For those of you who liked "A Mighty Wind", or "Best of Show", or "Spinal Tap"...

Hopefully later this year, Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy have another mockumentary coming out called For Your Consideration, it's listed as being in post-production, so we'll just have to see when it gets distributed.

I'm looking forward to it, sounds like fun!

GAH! INTERNET WITHDRAWAL!

Apparently a backhoe ate a cable and we were without phone or internet connection for a good four or five hours! It wasn't easy getting through the afternoon without checking my LJ flist every 20 minutes.

But I survived, I got most of my digital voice recorder transcribed and lots of game design notes transcribed. Also got the trash taken out and most of the dishes washed, but that was to be done anyway.

Spectral analysis of your blog?

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What a frickin' insulting commercial!

Most of the time when I'm watching tv, the sound is always muted when commercials are on. Recently I've been seeing part of an Intel commercial that looked pretty high tech, slick and smooth. I thought there was something about it that sucked: you see all these people in bunny suits in a clean room and they're all moving in slow motion like they're in zero-gravity. Pretty silly.

Tonight I'm watching Top Gear on Discovery Channel. (cool show, a British car show that does a lot of weird things like take 60-80 year old grandmothers and teaching them to do donuts in a Honda 2000 Spyder or driving a Land Rover up the tallest mountain in Scotland) For reasons unknown, I didn't mute the sound and caught all of said commercial. It had such a wonderful line about saving their wonderful chips from "dull little boxes doing dull little jobs." It goes on to say that now the world is a beautiful place because our wonderful chips are now in Macs.

Up yours, Intel!

I've been using your chips for about 20 years now, doing the dull job of making a living doing database programming and helping other people do their jobs, earn a living, and keep their employers in business. I've known people doing film editing, publication, photo editing, etc. I create games, I write stories, I do any number of things that are far from dull. And what does my wife do on her spiffy Mac? Reads fanfic. Orders books from Amazon. Runs the control software for the telescope. EXCITEMENT!

YOU GET OUT OF IT WHAT YOU PUT IN TO IT.

The difference between the Mac and the Microsoft systems is in the operating system. Largely speaking, anything you can do on one you can do on the other. Maybe not in identical fashion or with the same software, but you can basically accomplish the same tasks between the two. Each has advantages, each has weaknesses.

A thing that I find very funny is that Apple was all hot that their new PCs would use Intel chips allegedly because IBM wasn't advancing the state of the art with the PowerPC chips, and were adamant in saying that you couldn't run Windows on an Intel Mac. WRONG. Less than a month after the development kits came out, people were running XP Pro on Intel Macs. And I'm sure the production machines will get hacked in the same way and people will be dual-booting them. And now people are saying that Apple made a mistake and other chips (i.e. PowerPC and AMD) may be outperforming the Intels.

An easy way to hide secret messages

Consider the following email:

Dear Business person ; This letter was specially selected to be sent to you . If you no longer wish to receive our publications simply reply with a Subject: of "REMOVE" and you will immediately be removed from our club ! This mail is being sent in compliance with Senate bill 1916 ; Title 9 , Section 303 ! This is not multi-level marketing . Why work for somebody else when you can become rich inside 55 days ! Have you ever noticed people will do almost anything to avoid mailing their bills & the baby boomers are more demanding than their parents . Well, now is your chance to capitalize on this . WE will help YOU sell more & use credit cards on your website . You can begin at absolutely no cost to you ! But don't believe us . Ms Jones of New Mexico tried us and says "I've been poor and I've been rich - rich is better" ! We are licensed to operate in all states ! So make yourself rich now by ordering immediately . Sign up a friend and your friend will be rich too ! Thanks ! Dear Salaryman ; Your email address has been submitted to us indicating your interest in our newsletter ! If you are not interested in our publications and wish to be removed from our lists, simply do NOT respond and ignore this mail ! This mail is being sent in compliance with Senate bill 1916 ; Title 6 ; Section 302 ! THIS IS NOT MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING ! Why work for somebody else when you can become rich as few as 43 MONTHS . Have you ever noticed how long the line-ups are at bank machines & people will do almost anything to avoid mailing their bills ! Well, now is your chance to capitalize on this . WE will help YOU process your orders within seconds plus deliver goods right to the customer's doorstep . You can begin at absolutely no cost to you . But don't believe us . Ms Jones who resides in Rhode Island tried us and says "Now I'm rich many more things are possible" ! This offer is 100% legal . For the sake of your family order now . Sign up a friend and your friend will be rich too . Best regards ! Dear Internet user ; Your email address has been submitted to us indicating your interest in our letter ! If you are not interested in our publications and wish to be removed from our lists, simply do NOT respond and ignore this mail ! This mail is being sent in compliance with Senate bill 1619 , Title 9 ; Section 308 ! This is different than anything else you've seen ! Why work for somebody else when you can become rich inside 85 days . Have you ever noticed people are much more likely to BUY with a credit card than cash and most everyone has a cellphone . Well, now is your chance to capitalize on this . We will help you sell more & SELL MORE ! You are guaranteed to succeed because we take all the risk . But don't believe us . Mrs Simpson of Delaware tried us and says "My only problem now is where to park all my cars" ! This offer is 100% legal . We implore you - act now ! Sign up a friend and you get half off ! God Bless !

Now, if you copy that text and select the Decode function at Spam Mimic, you'll see that it contains the message "we blow up the zeppelin at midnight".

This is a process called Steganography, or hiding one message in another.

So how effective is wiretapping the entire US when you can do stuff like this? Set up a process with "an associate" that he knows emails from disposable address following a certain naming convention are from you, and you're in business. It's really easy to forge email addresses off of insecure mail relay agents, when I was at the PD we sent one from santa@northpole.com.

"It's 18 years since Chernobyl, and we still don't have any superheroes!"

Thanks to Jimmy Carr, the host of Comedy Central's Distraction.