Also the quote of the day:
“…I had always believed that if somebody who worked with me went home feeling like a jerk for giving their time and their genuine effort, then it was me who had failed them—and in a very personal, fundamental way.”
—Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
Question for you leaders out there: how do your people go home at the end of the day?
“…for me, as a New Yorker, however quaint the concept, homeland security is still about keeping suicidal mass murderers from flying planes into our fucking buildings.”
—Anthony Bourdain, from Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
Edwin Newman, legendary NBC newscaster.
91 years is a good run, but this still saddens me. When I was a young man, Strictly Speaking
The world is worse for his loss.
(Edited to add: NYT obit.)
It has been a long time since we’ve made it into Murder by the Book, and we cannot say we had the honor of knowing David Thompson at all. But we did want to note, with sadness, his passing. Busted Flush Press has published some pretty spiffy stuff (A Fifth of Bruen, for example).
Bill Crider was the first person to tip us off, and we suggest going over to his blog.
(Edited to add: HouChron obit.)
I missed this story on Friday: thanks to Roberta X for the link.
I’d seen the link on Instapundit about Amazon Mom (which, as far as I can tell, is Amazon Prime for parents; moms, dads, and other caregivers, in spite of the name) but not being a mom, it wasn’t relevant to my interests. (I did mean to send out a couple of emails about it, however, but got bogged down in illness.)
I just found out we now have Amazon Student as well. You know, for kids college students. Like me. I wish this had been available a few weeks ago…
As noted previously, I finally resolved the phone issue. (And AT&T can still die in a fire.)
The number one question I’ve been getting (replacing “Where did you get that shirt?” at the top of the charts) is: “How do you like your new phone?”
Answer: I like it just fine, but…below are some preliminary thoughts on Android (at least, as implemented on the EVO 4G; I do realize that some of these may be issues with the built-in apps, rather than the Android OS itself):
. This makes me mildly cranky.Again, I generally like the phone; most of these are just minor quibbles that I can probably solve one way or another.
I’ve been trying to find a way into this for the past couple of days now, which is why I’m a little behind.
Paul Conrad, former cartoonist for the LAT.
Robert Schimmel, stand-up comic.
Larry Ashmead, prominent book editor. Ashmead edited books by a lot of people I like, including some well-known mystery writers.
Joe Domenici, local Austin thriller writer (Bringing Back the Dead
Lawrence and Bill Crider both have posts up at their sites about Joe. I’m not going to pretend I knew Joe real well; both Mike the Musicologist and Lawrence knew him better than I did. I basically just saw Joe every year at Armadillocon, and the occasional convention in between. But he was always happy to see me, and I was glad to see him around. When Bringing Back the Dead came out, I thought it was a pretty spiffy book, and I’m glad I had a chance to tell Joe that. I don’t know why he seemed stunned by that; after all, the truth is the truth. You can’t have opinions about the truth.
Mike and I both got email from Joe quite a while back asking for permission to Tuckerize us in the next book. I’m not sure what Mike’s response was; mine was basically, “F- yeah!”. I was enormously pleased and honored that Joe would do something like that. Joe emailed us both back in early May to let us know the next book, The Death Factory, was tentatively scheduled for “Sping/Summer 2011”. I’m hoping it comes out and doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. Joe deserves better than that.
Obit watch: Laurent Fignon, two-time winner of the Tour de France, and the man who lost the Tour to Greg LeMond by eight seconds in 1989.
Is it just me, or do Tour winners tend to die relatively young? (Yes, I read the obit. Yes, I’m aware Fignon blames his drug use. I’m trying to avoid painting all the Tour winners with the same broad brush.)
Kim Severson profiles Roger Ebert, rice cooker chef.
I wanted to blog this yesterday, but didn’t get a chance: the Barnes and Noble across from Lincoln Center is closing. People are sad, though it sounds like many of them were getting their books elsewhere. Remember when people were indignant that Barnes and Noble and Borders were destroying the little bookstores?
Patrick over at Popehat links to a NYT article I noted late last week, but didn’t have time to read until yesterday.
Guy Deutscher’s article is basically (as I see it) a call for reconsideration of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that our language determines how we think. I encountered Sapir-Whorf for the first time many, many years ago, in the pages of the late lamented Dr. Dobb’s Journal, and it blew me away at the time. I figured, “Well, if language influences how we think, then I need to learn FORTH. And C. And LISP. And…” Later on, of course, I read the various arguments against Sapir-Whorf, and don’t completely buy into the strong version of it any more, but I still retain some affection for Sapir-Whorf.
The Deutscher article is an excerpt from his (forthcoming? It looks like it comes out today) book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
In other notes, sorry about the blogging slowdown; I spent the weekend at ArmadilloCon, and am now somewhat tanned, rested, and relaxed. I spent some time yesterday bumming around various Half-Price Books in a futile search for A Short History of the French Revolution
, which looks like a lot of fun. I read her chapter on The Great Kosher Duck Scandal last night.
. I haven’t been disappointed in a Standage book
yet.
. I blame Calvin Trillin for this.
. I admired Bill Mauldin greatly (the HouChron used to run his editorial cartoons, and they were among the few I agreed with in that paper) but I wasn’t even aware this book existed until I saw it on the Austin Books sale table. By the way, for those of you in Austin, Austin Books has a big sale coming up this weekend.Interestingly, today is both:
The second link is by way of FARK. I was not aware until fairly recently that Kittinger not only held the record for highest parachute jump, he was also shot down over Vietnam and spent 11 months as a prisoner of war.
Ordinarily, I would suggest that someone needs to write a biography of Colonel Kittinger (he was a captain at the time of the jump, but retired from the Air Force as a colonel). But wait! Somebody has
The Seattle Mariners (43-70) fired Don Wakamatsu, their manager, yesterday. As the Seattle paper notes, this took place right before the Mariners’ celebration of Japanese heritage day, and Wakamatu’s firing was just the latest in a long string of odd incidents this year.
Missed this on Sunday, but the Pirates fired their pitching coach and bench coach.
And the city of Maywood (remember Maywood?) is considering firing the city of Bell, due to the ongoing salary scandal in Bell.
Not exactly a firing, but I’m going to throw this in anyway: LA County Sheriff Lee Baca is refusing to release records involving the death of Ruben Salazar. Salazar was a television journalist covering an anti-Vietnam war rally in East LA on August 29, 1970; he was killed when a sheriff’s deputy fired a tear-gas grenade into a bar and hit Salazar in the head.
The LAT doesn’t mention this aspect of Salazar’s life, but I will. I’ve been interested in Salazar ever since I read The Great Shark Hunt
Edited to add: Whoops, I was mistaken. I had Salazar confused with Oscar Zeta Acosta. That’s what I get for relying on my memory while I was at work, and not waiting until I got home to check my sources. HST did write about Salazar in The Great Shark Hunt, though.
I covered a lot of stuff in my previous travel report, so this will mostly just be updates.
and am almost finished with Cisco Routers for the Desperate 2nd Edition
(also recommended). No Starch Press rocks. And the coupon code “DEFCON18” will get you a 30% discount. And they’re running a half-price sale on all e-books.My thanks to, in no particular order, the DEFCON 18 staff and presenters, No Starch Press, UNIX Surplus, SEREPick, Lotus of Siam, Shabu-Shabu Paradise, Sarah at the iBar in the Rio, and the unknown belly dancer at Marrakech.
Special thanks to my high-speed, low-drag travel companions in the primary, Mike the Musicologist and Andrew “Porous concrete? What were they thinking?” Wimsatt.
Saturday was kind of a rough day at DEFCON 18. But then, Saturday is always a rough day at DEFCON.
I don’t feel it’d be fair to review or summarize the “Extreme-range RFID Tracking” panel; I came in about 20 minutes late. (We lingered a bit over a very good breakfast at Blueberry Hill.) What I was able to gather is that Padget’s set a new record for long distance RFID reading, and that upping the radio power works for increasing RFID reading range up to a point. (Edited to add 8/10/2010: added link to Black Hat 2010 version of paper. Here’s a link to Paget’s blog entry about the session.)
I was not able to get into “Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines Redux” due to extreme overcrowding. (Edited to add 8/9/2010: The Black Hat website has what purports to be MP4 video of Jack’s version of the presentation at Black Hat 2010. I have not sat down and watched it yet.)
I did attend the “This is not the droid you’re looking for…” panel, mostly because I was camping out for the next talk. This panel turned out to be more interesting than I expected; the presenters demonstrated a proof-of-concept rootkit for Android phones that allows you to do all sorts of fun stuff; grab contact information, grab SMS messages, grab location information (all three of these are stored in SQLite databases on the Android), and even make phone calls from the phone. The presenters haven’t weaponized the attack yet, but claim it should be easy to do so.
“Practical Cellphone Spying“: Another nifty panel. Padget discussed the concepts behind IMSI catching, and gave a live demo of cellphone interception on the AT&T network. The key takeaway here for me was that the same technology used by law enforcement to intercept calls is now coming down to the point where it will be wrapped in a turnkey package and sold to people with more questionable motivations. (Edited to add 8/10/2010: added link to Paget’s blog entry which includes slides.)
“How to Hack Millions of Routers“: I went to this because Lawrence put in a special request. The short version is that a large number of commercially available routers (such as those used by Verizon FIOS) are vulnerable to a clever attack using DNS rebinding and load balancing. Heffner has also released a tool that automates this attack. (This is another Black Hat talk that got a lot of attention in the press; the link above includes a copy of Heffner’s white paper which details the attack vector.)
(Edited to add 8/9/2010: I’ve added a link to Heffner’s Black Hat version of this talk, which as far as I can tell, is pretty similar to the DEFCON 18 version.)
I didn’t attend either “Hacking with Hardware: Introducing the Universal RF Usb Keboard Emulation Device – URFUKED” or “Programmable HID USB Keystroke Dongle: Using the Teensy as a Pen Testing Device“. (Edited to add 8/10/2010: added a link to the Teensy project from the Irongeek website. The bottom of that page has a link to the DEFCON presentation. I’ve also added a link to HackerWarrior.com for the USB Keyboard Emulation Device; that directory appears to contain a copy of the presentation, plus code.)
Instead, I left a little early, had a very nice sake fueled dinner at Shabu-Shabu Paradise in Henderson (a restaurant I enthusiastically endorse), sidecars at the iBar in the Rio (sadly, we did not get to play with the Microsoft Surface), and Penn & Teller.
The three of us saw Penn and Teller back in 2006, and we wondered how much the show had changed since then. Mike the Musicologist estimated that about 50% of the show was new; I think the percentage is a little higher than that, but my memory may be faulty. I was not unhappy that they ended the show with the .357 magnums; the bullet-catching illusion fascinates me, and I’m still trying to figure out how Penn and Teller do it. (Jim Steinmeyer’s The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo
The other thing we all noticed is that Penn and Teller’s show has become a bit more explicitly political; in addition to the .357 magnum closer, which has always included 2nd Amendment references (and big kudos to P&T for reciting the Four Rules), the show also included references to flag burning, the Chinese Bill of Rights (“What Chinese Bill of Rights?” Exactly.) and the stupidity of the TSA. Penn and Teller even sell the Security Edition of the Bill of Rights in their gift shop for a lousy $5. (Quote: “We want McCarran Airport to be flooded with these.”) Not that any of us were bothered by the politics; I think all three of us lay claim to at least some form of Libertarianism. And if you’re the kind of person who would take offense at Penn and Teller’s politics, I won’t tell you “don’t go”; I’ll tell you “go, and have your world view challenged”.
(I’d also like to give Penn and Teller kudos for keeping gift shop prices low. Both Andrew and I picked up DVDs
The LAT writes about the closing of Edward’s Steak House, a 64-year old steak house in El Monte. I’ve never eaten there, but it sounds like a place I would have enjoyed trying.
By way of Marginal Revolution, I found out about a fairly new book that’s relevant to my interests: Steak: One Man’s Search for the World’s Tastiest Piece of Beef