total.pardo

best to fill your tank up tonight.

regardless of the outcome of today’s election, the price of gas will rise tomorrow – almost guaranteed.

or at least i think it will.

as it has after every election in recent years.

pitiful.

oh, and by the way – as of this writing, the DJIA was up 270 points.  interesting correlation.

bah – i see conspiracies in my sock drawer.

i suck.

i spelled it wrong for a reason – i don’t want the spiders to find it here or anywhere.

scr00gle allows you to search without being tracked and recorded by scraping g00gle’s search results.

use:  https://ssl.scroogle.org/

from their site:

When the Scroogle results come back from an SSL search, and you click on any of the links shown on that secure page, there is another advantage. SSL does not allow the browser to record the address where that secure page came from, and attach it to any outgoing links on that page. Normally all browsers do this, and it’s called the “referrer” address. But SSL blanks out the referrer, so that any site you click on from a Scroogle SSL page won’t even know that you arrived at their site from Scroogle. The referrer will be blank, and your log entry will look like any of the hundreds of bots that crawl the web all day and night with similar blank referrers.

i say it is 1/7th of the answer because there are several elements of privacy you can attempt to control while on the web:

1.  search history (use scr00gle)

2.  email  (only answer there is PGP, SLL enabled mail, and absolutely NO free email accounts)

3. instant messaging (gets harder when people won’t use encryption)

4.  browsing (use tor)

5.  bookmarks and stored history (keep your bookmarks local)

6.  social websites (not so good)

7.  disparate usernames

Scott McNealy of SUN Microsystems: “You have zero privacy now. Get over it!”  Or get around it.  if you want personalization, you are giving up privacy.  read nick carr’s book:  the big switch.  you will be appalled at what can be determined from the bread crumbs you leave on the web.

an uncultivated rant follows:

you would think a blog that purports to be the “synergy of all things civilized” would have had an author who was savvy enough to take up the mantle of privacy during its three+ year run.

you would think the guy who’s bread and butter is based on securing his rather large company’s network and data would have been more concerned about the rampant degradation of privacy rights and the rapid loss of all cultural gatekeeping.

you would think…

how does the world balance the wisdom of the crowd with the cult of the expert? how do we avoid becoming the next AOL user # 1172891?

i have spent a great deal of time learning from the text books about the different ways to keep a company network protected from you war time hero fools out there that would have at the data contained therein. even fractured a few rules to “learn” how you’d do it.

but never did i consider the threat that all this damn information out there poses.

go ahead, do a zabba search on yourself. take the shock. swallow hard - your info is out there. everywhere. everyone knows.

does ubiquitous access to information make us better or worse as a society? do you want, what alarmist andrew keen says, everything to be absolutely knowable? Or would you rather have Adam Greenfield’s notion of “Everyware” - tiny embedded computers in clothes, walls, and beer mugs?

i’m sorry, but a credo of Do No Evil no longer cuts it for me. how many times do we have to learn from our mistakes? time to cut the ties.

if i have learned anything about data mining and OLAP, its that these process and algorithms don’t play well in the wide swath.  why do you think google keeps offering free honeypots software to the masses?  altruism, it is not.  unadulterated data collection made fun and easy by your friends at google.  10 to the 100 project indeed! (fuck you, keen.  i will refer to and quote my amateur ass any damn well time i want)

its time to get under the proverbial radar and get flat. very flat and scattered. am i ringing the bells? no. but i see the wool now. yeah, this stream of consciousness piece is an admittance of dependence on the very thing that can hurt. research shows the internet and the use of hyperlinked documents to read (learn, meh.) new concepts through the fog of continuous partial attention is rewiring the unwitting brains of those of us who use (read: believed) the powers of the internet as a modern day oracle at delphi.

am i swayed by the logic nicholas carr - IT public enemy #1 - who claims IT doesn’t matter? yes and no. but i see where he and others much smarter than i could ever be are going - IT as a utility like water, gas, electricity - plug or connect to the “grid” and get your files, all neatly indexed by the “oracle at mountain view” for feeding to the hungry advertisers, or worse, a panicked uncle sam - shredding rights with impunity in the name of homeland security. what happens when “con”cast becomes a de facto agent of the us government (as some would argue, they already are in limine of such compromise) - not unlike actions taken by yahoo and at$t (dollar sign purposeful) to date in the war on terror.

so, i hear you thinking as you read my rant that ol’pardo must be up too late some nights looking for conspiracy whilst clutching his ragged copy of the standard orwellian horror tome. rather, you should do your own thinking. keen is right, 2+2 CAN be made to equal five. and we all need to be careful when the amateurs out there try to make it so. i harken back to the episode of ST:TNG Chain of Command, Part 2: THERE….ARE….FOUR….LIGHTS!

mind your data - before it minds you (nefariously or not - its time to hold the line.)

the attack on intellectualism is becoming too much to stomach.

fta @ http://www.bilerico.com/2008/10/the_war_on_intellectualism.php

I want them to lead. "Going with your gut" is not a viable option for this level of leadership. Quick sound bites or catch phrases don’t make you a good leader. I don’t care if you can hunt, were in the PTA, or wink at me- I want you to be educated about the issues facing our country.

Intellectualism is a quality we want in a leader. I would rather have someone who might be a bit dry and heavy on the facts than someone who is folksy and dead wrong any day.

But hey, what do I know? Maybe I’ll just stick to eating my elitist arugula salad and reading."

How far we have fallen as a country?

Now is not the time for folksy platitudes, pandering and rash stunts.

Now is the time for intellectual honesty and measured, thoughtful response. Neither Palin nor McCain possess these qualities.  Now is the time for the salad eaters to rise up and stab them with their plastic forks.

Seriously, are we so far gone that we can’t see through the crap to understand the truth of things?  A VP candidate that tells a commentator – I’ll get back to ya – when answering a direct question that should have had a factual response is just wrong. 

Maybe we could have her sell Air Force 2 on eBay?  Or perhaps she can lobby Congress to have John Mccain’s name changed to John Mccaverick.  (credit tikiniki)

if you are kevin mitnick – you should expect to have your bags checked – your laptops, lock picks, etc confiscated – even if you are traveling to do a “security conference” in one of the drug capitals of the world.  the DHS and ICE don’t care about the 4th Amendment – it doesn’t apply any longer in this day and age if you are a US citizen.  kevin probably should have expected this:

cnet

“They can detain you for four hours, inspect everything, and put you through the third degree for no reason. It’s really a police state,” Mitnick said. “I travel in foreign countries that have even more stringent rules, and I never have problems.”

To protect his privacy and that of his clients, Mitnick encrypts all the confidential data on his laptops, transmits it over the Internet for storage on servers in the U.S., and wipes it from the computer before returning from any international trips, just in case officials decide to search or seize his equipment. He also encrypts his hard drive. And now, he says he is going to keep a “clone” of his MacBook at home so he will have an exact duplicate of it if it is ever seized.

“I don’t harbor any ill feelings toward (customs), but I was really scared because of the circumstances that were happening in Bogota at the same time,” he says. “I feel lucky in a sense, and I feel violated in a sense.”

violated huh (pot, kettle, black). you should feel that way kevin.  as should we all.   I think back to the quote from West Wing with President Bartlet exclaiming:  “Did you know that two thousand years ago a Roman citizen could walk across the face of the known world free of the fear of molestation? He could walk across the Earth unharmed, cloaked only in the protection of the words civis Romanus — I am a Roman citizen. So great was the retribution of Rome, universally certain, should any harm befall even one of its citizens.”

Cives Romani doesn’t apply anymore.  We no longer walk the earth unmolested as a people – we encounter more issues from our own government than we do at times from those who wish to do us harm.  there is hope from a few Democrats:

cnet

The Homeland Security Department has declared its right to seize laptops at the U.S. border indefinitely, but legislation introduced Thursday is intended to curb that power.

U.S. Sens. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), and Rep. Adam Smith, (D-Wash.), introduced the Travelers Privacy Protection Act in response to the DHS policy allowing customs agents to detain a traveler’s laptop for an unspecified period of time to review its contents, even absent of individualized suspicion.

“Most Americans would be shocked to learn that upon their return to the U.S. from traveling abroad, the government could demand the password to their laptop, hold it for as long as it wants, pore over their documents, e-mails, and photographs, and examine which Web sites they visited–all without any suggestion of wrongdoing,” Feingold said. “Focusing our limited law enforcement resources on law-abiding Americans who present no basis for suspicion does not make us any safer and is a gross violation of privacy.”

The legislation would require DHS to form reasonable suspicion of illegal activity before searching electronic devices carried by U.S. residents. The DHS would also be required to provide probable cause and a warrant or court order to hold such a device for more than 24 hours. The bill also limits what information acquired through electronic searches the DHS can disclose, and it requires the department to report on its border searches to Congress.

The DHS refused to send a witness to a Senate hearing in June, chaired by Feingold, regarding searches of electronic devices, but it provided a written statement defending its policy. A ruling in April by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals also defended the agency’s right to conduct the searches without reasonable suspicion.

Similar bills, such as the Securing Our Borders and Our Data Act and the Border Security Search Accountability Act, have been introduced this year in the House.

there is a more in depth article about this at the washington post:  http://tinyurl.com/4qx83x

the aclu (obviously) supports this measure:  http://tinyurl.com/4shbbz

makes you wonder who runs this country and if every citizen is to be considered a threat.  the steps we need to take to protect our privacy are becoming insurmountable.  kevin’s example (and he is one of the smartest people out there in terms of circumventing such security) of transferring data across the web to a server in the US and returning his hard drives to virgin states is telling – telling of the ludicrousness of our age.  its almost like you have to think like a bad guy to survive.

i wrote my senators asking for their support.  my representative is in flux right now, Rob Andrews stepped down to run for the senate this year – i think his wife is the congresswoman who took his seat.

i am going to try rssfwd @ http://www.rssfwd.com/ to populate my posts into evernote.

i like both evernote and macjournal but i just can’t bring myself to pay for mJ. i think both programs have good and bad points.

if the feed automatically populates evernote via the mailing of my feed, it may work out better to use evernote over mJ.

let’s see what happens. it probably won’t work and i will have to settle for manual imports.

in ke9v’s latest masterful observation, jeff brings to light something the average voter may not have taken the time to notice.  his post (<—linked here) is repeated here in full from his site ke9v.net :

A little over a week ago, in the immediate aftermath of the Dow tanking some 500 points in a single day, John McCain said, “the fundamentals of our economy are sound”. Yesterday, the Senator decided things were so freaking bad that he needed to suspend his campaign, cancel his first debate with Obama, and rush back to Washington to save America.

Given that he hasn’t been in Washington to vote for any legislation since April, he may need the help of a GPS to find it.

At first I thought this was just a political stunt; a hack attempt to make McCain seem more presidential. It may have that effect with the deluded, but I think the real motive might be revealed here:

McCain supporter Sen. Lindsey Graham tells CNN the McCain campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there’s no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the VP debate, currently scheduled for next Thursday, October 2 in St. Louis.

So I suppose the thinking here is to put “country first” by bailing out of the first debate and rushing off to Washington to feign the saving of the nation, while at the same time, saving Sarah Palin from having to debate Joe Biden, which if you have seen either of her two televised interviews, might just help save the McCain campaign from looking any dumber than it already does.

That’s a lot of saving in one slippery as snot slick political move!

i am very glad someone else saw what i saw.  and in the order observed.  its huge.  and i guarantee it won’t be reported on in the way jeff has. what is mccain going to do that he has not already tried to do?  what can obama do?  nothing much.  the crooks that perpetrated this fraud will not hang for their crimes.  and you and i will be left holding the bag, again.

the sad part of all of this is the democrats could have used clinton to counter palin.  there is no comparison between palin and clinton in terms of ability.  biden is fine, but he won’t win you the south – he is no lbj. 

i think we are headed for another 4 years of continued downturn and bad tidings. 

my subject SHOULD be the title for google’s latest attempt at “do no evil”

fts:

http://www.project10tothe100.com/index.html

google’s altruistic claim:

In the midst of this, new studies are reinforcing the simple wisdom that beyond a certain very basic level of material wealth, the only thing that increases individual happiness over time is helping other people.

yeah.

when your coffers are 10^100 in USD, you can say things like this and make the average lemming think you are trying to do good.

best to call it Project 10^ZERO.

maybe the tagline should be this:

“our overpaid, overfed, over benefitted, game playing employees are fresh out of ideas. sergi and i thought, ‘gee, maybe we can use the long tail and crowd-source our work?’ heck, why not - we have been giving away all this average free shit for years now. let us let the fools who unwittingly give us their data and habits carry some of the load. BRILLIANT!”

Q: What do I get if my idea is chosen? A: You get good karma and the satisfaction of knowing that your idea might truly help a lot of people.

i see willy wonka in my mind’s eye admonishing Grandpa Joe - “you get *NOTHING*! You lose! Good day sir!”

ol’gramp’s response is how i feel about google’s attempt at altruism: “You’re a crook. You’re a cheat and a swindler! That’s what you are! ”

its all there, black and white…its just unmitigated gall.

am i becoming a cynical close minded fool?

in the midst of what is going on in the world today?

you betchya.

take some time out to read this article from RWW:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_google_spreading_itself_too.php

see what you think - do your own thinking.

be scared, very scared of the gop this election.

Palin bans reporters from meetings with leaders

By SARA KUGLER – 3 hours ago

NEW YORK (AP) — Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who has not held a press conference in nearly four weeks of campaigning, on Tuesday banned reporters from her first meetings with world leaders, allowing access only to photographers and a television crew.

CNN, which was providing the television coverage for news organizations, decided to pull its TV crew, effectively denying Palin the high visibility she had sought.

…

The campaign told the TV producer, print and wire reporters in the press pool that follows the Alaska governor that they would not be admitted with the photographers and camera crew taken in to photograph the meetings. At least two news organizations, including The Associated Press, objected and were told that the decision was not subject to discussion.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ijGq94pVTj9FGiR-c5EdA3iSm2owD93CGVI01

not subject to discussion.  that’s rich.

btw – ken burns isn’t a large fan either:

"He (McCain) selected someone who is so supremely unqualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency and he has turned the selection process into a high school popularity contest and an ‘American Idol’ competition," Burns said. He said that McCain made a "cynical" pick in what he said was the most important decision of his presidential candidacy.

high school popularity contest.  interesting.

what is the campaign afraid of?  generalized contrived spontaneous honesty?  can she be trusted to maintain the “message” or are they afraid she will just constantly call the reporters by their first names without substantively answering any of their questions?

we don’t need subterfuge.

we need change.

fta@

http://tiny.cc/4AiV1

The fundamental flaw of pretty much every password recovery feature I’ve found online is that what they consider “secret” information actually isn’t thanks to social networking, blogs and even Wikipedia. Yahoo! Mail password recovery relies on asking you your date of birth, zip code and country of residence as a proof of identity. Considering that this is the kind of information that is on the average Facebook profile or MySpace page, it seems ludicrous that this is all that stops someone from stealing your identity online.

the author posits:

Web developers need start considering whether it isn’t time to put password recovery features based on asking personal questions to pasture.

while i agree with this level of genius in principle, wouldn’t it be simpler if people were more socially aware while online?  any self respecting system/network admin knows the crumbs of information left online are completely and fully available to everyone with enough understanding and time to spend finding and fitting them together will have some measure of success cracking human friendly systems to retrieve passwords.

i love the credit card companies with their “mother’s maiden name” for an account password.  that’s rich.  as if i would ever give the real name as the code word.  i have a word assigned that no one can guess via social engineering.  “favorite pet” is another nugget of ridiculousness that is easy to avoid.  yes, people blog about pets, yes it is “easy” to figure out.  but you don’t have to use the exact word/name for the answer.  you could make up a name for use in that field – the name foils any attempt to guess it.

non obvious relationship awareness is the key to the hacker’s success – be it through algorithms that cull over electronic data or information developed through social engineering.

the key to thwarting NORA and social engineering is to go off the grid with your password choices.  randomness.  complete nonsense. nothing that can be derived from my past, present – nothing that can be guessed – including my past use of a random repeating pattern of nonsense.

if you are able to guess my passwords, the shame is not on the developers.  the shame is on me.

a further delineation of:

http://www.totalpardo.net/2008/01/30/convergence-unified-tagging-vs-categories/

i think there may be value in adding further categorization to posts under the cat/tag: writing.

i have evaluated the growth in volume of my blog and have noted that it passed the 300 post mark this year.  even if i back out the cat/tag “word.log” (which, if you haven’t noticed, i don’t publish the posts for that cat/tag on the front page - that would just show how much of a verbal neanderthal i truly am) there is still a great deal of writing (not necessarily that which is posted under the “writing” cat/tag) to be read, indexed, searched, etc.

and, as i move forward, there will be more.  hopefully, much.

take this very post:  its writing, but its not what i would categorize on this blog under the “writing” cat/tag. i would (will, actually) post this under “life.stream” (consider: aggregate) and “ideas.”  whilst i wrote this, i don’t consider it as “writing” for the purposes of convergence tagging.

now, generally, most of the crap on this site is just that - perhaps occasionally evocative, often wrong, always imitated (for examples of what NOT to write) but, that which i would write for writing’s sake (see below), needs further mapping out (at least, for me).

what prompted this review was the start of my archiving process.  while my writing will not win any prizes, keep you attention past the title (most times), or even pay me - it is important to me to see the volume and, perhaps, progress(ion) of the art skill talent attempts. if not for anything but to remind me when i’m 50 what i did late nights when i was 30.

i started to notice things that were tagged as writing were really not searchable as much as i would have liked - further segregation was (is) needed.

here is what i came up with in terms of sub categorization for writing:

poetry:  obvious.

short story:  also, obvious.

practice:  here, fragments - ferment fodder | germinate ideas

book:  items from chapters or sections of manuscript length works

altdis: alternate discourse, writing difference; to wit:

“…an opportunity to examine issues, studying about and experimenting with mixed discourse forms (of writing). Writing difference is a pun: when the writing is an adjective, the title indicates the study of divergent modes that writing can take, the difference in writing.  When writing is a verb, the title indicates the practice of creating divergent modes, writing those differences…examining perspectives on language from sociolinguistic, literacy, feminist and composition studies, and writing in hybrid, multigenre or mixed-genre discursive styles.”  (Maxson)

i think this will provide enough further classification to index the blog and make finding things easier.

i decided i have to take more notes.

i decided i need less static.

ARO (amateur radio operators) call it QRN (troubled by static)

i just do.

went back over the “ideas” i had in a chap book called “34 observations” - and from the drain of forgotten epiphanies. the same drain that captures the deaths of great ideas that burst forth in hot, wet flashes of intuition and anger - ideas lost like sentries on the picket line guarding against the next attack from continuous partial attention.

i almost lost a great idea for a piece. Henri Cartier-Bresson would not have had his decisive moment. no sir.

if i lose 2-4 great ideas a week - could it be the “greats” lose several score more in the same period? probably.

jean shepherd got on that radio almost every night in the fifties and sixties - invariably without notes. did he pull the stories out of his bottom? or was he just that good. the latter evokes. the dude abides.

perhaps pardo’s mind has become like a compost pile? i certainly put almost every insignificant grass clipping of information i find in there. doyle’s holmes would most likely demand the immediate burning of my attic mind indeed. to wit:

My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth traveled around the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

‘You appear to be astonished,’ he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. ‘Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.’

i decided its not so good to have shallow knowledge, the mile wide, one inch deep retention basin absorbing the wiki blurbs, rss snippets, and other informational rat holes - only to dry up in after the deluge passes.

drinking from the content fire hose is getting cumbersome.

and keeping notes from it doubly so.

Oil rises as Gustav threatens Gulf of Mexico

<sarcasm on>(of course it would, why wouldn’t it?)</sarcasm off>

fta @ Oil rises as Gustav threatens Gulf of Mexico facilities - Aug. 27, 2008.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Oil prices ticked higher on Wednesday as Tropical Storm Gustav approached the Gulf of Mexico and the government reported a decline in crude and gasoline supplies.

so, the storage and distribution systems are that vulnerable that speculators need to drive up the price again.  and AUTOMAGICALLY there is an increase at the pump - despite the fact that the gas in the ground, the gas in the supply chain is already bought and paid for!

keep electing the ass clowns.  keep driving the gas guzzlers.

this could actually be the next “big” thing.

scot asked me a few weeks ago about bringing gamers into the AR fold via gaming and their interests…perhaps this social interaction method is better even than outreach to gamers.

these social sites hit the younger generation where they live. scot and company can be on in the background while you are doing other things. its perfect.

i offered any assistance i could give.

HamRadio2.0 Live Beta Broadcast “Putting The Ham In Ham Radio”

It is time for HamRadio2.0 and you are invited to join our discussion on Ustream Live, Interactive Broadcasting. The above screenshot is channel HamRadio2.0 featuring text, audio, and video capabilities for each participant. Are you interested? Then prepare your web cam and audio. You might be chosen to co-host HamRadio2.0 with me. Fun!
The above screenshot is the control panel utilized by the broadcaster. I can create polls, invite a co-host or two, turn on your microphone, and few other goodies. What is really, really important is registration prior to joining my live broadcast. After registration, type HamRadio2.0, into the search bar. Or follow us on Twitter and/or FriendFeed for live updates. Join us as we have fun this Sunday at 11 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time or 1800 Universal Time Coordinated. 73.

[From KA3DRR: HamRadio2.0 Live Beta Broadcast "Putting The Ham In Ham Radio"]

Tempus fugit is a Latin expression meaning “time flees”, more commonly translated as “time flies”. It is frequently used as an inscription on clocks. The expression was first used in the verse Georgica written by Roman poet Virgil: Sed fugit interea fugit irreparabile tempus, which means, “But it flees in the meantime: irretrievable time flees”.

The meaning is sometimes used less colloquially as: “Meanwhile, the irreplaceable time escapes”, expressing concern that one’s limited time is being consumed by something which may have little intrinsic substance or importance at that moment.

little intrinsic substance.

isn’t that EVERYTHING one does? even emerson’s transcendental sentiments in his lofty “to have succeeded” quote:

…whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived…

do the few tasks above have intrinsic substance?  or does win(ning) the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children matter most?  i believe most things one does in his day lack substance.  i believe selfishness has made the situation worse.  said as i turn on the 360 for another few hours wasted playing COD4.

time flies - escapes incessanty forward - and our perception of its passing alters as we age as well.  a lazy sunday spend blogging or watching football seems to contain less time than it did when i was younger.  ke9v - jeff davis - wrote a poignant story which exemplifies tempus fugit more clearly.  linked here, and other places, as well as available in book form from amazon, 1000 marbles says it all.

i have already bought my marbles.

the clear container i placed them in is marked:  carpem fugit tempus

seize fleeting time.

you don’t have to be a smart roman philosopher (or a war time hero fool) to get it.