66 points!

GC-in-E at Stephen’s again. I got there fairly late, having spent some time in Barnes & Noble reading Matt Wagner’s Trilogy (three-issue series about Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, collected in hardcover). It’s pretty good; I especially liked the opening scenes. Not enough to buy it, though.

When I got there, the gang was suffering through a protracted Cosmic Encounters endgame. I played that game enough back in high school and college to last me the rest of my life.

After they finally beat the game to death, and bigscary negativeq established by phone that we aren’t worthy enough for them to bother traveling downtown for, we played a four-player game of Puerto Rico, something we haven’t played since San Juan came out. I started out with corn for the first time in I dunno how long, managed to get a money pump going, and finally scored my highest ever, 66 points, only to be beaten by Stephen’s 69.

Then a game of San Juan, ’cause it wouldn’t be GC without our current addiction, then home.

Stick this up your memory

I also picked up a 128-meg Sony memory stick today, for my Clié. This lets me both back up my PDA and store photos and stuff. Missing Sync needs the memory stick to import photos, for some odd reason, but it does so directly through iPhoto, which is kinda cool. This over here is a photo I’ve been carrying around on my Clié for several months, unable to get it into my computer till just now. It’s a poster I saw in Greenwich Village.

For those playing along at home, the Missing Sync documentation is out of date. Instead of MS Import, the program you need to be using on your Clié is called Data Import, and is probably already present on your device.

I’ll probably get another, smaller (32- or 64-meg) stick to use for at-home backups, just in case my Clié gets stolen or falls in a river or something.

Sausage security hole

If you see a post that just says:

this is very interesting.

...don’t click it! It’s an annoying and potentially dangerous hack that’ll hijack your browser post itself in your journal, and could be sending your password to someone nasty. I think it’s just a demonstration of a security hole, but avoid it anyway. Some discussion going on in lj_dev.

Oh, and if you did click it? Clear out your browser cache, delete your cookies, and come back to LJ and change your password.

Update: According to some discussion I’ve read, it doesn’t actually grab your password, so you may be safe if you just log out and back in, maybe clearing cookies first. I dunno. I changed my password, ’cause I was overdue for it anyway.

They forgot the self-loathing

I’m running along on 45% raw nothing!

I’m probably really only 2 parts anger, though.

( Cocktail quiz )

And yo, “a agrumer”? What, you don’t know how to code for checking that the first character of a string is a vowel?

Bridge to the 17th century

Back in 2000, I joked that Bush and his cronies wanted, if elected (back when I thought that election was the method they’d use to take power), to build a bridge to the 19th century. I don’t remember if it was my joke, or someone else’s I was passing along. I’m certainly not the only one who said it.

We were wrong; we misunderestimated them. According to memos uncovered by The Wall Street Journal, Pentagon lawyers presented the administration with arguments that would allow US forces to use tortures of the sort discovered to have occured at Abu Ghraib. Here’s the nut graf:

To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a "presidential directive or other writing" that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."

There’s your bridge right there. That’s not just overthrowing the rule of law enshrined in the US constitution. That’s going all the way back to the concept of the divine right of kings, which the British rid themselves of (with difficulty) in 1647. (Or maybe even back to the 13th century...?)

(Yeah, my readers who follow political blogs have known this all week. Sorry for just now getting around to it. And here’s a longer portion of that memo, in PDF form. And the definition of nut graf.)

AIMless

Is anyone else having AIM trouble? For the past few weeks (months, maybe) I’ve been having trouble connecting to the server (toc.oscar.aol.com:9898).

I’m still using Adium 1.6.2. I downloaded a beta of AdiumX (ver 0.56) a while ago, but it required me to jump through too many stupid bullshit hoops to import my buddies list. I’ll try 0.59 and see if it’s improved.

Update: Yeah, OK, that seems to have fixed it. And it still requires the bullshit hoops, but I discovered that I had on my hard drive the main hoop that I thought I’d have to go find and download, so hey.