My Quiet Life

Boom.

This shows what's left of the Nashville Thermal Transfer plant, which is (was) right across the street from my old apartment. They detonated the big smokestack this morning. This is what it looked like before the demolition.

The plant was built in 1973 as part of Nashville's District Energy System, to provide heat for the downtown area by burning more than 1,000 tons of trash a day.

I had been told as a kid that it was a geothermal plant, a conviction I never questioned until recently. It was rather disappointing to find out it just burns garbage, and ineffeciently at that. I don't feel as bad as my friend Daniel, though, who told me he always thought it was a Colgate toothpaste factory.

Looks like Toyota is dropping the Celica as well as the MR2. I could care less about the Celica, the death of which was only prolonged by a hideous re-design. The MR2 was actually a pretty slick little car, though.

Home again, home again, jiggety jig.

Well, Knoxville is much as I remembered it -- quieter and cooler than Nashville. We went up for a day to help Nick move -- his wife just got into Vandy law school, so bye-bye UT.

I was sad to see that Kyoto Express on Cumberland is now just a regular ol' japanese place. Their "chicken bowl" got me through many a tight budgeted week.

I was totally dissed by the Rocky Top Brigade knoxville blogosphere, but we had very little free time, so it's just as well.. We did manage to sneak out to Chili's for dinner and some drinks, where we evidently sat next to Lee Greenwood. (Who would have thought we'd have to go to Knoxville from Nashville to see Lee Greenwood?) When informed of this by our waiter, I mentioned how my dad used to play with him, and recounted the winner of this year's You Are So Nashville IF... in the scene, which was "You are so Nashville if you need a war to sell records.". Good times.

There's an entire blog devoted to spyware-removing applications for Windows, and they maintain a pretty awesome list of rogue spy-ware -- software that claims to be spyware-removal but is in fact spyware. Be sure to check this list before downloading any cool new spyware application!

An article on zdnet that caught my eye focuses on Aventail's new small-biz product -- a less expensive version of its "SSL VPN" product:

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Via Brad "no link" Delong, a cute little article about Paul Krugman in the Arts & Weekend section of the Financial Times.

Some data about the mail that hit my personal mailserver since mid-June:

That's right, 63% of the mail that hits my MTA is rejected straight away because it was either sent from an invalid domain or the sender's IP was in a blacklist. Pretty impressive. Even after that, I still get several hundred pieces of spam a day that Spamassassin catches.

An interesting history lesson from Nathan Newman, with some good comments as well.

A cool view of these storms that blew through last night. The power went out while I was peeing, half-asleep, which I can assure you is a very bad time for everything to go black. With a surge of adrenalin like that, you never go back sleep.

Also, I find the local news coverage of bad weather hilarious. It's funny how the same elements of viewership-retention-by-fear even play into delivering the weather:
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"We must also work to change a number of customer perceptions, including the views that older versions of Office and Windows are good enough, and that Microsoft is not sufficiently focused on security."
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, addressing employees on the urgent need to deceive customers more aggressively, News.com, 6 July 2004

This is an interesting quote. Odd as it may sound coming from an inveterate Microsoft-hater, I don't blame Microsoft entirely for their security problems. They are walking a remarkably fine line between making a product so usable that the dumbest of the dumb can use it, while maintaining some semblance of security as the #1 most targetted operating system in the world. It's not a task I envy. Now, some programmers better than I (pretty much anyone) that are up on security might be able to make a case specifically for what Microsoft is doing wrong. All I know is that if the forces of idiocy and malice currently focused on Windows were ever to be unleashed on the UNIX world, I am not convinced it would fare much better -- at first, at least.

Regarding the quote specifically: I think the answer to this is remarkably obvious. I, and many others I am sure, are disinclined to ever run the latest version of Windows because of its hardware requirements. WinXP is a bloated pig compared to Windows 2000. The number of user-perceivable changes are small, even if the security has been completely overhauled. If there's no perceptible reason to upgrade, and it involves buying 512M of RAM and an upgraded processor, many people just won't do it.

There has never been a security problem in all of my dealings with UNIX that involved changing the bulk of my operating system entirely, much less upgrading my physical computer, to fix.

A while back there was a rumbling about the specs for the new release of Longhorn:

Microsoft is expected to recommend that the "average" Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.

Now, I have since heard that this was bogus, and perhaps that these were just for a "target" system. Let's hope, for Microsoft's sake, that it was. Otherwise, they are going to have a whole lot of people opting to stick with Windows 2000 or XP.