them easily searchable. I was able to come up with the original plat describing my street […]

Went out for a Venti(tm) dirty chai tea latte, and decided to scope out the Cingular/AT&T store that will be carrying iPhones tomorrow. Asheville is not a very large town, so we don’t expect many phones to come in.
But these two guys will definitely get one.

The lucky First Guy In Line is Greg Mayer […]

To be honest, I’m not that much of a Smashing Pumpkins fan, but I think it’s cool that they’re breaking out of the normal box, and doing a rather odd tour this year. They’ve picked 2 cities to have a “residency” at. One of them is my town, Asheville, North Carolina.
9 shows between […]

In a thread on TheServerSide, commentors are discussing how much trust you can put into an OpenID identity. Even the OpenID literature speaks of a server that returns true to all queries. The argument seems to be that since you don’t control the OpenID server, you can’t trust the identity returned, making it […]

Today, the Man In Brown showed up, and dropped off some boxes.
They were for my wife. Damn!
Then he came back! And brought a box for me. Inside the box there was some flavorless edible packing peanuts (they dissolved amazingly quickly in your mouth) protecting a Silent Paint Remover.
This thing rocks!
I live in an […]

Today Ning crossed the dad threshold. This is the point in time when someone like your dad might actually cross paths with the work you (or your friends) do.
Without you having to say “hey dad, look at this”.
I’ve personally never crossed this point with my own father. He has a rough idea of […]

This has been an interesting week in terms of networking. Actual TCP/IP networking, that is. First, there’s the normal jumping between the hotel and office networks. The hotel, nicely enough, was completely free. The office was also free, after entering what seemed to be an 480-character security key and avoiding the other […]