Ding, dong! The witch is dead! Tom DeLay resigns from Congress

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/us/us_congress

DeLay Announces Resignation From House
AP - 1 hour, 57 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Succumbing to scandal, former Majority Leader Tom DeLay said Tuesday he will resign from Congress in the face of a tough re-election race, closing out a career that blended unflinching conservatism with a bare-knuckled political style. "I have no fear whatsoever about any investigation into me or my personal or professional activities," DeLay said in a statement to constituents. At the same time, he said, "I refuse to allow liberal Democrats an opportunity to steal this seat with a negative, personal campaign."

Microsoft admits that it's almost impossible to recover a severely infected machine

DUH!

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1945808,00.asp

"When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit," Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft, said in a presentation at the InfoSec World conference here."


We use a program at the university called Deep Freeze. It locks the computer so that every time the computer is rebooted, it is effectively instantly wiped out and reloaded. Virus hits you? Reboot. Malware making popups? Reboot. All gone, all clean.

The down side is that you can't do system updates without unfreezing your machine, I spent probably five hours over spring break updating computer labs: unfreeze machine, apply updates, refreeze. We also use a rather nifty feature in the computer lab: all of the machines turn themselves off at 10:30pm.

Their more advanced versions offer a lot more features. Basically, when you run this, your C: is read-only. Anything written to it goes away. So you have to be absolutely sure that your data is written to another drive or to a network area.

New Camera Case!

Woot!

It has: one 35mm Canon Eos Elan 7e body, one Canon Eos Digital Rebel body, a 35-105 zoom, a 28-300 zoom, and the Digital Rebel's 18-55 zoom, all lenses have skylight filters. A Minolta IVf flash meter, a sync cable for a Speedotron (studio flash) power pack, a circular polarizing filter, a skylight filter (for use with Vasoline to produce soft focus), some cleaning supplies, several rolls of professional portrait film, and a roll of painter's tape (easy to remove, doesn't leave residue).

The case is actually a tool case that I got at Lowe's Home Improvement for $25!

It's great for having everything organized and together to take for a shoot. The case came with a tool insert for the lid that was discarded, the dividers as shown in the picture, and a big block of foam that has these half inch rectangles that you can pull out to make custom fits for whatever. I decided to use the inserts and put the foam in the top of the case (mainly because I'm lazy and didn't want to bother, plus, this way I can rearrange it without having wasted a block of foam). The foam thickness overlaps the lid edge by a good half inch and does a nice job of holding down all the gear inside. I wouldn't use it as a shipping container, but I think it's quite nice the way it is. I'd like to get a strip of half inch foam to put under the lower camera body to give it a little more vibration resistance, I'll probably be doing some modification on it later.

It doesn't hold all of my gear, but it certainly holds a lot and most of what I usually shoot with.

Wal-Mart Hit by 'Brokeback' Protest

Now, I have little love for Walmart, but none for intolerant anti-gay jerks. From IMDB news:

Wal-Mart has turned aside a massive letter-writing campaign by the American Family Association urging the retailer to refuse to stock Brokeback Mountain, being distributed by Universal Home Entertainment. The group, which has successfully campaigned against what it considers to be broadcast indecency launched the campaign last week after ads for the film began being displayed prominently in the retailer's 3,900 stores. In an interview with today's (Tuesday) Los Angeles Times, the AFA's Randy Sharp, accused Wal-Mart of helping to push the "gay agenda" by "trying to help normalize homosexuality in society." He added, "But how many copies are they going to have to sell to [recoup] the losses of customers who they've offended and will no longer shop at Wal-Mart?" But a Wal-Mart spokeswoman replied, "The fact that we are offering the movie is not an endorsement of the content of the movie or any specific belief. ...We simply offer the latest titles that consumers want."

The Deputy Press Secretary for Homeland Security arrested for attempting to seduce a minor!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060405/ap_on_re_us/press_secretary_arrested

Sometimes them 14 year old girls just ain't 14, and sometimes they ain't girls!