The chief is staying in Austin. And getting a pay raise.
In other news, VonTrey Clark has been deported from Indonesia:
Art (Acevedo), damn it! watch. (#W of a series)
September 2nd, 2015Oliver Sacks.
August 31st, 2015NYT. Michiko Kakutani appreciation. LAT. WP. A/V Club.
“The Oliver Sacks Reading List” from The Atlantic.
I like what Kakutani says, and I don’t think I could say it any better:
Dr. Sacks was a personal hero of mine. Unlike most of my personal heros, I actually did get to meet him once. He probably wouldn’t have remembered it, even if he wasn’t famously “face blind”…
Jesus, Joseph, and Mary.
August 31st, 2015Mostly a local story, but noted here for people who may have missed it:
Austin police and fire officials spent much of Sunday investigating a fiery crash that left four people dead at the Arbor Walk shopping center.
The accident, reported at 4:53 a.m., happened when a Nissan Altima crashed through a barrier on the Braker Lane off-ramp on MoPac Boulevard, went airborne, caught fire and crashed into a building containing several businesses, including Mighty Fine Burgers Shakes & Fries.
Obit watch: August 31, 2015.
August 31st, 2015Noted film director Wes Craven. LAT. A/V Club. NYT.
Dr. Wayne Dyer, author (“Your Erroneous Zones”) and perennial fixture on PBS. Quoted without comment:
…
Often promoted as “public television’s favorite teacher of transformational wisdom,” Dyer was a fixture on PBS for almost 40 years and became embroiled in a controversy over complaints beginning in 2006 that he was promoting a specific religious worldview in violation of PBS’ editorial policies.
Michael Getler, PBS’s ombudsman at the time, wrote in 2012 that it was “my sense” that Dyer’s advocacy strayed outside PBS’ editorial standards but that the PBS board disagreed with him.
An Oliver Sacks obit is coming, but his death was kind of personal for me, so I want to take a little more time.
Unintended consequences.
August 27th, 2015Part 1:
Part 2:
Obit watch: August 26, 2015.
August 26th, 2015Legendary Houston surgeon Dr. James “Red” Duke Jr.
Dr. Duke was one of the founders of the Life Flight service. He attended John Connally after the Kennedy assassination. He inspired a short-lived TV series with Dennis Weaver.
Edited to add 8/27: NYT obit.
TMQ Watch: August 25, 2015.
August 25th, 2015Well. Well well well. Well.
We’ve been wondering when the first TMQ of the season was going to show up. We’re well into the pre-season and there’s no TMQ on the ESPN site. We’ve been watching Easterbrook’s Twitter: usually he links to his columns there, but there’s been nothing.
Apparently we missed the news. We fired up the Googles, and according to a certain website (one we have a policy of not linking to), Easterbrook’s deal with ESPN wasn’t renewed at the end of the 2014 season.
We would figure that Easterbrook would take TMQ elsewhere, and that he’d link to it on his Twitter, but perhaps he’s grown weary of writing it?
Tonight, when we get home, we’ll pour out a blueberry-almond martini for TMQ. If the column does show up someplace else, we’ll let you know, but we won’t promise that we’ll link to it or resume TMQ Watch: if Easterbrook goes somewhere like Salon or Slate, for example, we won’t follow him there.
Historical note, suitable for use in schools.
August 21st, 2015By way of the invaluable NYT obits Twitter feed, I have learned that today is the 75th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky. I don’t know what I would have done if this anniversary had gotten past me.
(Technically, I suppose it is the 75th anniversary of Trotsky’s death. Ramón Mercader, or whatever his name was – he seems to have had multitudes – attacked Trotsky on the 20th, but he lingered until the 21st.)
I haven’t done one of these in a while, so how about a little musical interlude?
This might push a few buttons.
Obit watch: August 21, 2015.
August 21st, 2015Brigadier General Frederick Payne (USMC- ret.)
Gen. Payne was 104 when he died, and was the oldest surviving US fighter ace.
Gen. Payne received the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, and the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions.
With Mr. Payne’s death, there are 71 surviving aces, said Arthur Bednar, coordinator of the American Fighter Aces Association.
According to Mr. Bednar, only 1,450 American pilots qualified to be called ace, a distinction reserved for pilots who downed at least five enemy planes in aerial combat during World Wars I and II and the wars in Korea and Vietnam; in addition, six aces are recognized from the Russian Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Sino-Japanese War and the Arab-Israeli War. Mr. Payne was credited with five and a half kills.
Art (Acevedo), damn it! watch. (#V of a series)
August 20th, 2015The question of the day is: will we get to “Z” in the series?
Austin police Chief Art Acevedo is a finalist for the police chief of San Antonio Police Department.
(As a side note, I’ve always wondered what Sue Grafton’s going to do with Kinsey Millhone after she gets to “Z”. Two books to go.)
Quickies: August 13, 2015.
August 13th, 2015On August 21, 1971, Pinell, George Jackson, and several other inmates attempted to escape from San Quentin. Three inmates and three guards were killed in the attempt.
Pinell was killed by another prisoner during a riot.
Noted: Warren G. Harding apparently did father a child with his mistress, Nan Britton.
Also noted: VonTrey Clark was allegedly offering $5,000 for the murder of Samantha Dean. (Previously.)
My great and good friend Joe D. and I have had past discussions about death at the Grand Canyon and at Yosemite (although I can’t find them now). In that light, this is interesting: “Forget bears: Here’s what really kills people at national parks”.
Short version: if you do die at a national park, it will probably be a drowning or a car crash. But statistically, the odds are low that you will die at a national park.
DEFCON 23 notes: August 12, 2015.
August 12th, 2015More slides! More stuff!
- Brent White’s slides from “Hacking Web Apps” are here.
- Sean Metcalf has slides from both the DEFCON 23 and Black Hat versions of his “Red vs. Blue: Modern Active Directory Attacks & Defense” talk up here. According to Sean, the DEFCON 23 version is slightly different from the Black Hat version.
- Not exactly slides, but Mike Ryan has a post up at his blog that summarizes part of his presentation with Richo Healey, “Hacking Electric Skateboards: Vehicle Research For Mortals”. Actually, his whole blog, while small, has some really good Bluetooth related stuff that I want to bookmark. In addition, there’s a GitHub repo with Healey and Ryan’s skateboard code.
DEFCON 23 notes: August 11, 2015.
August 11th, 2015The Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek paper, “Remote Exploitation of an Unaltered Passenger Vehicle” is here. Sorry I don’t have much to say beyond that; I’ve been frantically busy all day and haven’t had a chance to review their paper (or much of anything else) yet. But I did want to get this up, because I’ve been waiting for it.
(Also, one of my cow-orkers owns a vulnerable vehicle, and I’ve been giving him a little bit of grief about that. Only a little bit, though, because he has problems with the vehicle that go beyond Miller and Valasek’s work.)
DEFCON 23 notes: August 10, 2015.
August 10th, 2015- Slides and code from Samy Kamkar’s “Drive It Like You Hacked It: New Attacks and Tools to Wirelessly Steal Cars” are up here.
- Jeremy Dorrough has a GitHub repository with slides and ancillary material from his presentation, “USB Attack to Decrypt Wifi Communications”.
- This is a better link for the slides from the Runa Sandvik and Michael Auger talk about the TrackingPoint rifles. That set of slides includes links to YouTube videos, which may add some additional context to Sandvik and Auger’s work. (I’m writing this at lunch and haven’t had a chance to watch the videos yet.)
- Dan Kaminsky has a blog entry up that includes the slides from his “I want these * bugs off my * Internet” talk.
- I haven’t found slides yet, but the tools from “Security Necromancy: Further Adventures in Mainframe Hacking” are up at Solder of Fortran’s site and Big Endian Smalls’ site.
More when I have it; possibly tonight or tomorrow.
Obit watch: August 10, 2015.
August 10th, 2015I was too young to remember Frank Gifford‘s playing days, but I do have fond memories of him from Monday Night Football in the 1970’s.
Interesting bit of trivia: