Daily Archives: September 22, 2004

It’s 9:02; do you know where your computer’s been?

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So. I went to a client’s site this afternoon to set up several brand-new Power Mac G5 systems. Apple Cinema Displays, Adobe Creative Suite Professional, Quark 6, the works. Beautiful systems; I wish I had one.

And then the client asked me to look at his Windows XP laptop, because it’s been “acting funny.”

He has broadband at his house. He’s never run Windows Update.

It’s after 9:00 at night and I’m still here. Why am I still here? 1,524 copies of the W32/Bagle.z virus and counting. Plus about 6,000,000 Windows security updates that need to be installed. And did you know that Bagle blocks Windows Update from doing its job? Isn’t that lovely?

If you are reading this on a Windows computer, and you have never run Windows Update on your computer, you are infected with a virus. Or more likely, thousands of viruses. Yes, I mean YOU. Right now, the average life expectancy of an unpatched Windows box connected to the Internet is less than twenty minutes.

I could be at game night right now. I could be hanging out with cool people and playing Are You a Werewolf? But no.

Immortality Ho!

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Shelly finished all her Alcor paperwork today! datan0de and I witnessed it, so it’s all signed and notarized and ready to go. She should have her bracelet soon, and I’m getting started on my own paperwork soon as well.

We’re thinking of having a party when Shelly gets her bracelet, and another when I get mine, because hey, two parties!

A peek into the future

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I’ve been looking for a new programming project, since I haven’t really felt like doing any more TCP/IP programming for a while, and I finally decided to make a program that could predict the future.

It’s a simple matter, really. If you know the basic laws of motion, and you see a ball rolling across a table, you can use the laws of motion to predict that the ball will fall off the edge of the table if it’s going fast enough. Applying the same basic idea to a larger system, if you know all the laws of physics, and you can create a model of the entire world, you can use the model to predict the future, right?

So that’s exactly what I did. I wrote a program that would simulate every subatomic particle in the solar system (I decided not to model the entire universe, because I’m running the simulation on a 600MHz iMac), and set it up to show me what will happen in the future. Among the more surprising discoveries:

In the future, cows and other barnyard animals will be converted to run on natural gas, a clean, renewable energy source.

In the future, supplies of gravity, once thought to be a limitless natural resource, will diminish until the government has to start rationing gravity. People with an even numbered street address get to use gravity on even numbered days of the month, people with odd-numbered street addresses can only use gravity on odd numbered days of the month. $500 fine for using gravity on the wrong day.

In the future, a balloon animal will be elected mayor of Washington, DC, and surprisingly, its ideas on economic reform will prove to be very popular.

In the future, mimes will be driven to the brink of extinction by unlicensed poachers, and nobody will really care.

In the future, money will be printed on aluminum foil, because it’s much shinier than paper.