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musings of mark since 2001

My Dad has found a great hobby for his retirement in wood artistry. I have “Whales off Bowen Island” hanging on my wall and he’s been preparing for the past year on the Kelowna Art Walk and really looking forward to it: “This is not a Mickey Mouse flea market, but a genuine Art display.” Hope he’s charging enough for his art work.

First day at the new job is going great. Good couple guys to work with and nothing I can’t handle. The working conditions are good, although this Monday was apparently an exception because the restaurant didn’t break anything over the weekend. Changed a “hose bib” (a fresh water faucet on a dock when it’s connected to a boat) and hung a couple new pictures in one of the guest rooms, picked up a bit of garbage and generally kept busy.

Ugh, rainy day for the island festivities of Bowfest 2004 today. Won’t dampen anyone’s spirits, but it makes for a much cooler day and more time spent under the awnings that are set up for the occasion. All the regulars will be there, no doubt J.P. will be leading the parade in his “cats” costume on roller skates in front of the citizen of the year float. The owners of the general store have the Korean dancing again and there is a Tae Kwon Do demo from the local club. The Bowen Island Free Riders will be having a display of their acrobatics on two wheels, and well known local musicians like Rob Wall, The Fiddleheads, Brenda Reid, Two Days Gone and John Bottomley.

The island just keeps on giving as I landed a choice job at Union Steamship Marina working as a maintenance person yesterday, starting Monday. It’s just like the Cates Pharmacy job in that it’s 5 hours a day five days a week, but weekends off. Day ends earlier too, start at nine in the morning; that will be nice as plenty of time in the early morning to take care of problems and most of the afternoon left over as well. The pay is even decent for an island gig, looking forward to Monday

Getting back to Iraq again, with the blog for Friday from Christopher

Running the ad for a roommate again in the Undercurrent this week, almost had a good one earlier in the week but same old story; with the 74 steps and rocky road to get here access is a deal killer for everyone so far. In the meantime, I have a temporary person for a week, every little bit helps!

Looks like the weather is going to cooperate for Bowfest this weekend with it clearing up a bit already this afternoon and promising to be even better over the next couple of days. There’s a lot of chatter over on the forum about the early closing time this year. Since it’s inception, the event been a great draw for local talent and families to get together for the day in the park. There’s music all day, and the temporary stage can get rockin’ and with the beer garden things are pretty noisy in the cove until closing time at 11:00pm.

This year festivities are to be shut down at 9:30 because of a new noise bylaw, and some of the old timers are decrying that the island is being taken over by the newcomers. Everyone forgets that they were newcomers too at one time and people’s attitudes change. Attending last year, it seemed that after the sun went down the families were pretty much gone and just the drunks were left. Don’t know how much of the money made after that time affects the charity donation but it’s only an hour and half missed drinking, and then they all go to someone’s house party anyway.

Looks like Microsoft is having problems with it’s latest and greatest behemoth update to WinXP as security experts have already found a hole that lets malicious programs hide as images that automatically install and then run when Windows is re-started. The funny thing too, is that the ability to hide executables in files with a .jpg (or any other extension for that matter) has been around a long time. Knock on wood, but still gliding along with Zone Alarm and a good Lynksys router myself and not entrusting security to my operating system by itself. Firewalls and routers have nothing to do with the exploit above of course, best remedy is to not go to web sites that are of dubious nature to not have that happen.

The bug works on systems patched with SP2. When an infected system is re-booted, the planted program will run.

The loophole, which strikes when files are dragged and dropped from the net on to a local zone, was found by an ethical hacker who goes by the handle of http-equiv. A demonstration of the bug has been posted on the Malware website.

“Given the significant amount of user action required to execute an attack, Microsoft does not consider this to be a high risk for customers,” said Paul Randle, head of all things XP at Microsoft UK.

Hmmm, is he saying that dragging and dropping a file from one window to another is a “significant amount of user action”? As it seems that the general population see no difference between thier internet browser window and a window on thier desktop, good old Mr. Randle is talking through his hat.