blogx
musings of mark since 2001

Woke up yesterday morning to snow on the ground, a little unusual to get it this late, but no where near the record date back when it snowed the day after Cinco de Mayo in May 2002. A few inches on the ground here, and it may even get got sunny by this afternoon so don’t expect it to it didn’t stick around very long.

Hopping around the blogosphere and visiting Picasso Dreams, a great blog about Kelly and Rob and the adventures they had traveling to Nicaragua, which is now a blog about them living there. While looking at the latest pics from the region and catching up with their latest venture running a coffee shop, I ran across an article mentioning someone that I had read about on another site and it’s interesting how her initial shortcomings about the person in question turned out to be somewhat true, or not, you decide. The guy sounds like a real expert hustler from way back at the first, good at the craft of making themselves sound a whole lot more important than they really are. She had started doing a little research on the fellow and was coming up with answers that didn’t match, so the red flags started popping up and so she said so on the blog.

Well, guess who comes over to her web site and gets himself in the comments section. The explanation is pretty good, it appears that he’s done his homework since 911 and is milking that for all it’s worth. After the Iraq war started he found out about the DU weapons that have been in use for years now by the USA and the damage that they are causing with their fall out that is spreading around the world, and is working that angle if you think he’s a huckster or he’s going to save a lot of sick people otherwise. He seems to be implicating a cure for same with a company having a technology that almost no one understands what it really means. Problem is, nanotechnology isn’t really all that new and there are already some pretty big players in the field, and he isn’t one of them it seems. Although from the way he talks you would think they have invented the process but upon a visit to the web site you find that they really don’t have any patents actually held, and by his own admission has had only a year of looking into how the nanotube business works. One wonders if he’s found out that not many know what it is, and it costs a heck of a lot of $ to put the parts together so that’s the fund raising angle to work with. There is no actual location for their processing facility apparently either according to the web site, he says two of them are running in Europe right now but for some reason the plants are unlike the others around the world and have to remain a secret of course.

But I digress, besides the great pics of Nicaragua from Kelly, she’s always got some links to interesting places and one of them came from the comment section of the post about the nanotube fellow. This person is a Susan B. Anthony fan apparently, complete with a header with one of the famous utterances attributed to her:

Cautious, careful people always casting about to preserve their reputation or social standards never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest are willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathies with despised ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.

And does she ever rip into the nanotube slash depleted uranium slash telcom giant both by posting an article and link to the comments section of Kelly’s web site, and when you head over there she’s got what appears to be days worth of research on the fellow.

But wait, it gets better, the fellow comes back and states he is now suing the yayacanada.com person calling herself Madam Karnak and she’s the fake! What an odd place the wild world web is, will be interesting to revisit this one in a year and see who was what that I stumbled upon surfing Kelly and Rob in Nicaragua

Meanwhile in the Daily Kos, it’s getting real worrisome for those that read news from other places than Fox and CNN. Those that do must be the reason that the Americans allow their government to willy-nilly invade other countries, check out where the film maker has placed the country of Iran on the map:
http://video.google.com/

There’s a little reported news item out there, that is a whole new era in banks getting hit by hackers. Last year, the credit card processor Cardsystems was hit and the records for millions of credit card accounts were compromised, at least they raised some awareness that your information is only as safe as the servers they sit on.

As it happens the data, namely the PIN number that goes with your debit card number, is stored by some point of sale (POS) systems locally instead of being wiped out immediately after the sale is confirmed, and is then subject to be read by anyone that can gain access to the system. In some systems the data is secure, but the encryption key is stored right along with it so the company can use the data themselves and all a hacker has to do once a server is compromised is to make sure to remember to grab the key at the same time they grab the PIN number blocks.

Here’s the kicker - this hack is still ongoing right now and affects numerous banks in Canada, Russia, and the UK. Citibank and security firms are monitoring the situation and are replacing hacked cards, but now that this exploit is in the wild there isn’t any stopping it. Every company that does more than a hundred credit card transactions a day is probably going to get probed in the next few months by various drones that have probably already been set up, the amazing part is how well this is kept out of the MSM news.

For those that aren’t geeks like me, there haven’t been any National Emergency Broadcasting System warnings or even a mention on the six o’clock news that your foolish to use anything but an ATM machine located at a physical bank branch with your debit card. Avivah Litan, a Gartner research vice president, someone you would think might know a little about these things says “don’t use a PIN-based debit card at point-of-sale,” she recommended. “I never do.”

If you have to buy something from a store and don’t have the cash, don’t use your debit card for the purchase. Instead take the time to seek out a bank branch that has an ATM, and get some cash out of there instead for your purchase. Beware if the ATM doesn’t “look” or act like you think it should - false fronts, hidden cameras and other methods are used at generic ATM locations themselves to get your PIN and debit card number combo, use only the bank’s ATM machine and keep your eyes and ears open when you do.

The MSM is full of the demonization of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Stephen Gowans aptly puts it. His latest piece picks apart the headlines coming from the Western Media and why he thinks it’s an economic intervention coming up:

Why Iran? (1) To stifle the country’s economic development by depriving it of nuclear power; (2) To prevent it from acquiring a nuclear deterrent to Western aggression; (3) To keep it from becoming powerful enough to challenge the US attack dog in the region, Israel; and the reason to which the preceding three are subordinate: (4) To put an end to Iran’s assertion of economic sovereignty, which conflicts with the profit-making interests of US investors and trans-nationals.

Meanwhile, China has come back with it’s own reply to the the yearly USA report on Human Rights and shows the big country to the south as guilty as any other when it comes to protecting the rights of citizens. Like Stephen’s piece above, it is a long article, starting off with pointing out how the US is the most murderous country in the world within it’s own borders and has the highest prison population per capita than any other country. Other items outline the poor record of the US on government propaganda, police abuse, political prisoners, and the ongoing racial problems and inequities foisted upon the non-Caucasians and women of the country. It finishes off outlining just a few of the numerous cases of US imperialism and violations against other countries’ sovereignty.

Everything is fine in Iraq according to Secretary of Offense Rumsfeld, if there is a civil war, “civil war in Iraq would be the responsibility of Iraq’s own security forces” and besides, it’s their own fault there is unrest. The Generals on the ground say that the crisis is over and the Iraq Security Forces would be able to handle things and some days not and that some of the “Security” was actually helping the, (pick one according to which side you’re on: insurgents/militias/freedom fighters). Reporters on the ground like Christopher say otherwise: “To be blunt: We are as close to full-scale civil war as we’ve ever been.”

The first CSS and XHTML tutorial is now Exercise Two and Exercise One is done. The new first one is the best with a lot of different techniques in it. It’s a site with a header and footer and three columns with two of them fluid and three if you wanted it without all the negative margins or complicated math required for other methods. Everything else is rock solid too with relatively sized fonts and the layout able to handle below 640 pixel widths, and of course the final result is semantic and will validate.

Still have to go through the validation for the CSS and fine tooth comb everything, but the new start is from the old upgrade section leading to a whole new directory for tutes. It would be ice to have about four of the most common layouts done like this; takes a while to write everything out and check it with the specifications as you go but it really, really helps get your head straight around how to make things work trying to explain them to someone else.

While being immersed in creating the new tutorials for a week, missed going to news.google.com to keep up with what’s happening with the big elephant to the south, but didn’t miss much. The new war theatre plans against Iran are going ahead full steam with all the prerequisite sabre rattling going on, growing up through the Cold War years it’s a little odd to hear Russia and China being the ones calling for cooler heads to prevail.

It was reported earlier in the year that the USA was going to run out of credit at the end of their fiscal year on the 20th of this month, but the problem is worse than it earlier sounded. Apparently there’s good reason to not reporting the M3 figures for the first time in history, when it’s all added up the present administration has got that country in some serious financial doo-doo. To help keep the govt. running, plans are to get money needed from accounts that have already been promised to some one else, namely the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund. This is just the first time anything has been publicly reported, apparently they have been robbing the government employee pension funds, securities and other monetary exchange funds saved for an emergency already.

Which begs the question, if they are already taking money from emergency accounts, why hasn’t the alarm been raised yet that there is a fiscal emergency? Sure seems like something very big is coming down the tracks, and the American public are like deer caught in the lights - aware of a very large impending force to enter their lives, but blinded by the bright lights of their media empires hiding the truth.