The Hizzle of T-Fizzle

The need to provide pics to the editors of the PCC newsletter provided the impetus for a few things - resurrecting the Gallery that fell to pieces, trying out the cool SD Card Reader/Thumb Drive (has a cover so you can lock an SD Card in and use it like a thumb drive) and popping in the 2GB SD Card I got for my camera awhile ago but had not yet installed.

Getting Gallery2 back was super-easy since my new host has some sort of automated installation gizmo for commonly used web apps called Fantastico that pretty much provided one-click installation.  I still have some tweaking to do to make the Gallery a little easier to view, but it is at least functional for the time being.

I found photographing curling in action to be somewhat akin to shooting concerts - 2 people sweeping a stone pretty much look the same no matter what. 

You have to instead look for more unique moments like Derek blowing his brains out:

Or Derek gleefully carrying a tray of Drambuie:

Or a father spending the weekend curling with 4 of his 5 daughters.  2 sets of twins, by the way.  These are the people that clobbered us in the first game:

And, for posterity, the Potomac team that whipped us in the second game:

These ar unretouched/uncropped, so I may add some edited ones later on.  Until then click the pic below or head over to the Gallery to see them all.

Friday night, we were off to Chez Fitz to help prepare for their annual ‘Ween Extravaganza.  Jesse was there to further add to the fun and entertainment.  One highlight included X trying to bake some cookies.  She had asked me to take out a stick of butter from the fridge, turn on the oven, and sit the butter on the oven to soften.  She may have said 1/2 cup of butter or 2 sticks of butter, but most key witnesses claim she only said one.  I placed the butter on the oven, but I did not turn the oven on.  Turning on the oven just to soften butter is absurd!  After giving the butter some time to soften at room temperature, she set out to make the dough and complained that it wasn’t doughy.  After a lot of head scratching, we finally realized that 2 sticks of butter were required.  Things improved immensely with the addition of 100% more butter.

Saturday was our third curling match, marking the opening of the Mixed League.  The Mixed League has an interesting standing format.  You get a point for each end you win plus 3 points for winning the match.  You can lose the match and still get more points than the winner.  It is interesting because it rewards consistent play.  You can get lucky with a big score in one end, but to come out on top, you need to play consistently, winning many ends and not just an occasional big score.

We are teamed up with our favorite instructors from the curling class (sorry, Mike and Mary!  You’ll probably get them in January.) who seem well-known around the club for being Awesome Curlers.  Deanne is a Canuck (being born in Canada apparently gives you +3 to your base curling ability right off the bat) and has curled pretty much her whole life.  Mike R (also on my team in men’s league) was PCC Rookie Of The Year a few years ago.  In addition to being good players, they are both just genuinely really nice people and a lot of fun to play with.

We got killed.  Again.  Maybe it’s me?  Nah, it’s just the way the game goes.  The newbies are newbies and the oldbies are rusty from having the summer off.  We were up against a team consisting of a substitute skip named Craig who looks enough like Jon Voight to be intimidating and is a very solid player, and our training class arch enemies John and Nancy, along with a vice skip whom I did not know and I can’t remember her name.  John and Nancy were both throwing really well.  Their whole team just was more consistent than we were.

Personally, I am getting closer to an optimal position for holding the broom (the head is farther out to the side - I was previously holding it straight in front of me) which has allowed me to keep my balance better.  Many of my throws were very close to their intended line, although I was having trouble with weight, especially towards the end when the ice was beginning to really speed up.  I threw a lot all the way through, and then the next one would barely clear the hog line.  But now that I’m getting my balance down, I can work on weight control.

Broomstacking after the match, we confirmed our suspicions that curling is full of smart people.  Mike and Deanne both have PhDs.  Craig didn’t say he was a PhD, but he did say he is a professor at UPenn, so he at least has a masters.  Many of the people we met have been engineers, psychologists, scientists…it’s definitely a brainy bunch.

After the match, we ran home and changed into costumes for the Halloween party.  We went us George and Jane Jetson.  X made her costume from scratch and it turned out really nice!  My costume was dead simple but it looked good.  We got to the party kinda late.  A lot of Mary’s guests come from far away and stay overnight, so they tend to get started fairly early.  We arrived just in time for Pictionary.  Actually, it’s more like Win Lose or Draw without teams.  People made up words/phrases which made for some interesting ones.  That took quite awhile and things started to slow down after that.  People were beginning to nod off and go to sleep.  We had an early morning ahead of us, so we decided to get on home.

Sunday was the Lupus Loop fundraiser.  We assembled a sizable group for the walk/run.  X had planned to run, but wasn’t really able to finish her training so decided to walk instead.  It would have been a pretty nice day, but the blazing winds made things fairly cold.  Afterwards we went to lunch at CPK where BSchwartz is an AGM/Mayor Of PizzaTown.  I haven’t seen BSchwartz in many months.  It was nice to talk to him for a bit.

Somehow we managed to make it the whole day without getting a spoiler on the Eagles score.  This is unfortunate - had we known the outcome, we would not have wasted our time watching it on TiVo!  Neither of us paid too much attention, though, so we didn’t waste too much on it.

Usually busy weekends drive me nuts, but I felt pretty good after this one.  I did things I wanted to do and had fun doing them.

Tomorrow…more curling.  I’ll then have a break until Saturday.

Straight from Yahoo.  YARLY.

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After a lengthy hiatus following my website being hacked by a worm that advertises Brazillian leftists (you just can’t make this stuff), I have finally taken the time to get the site back in order.  One of the key reasons I felt like starting back up is that the technology seems to have finally matured enough to allow me to do the things I want to do (in particular, making photoblog posts from my Sidekick) without having to do a whole lot of coding myself.  My educational background as a Computer Scientist may lead you to believe that I would *love* to sit around coding all night, but the truth is that I like to program here and there, but not too much, especially when it’s something that I believe in my mind that enough people are interested in that it *should* already exist.

So here we are.  The photo gallery will return soon.  Since the PHP-Nuke Coppermine Gallery was the attack vector which allowed the site to be compromised previously, I simply scrapped the entire thing.  I have all of the pics saved, so all I’ve lost is the method for displaying them easily, and there are plenty of alternatives including the standalone Coppermine now that I am no longer tied to PHP-Nuke.  PHP-Nuke was a decent CMS and I enjoyed customizing it to my liking, however it was designed for far larger projects than a simple personal blog.  I briefly tangled with MovableType until I realized that while there is a way to use Flickr to make photoblog posts by e-mail, it does not natively support posting by e-mail!  Is this the 21st century?  Sure, the open source folks say “If you want that feature, add it yourself!”  See comment above about how much I like to program.

MovableType did, however, introduce me to OpenID, since I had to sign up for TypeKey in order to download MovableType.  OpenID is a bit hard to wrap your mind around at first, but it essentially allows me to tie troy.fisher-fam.org to an account registered with an OpenID server (in my case TypeKey) by adding two simple lines to my index.html.  This is my OpenID Identity.  I can then use troy.fisher-fam.org as a login on any site that supports OpenID, and after logging into TypeKey, my identity is established.  The most significant use for this right now is cross-functionality with LiveJournal.  Using OpenID, I can have an identity at LJ that ties back to my own non-LJ blog, and allows me to have friends and be friended instead of having to post anonymously and miss “friend-only” posts, which seem to be many posts these days.  Furthermore, once better OpenID functionality is available for WordPress (the software driving this blog), LJ users will be able to interact with this site using their LJ addresses as OpenID Identities.  It’s a very handy system, and I hope that it takes off.

Most OpenID pundits are careful to mention that OpenID does NOT cover trust.  I’ll repeat that same warning here.  Anyone can go to TypeKey or MyOpenID or any of a number of other free OpenID servers and register an account and claim to be someone else.  It is up to you to decide whether or not that person is who they say they are.  Linking your Identity to your own website helps (the OpenID term for this is “Delegation”).  Since I own fisher-fam.org, you have some assurance that it really does tie back to my OpenID; why would I tie it to someone else’s ID?  Another good option would be a server that includes a PGP-style “Web Of Trust” in which you can log in using your Identity and then assign a trust level to my Identity based on how certain you are that it’s really me.  Then when you come across a new OpenID Identity, you can gauge whether or not it can be trusted.

Onle last thing to mention.  Those of you who are aware of my career in Information Security are probably wondering just how I could allow MY OWN site to be hacked.  Truth is, I chose not to stop plug the hole.  In InfoSec, we often talk about risk analysis: what is the likelihood that a risk will actually be exploited, and if it is exploited, how much damage will be caused?  In the case of the flawed Coppermine for PHP-Nuke vulnerability, I was aware that the vulnerability existed, however by that time Coppermine had scrapped PHP-Nuke integration and recommended installing the standalone Coppermine as the fix for the issue.  It was a hassle to remove the PHP-Nuke for Coppermine, install the standalone version, hook it in to PHP-Nuke and then upload the pictures, especially since everything was chugging along quite nicely.  I felt that the likelihood of actually being hacked was fairly low (a correct assumption based on the fact that it took over a year to be exploited) and that the potential “damage” was pretty much nothing - I have local copies of all of the pics, and as far as posts are concerned, let’s face it - I’m not blogging the Magna Carta here.  They were actually safe in the database, but saving them was not a high priority, so I just wiped the whole thing clean.  I have more confidence in WordPress, but let’s face it - if another vulnerability is published that requires more than a simple patch to fix, I’ll probably follow the same “wait and see” course of action.

With that, welcome back.  Since WordPress supports e-mail posting right out of the box, I expect to be able to update more often than before.  Hoorah.