I don’t often think to myself, “I really should blog this!” but today something happened that I felt I must share. In honor of my friends’ visit through and subsequent mostly safe return from Philadelphia, and in honor of the fact that I had a little more overtime than usual this week, I went out to Jersey Mike’s for a cheesesteak. Now remember this is South Carolina, so “cheesesteak” usually brings to mind a piece of t-bone with a slice of cheese on top. Jersey Mike’s is pretty good, all things considered. The rolls aren’t quite right, but I’ll overlook that. So I order my cheesesteak, and in the course of conversation mention to the guy that I’m from the Philly area. He thinks it’s cool that I think enough of them to eat their cheesesteaks and goes about preparing it. As he’s making it, he turns and, in all seriousness, asks, “Mayonnaise?”

Now, at that point my brain kicked into “really stupid comment” mode: it processes the fact that a stupid statement has been made and suspends all other non-essential active processes, both mental and physical, in order to devote more power to trying to figure out what was just said. The end result is that I look like I just froze. The deep thought is accompanied by a lot of blinking, not unlike a hard drive activity light. My response to this was the same as my typical response, which is to repeat the stupid comment in the form of a question, just to buy more time. If the comment happens to be a question, it sounds like I’m just repeating the guy. So: “Mayonnaise!?”

This guy must have had similar brain patterns (I’m scared now) because he looked at me as if I was the one saying something stupid. Finally a light dawns; he realizes that I’m not “from these here parts” and correctly deduces that mayonnaise is not a typical condiment or ingredient for a true cheesesteak. He apologizes and goes on about his business cooking my cheesesteak.

It was as if he had turned and asked, “Papaya?” It just didn’t make any sense whatsoever. For the uninitiated, a cheesesteak contains, as the name implies, steak (chopped into little pieces, I might add), cheese (melted or processed), and bread (which isn’t necessarily obvious, assuming you have the IQ of, well, mayonnaise). Additional popular favorite staples are onions and hot peppers. Ketchup (or marinara sauce, if you’re hard-core Italian) is the topping of choice. The jury is out on whether chicken cheesesteaks count as real cheesesteaks, because 1.) there’s no steak and 2.) there’s very little grease. A true Philly Cheesesteak will have grease from the cheese (or cheeze, depending on whether you used real cheese or processed oil) coming through the bag. Mmm. But I digress. You’ll notice that mayo never enters the list there. I’m not sure anyone up there has even thought about the idea.

The guy’s rationale was that this is the South - we eat everything with mayonnaise. And I’ve seen it, now that I think about it. The most popular combo is mayo and (gulp) french fries…or, heaven forbid, hash browns. Yech. I mean, when you think about it, all mayo is is egg whites whipped into a semi-viscuous liquid with vinegar. And people put it on fries. Oy. Once my brain had processed the day’s stupidity (not really his fault, I guess) I laughed the question off and got my food, sans mayo.

There’s no moral to this story, I don’t think. You’re welcome to come up with one and comment on it.

I’m creating a new category - Site News - which will serve as your clue that, unless you are that fascinated by what goes on behind the scenes, you can safely ignore what was written and still be considered cool.

This, however, should not be ignored, at least not right off the bag. I’ll make it bold for you: if you’re running Wordpress, YOU SHOULD BE RUNNING THE LATEST VERSION THAT CAME OUT TONIGHT - 2.0.4!

There. I’ve said it. I feel better. I promise I won’t shout again. I shout because I have been made aware of a security flaw that existed in 2.0.3 an earlier that has the potential to cause severe embarassment, at the least. I won’t go into details, but you should upgrade IMMEDIATELY (sorry!) if you haven’t done so yet.

…

So why are you still here? Go! Now! Oh, wait…the download site. Oops. Here. Now go!

Another three bloggers have added themselves to the list. First off, Erin Oliver runs and so it goes…; Joel & Cynetta Seekins run a family blog at The Seekins Family; and Jason Harper, a current student, views life from Grandpa’s Rocking Chair. Check these sites out and remember, the list is always searchable.

Firefox 1.5.0.5 was released sometime yesterday to relatively little fanfare. Head over to Mozilla.com to get the latest release. At this time it appears to be a fairly simple update - nothing I can see that’s broken on the update. Linux users, the source is there, but I don’t know about RPMs or apt packages yet. Don’t bother staying tuned here, though, the only Linux distro that’s running hassle-free right now is a server installation of Fedora Core 3, and I’m not touching that.

Apparently, I’m not the only one to think Windows Genuine Advantage was the worst mistake since Bill Clinton. PCWorld ran the latest in a series of articles slamming WGA as spyware, malware, vaporware, or whateverware. If history is any indication, Microsoft will see the discontent on the internet, run a series of studies, and conclude that 95% of all computer owners whole-heartedly support WGA. I mean, that’s what they did with IE and ClearType. (Do yourself a favor - sit down with a hot cup o’ joe and read all the comments. It gets funnier the more you read. You can also read Round 2 with comments, in case you’re really wanting a good laugh.)

Currently I’ve disabled registration for new users after being notified of a critical security problem. I don’t know what the flaw is (unlike Microsoft, Wordpress is choosing not to reveal how their flaws can be exploited before a fix is created), but since I don’t get many guest registrations I figured it couldn’t hurt. I’ll let you know when that feature is turned back on.

I’m just testing out what I think may be a bug in Wordpress.
Click for more…

Just thought I’d throw that out there. I’m running IE 6 on my computer (for testing purposes ONLY; thanks to the IETab plugin for Firefox, I have absolutely no need to ever open Internet Explorer unless I’m testing something).

Now, when I redesigned this site, I made sure that it looked right in IE. And it did. But now something seems to have gone haywire. Here are the problems that I’ve encountered so far:

1. On the Launchpad, the header image doesn’t show up at all.
2. On the Blog, the header image miraculously appears, but the nav menu up top is on two lines…until you hover over one, at which point they all line up on one line…except that whole menu expands by a pixel or two when you hover over something, then contracts back to normal size when you stop hovering.
3. On the List, the header image again doesn’t show up.

So that’s that. IE users won’t get to see my hanging indent because it doesn’t work in IE, at least not as I’ve coded it. Anyone who’s handy with CSS and has enough patience to put up with a crippled browser that won’t allow any editing of CSS on-the-fly is welcome to take a look. I’ve lost patience with IE. Any web design that I do (and it’s not just me) usually ends with, “Looks great in every browser but IE…but I can get it really close!” Stupid Micro$oft - WHEN will you stop relying on your own broken internal “standards” that are just cover stories for the laziness and/or arrogance of your programmers???????

UPDATE - I fixed the problem with the nav menu. Google “border box model” for more info, but suffice to say I was using percentages instead of pixels, and IE and Firefox were rendering the percentages differently, depending on whether you counted the one pixel border as part of the overall equation or not.

This afternoon marked the opening of a new bag of coffee, and the aroma went literally all through the office. The brand was Starbucks; the blend, Gold Coast. Nothing like opening that vacuum-sealed bag and letting out the rich aroma of some of the darkest “Extra Bold” beans you’ve ever seen. I ground them fresh at my desk, and it was a beautiful sight - the moist grounds sitting in the hopper, waiting for the hot water to pour through…I made a whole pot, and it was gone in five minutes. It truly was something to be experienced, not just tasted.

So that was the afternoon buzz. Perfect to contrast the thunderstorm that just now exploded over Greenville. And still that aroma is floating around my desk. As one co-worker put it, “37 milligrams of caffeine in every breath!”

Completely off-topic, this comic may illustrate the dangers of dumping the hymnal from church services altogether. Maybe.

First, a list update: Allison Meena, a current student, runs Ergo, a site dedicated to asking, “So what?” I’ll tell you, that’s my kind of site. I ask that question all the time. I’ve stumped seminarians over dinner with that question. That was after they spent 45 minutes debating the slant of a handful of writers for or against some six- or seven-syllable “-ism.” For all the time they spent talking about it, they couldn’t convince the average layman that it was anything really important. But lest I go on my semi-annual rant against seminarians and new pastors who haven’t worked a real job in the real world in their entire lives, I’ll stop now and let you folks debate whether or not someone who spent every summer, save his church internship summer, at the Wilds and who, rather than getting a part-time job in town, sits at home and reads the latest theological journal can truly understand what the rest of us who do have “9-5″ jobs go through when we’re invited to the annual Christmas office party.

An update on my life - I’m on some really cool painkillers at the moment, so if I start randomly spinning words, you’ll know why. It all goes back 10 years or so. City Boy here has never been fond of nature. Give me a good skyline over a majestic mountain view any day. I tolerate it, and I will go out into it, provided I’m eqiupped with the proper weapons and armor. But this day ten years ago, I decided to go on a hike. First time out, and I slip and sit hard on a tree root. Gave me a world-class spinal re-alignment. Four years later I had surgery to repair one disc that had popped loose and was killing the sciatic nerve down my right leg. I still have nerve damage there - no reflexes to speak of and no sensation of pain down the back of the leg. Came in handy running - I could never feel that leg getting tired, so I got more distance ouf of it before it collapsed enirely. Well, a few months ago I started feeling an intermittant pain down my left leg, same sensations as before on the right leg. It was sporadic until two months ago, when it became constant. Only last week did I finally see the doctor, who perscribed a few high-power meds, hoping that if she could kill the pain and let me walk on it normally, it’d pop itself back into place. I think it’s working - it’s been feeling better every day, and the Oxycodone is enough to put me out for 15 hours like it did this morning. Took it at 10p last night, didn’t wake up until 12:30 this afternoon. Except for…

…my next rant. Don’t ever assume that, just because you happen to be awake at 8a on a Saturday morning, that everyone else in the world must be, too. Someone called my room this morning at 8:30 or so and let the phone ring for what seemed like an eternity. Probably let it go for a dozen rings or more. Now, my parents taught me that, if someone doesn’t pick up after three or four rings, just hang up, because it’s rude to keep the phone ringing if the person on the other end of the line doesn’t want to pick up. It’s especially rude to let it go 12 times before hanging up, and even more rude when both people in the room are trying to sleep. (Talking with my roommate this afternoon, we discovered that the phone woke both of us up, but neither of us had the energy to actually roll out of bed to answer it. Which is why I typically take the phone off the hook Friday night.)

I’m still feeling the effects of sleep inertia, I think. I’d better close before I get myself into trouble. Cheerio…

Well, ladies and gents, I’m going to take a few minutes off from the rabid discussion that ensued this morning on my thread about Dr. Jaspers to put up some more bloggers on the list. I’ve got four today and one more waiting on confirmation.

• Living Worship by Rick Pidcock. I knew Rick when he was here - he graduated a year or so before me. He’s also very handy on a guitar.
• Alicia’s Scribbles by Alicia Westcott.
• Trumbulls by Tom and Amanda Trumbull. Tom is a graduate of BJU, and I’m assuming since it was just his name specified as a grad that Amanda did not.
• Bell’s Blog by Matt and Karen Bell.

Feel free to stop by their sites. And while I’m talking about the list, I also want to point out some changes that have been made to that page. In my haste to play with “Web 2.0″ toys like Ajax, I succeeded in doing something rather unconventional. I added a search capability to the list so one could search for a person’s name (I don’t have all of them in the database yet, so it may or may not work, depending on your search), a website’s title, or any part of the URL. The unconventional part was that it trimmed down the main list on the right side of the page for any search. Now, after the change, that right list is static, and your search results are returned neatly below the search box. I’ve also added a list of the last ten edits I made to the database. Since I wasn’t sure how useful that would be, and since the page was getting pretty long already, I decided to implement that little “[+/-]” thing on the list homepage, too. Now you can hide what you don’t need to see. On a side note, you’ll never see another page I created, but that page will save me a ton of time when you change your URL, title, rss feed, name, etc. So feel free to drop me a line when you want something changed, and I’ll be quick to make the change for you.

That’s all the site news I have. Enjoy your evening.

By now those of you in our little Fundy orbit may or may not have heard of the resignation of Dr. Dave Jaspers as President of Maranata Baptist Bible College. It’s a bit of a saga, and it (as well as the fallout) unfortunately demonstrates a disturbing trend in our circles.
Click for more…

Well, okay, it wasn’t just me. And it wasn’t live. Dan Forrest, a composer about whom I’ve written several times, composed a peice entitled “Words from Paradise,” which Chorale performed first semester last year. Well, that recording made it’s way to New York, where Dan participated in the ASCAP awards ceremony. More of his stuff is due out, so check his site for updates on recordings and publishings soon to hit the shelves.

Sometimes, more complicated is worse than simpler. Spam Karma 2, which traps a solid 95% of all the spam at this site, was letting through tons of comments the past few days on a “snowball check” - not sure entirely how it works, but apparently it is more gracious to commenters who have been frequent commenters. Lots of trackback spam came in today because of that. So, I’ve disabled the snowball check entirely, and all should be well. Apologies to those who say any of the 200 advertisements for prescription drugs or used car dealerships - those are gone now.

This morning at work we had a discussion about secure USB thumbdrives. The flash drive can be a threat to network security. Coming in, the possibility of having a virus on the drive means that network infection is still a very real possibility. On the reverse side, several high-profile cases recently have highlighted the fact that, just because a file is on a secure network, there’s no guarantee it will stay there. USB keys can be used to cart data off, and the fact that USB keys are starting to grow in capacity (up to 8gb in the near future) means that large documents, like CAD drawings, aren’t necesssarily safe just because they’re big. USB keys aren’t the only thing, though. The ubiquitous iPod (or similar), bluetooth phones, cameras, etc. - all can be a threat to security.

The quick and dirty solution is to ban all those products from the workplace and impose penalties on people caught with them. That might have worked ten years ago when these products were limited to the “1337″ (”leet,” for you non-haxor folks) few, but not today. Who doubts that, in any given office in corporate America, staffed by 30-somethings, no less than 75% of the work force own an iPod, USB drive, camera phone, or any combination of the above? I own a number of gadgets that I could use to cart off sensitive information. I’ve never been one to confront a problem by wishing the circumstances around the problem were different. Let’s work with the circumstances to solve the problem.

One solution is data encryption - if a file leaves the network or someone who is unauthorized attempts to view the file, it’s gibberish. Another solution is new technologies that incorporate greater security. When it comes to USB keys, though, this proves difficult. A lot of techs know about and use Linux distros to retrieve information from locked down systems. I personally use Knoppix often to retrieve files on damaged hard drives, but there’s nothing stopping me from using Knoppix to retrieve files from drives that are perfectly fine, albeit locked down. The ideal USB security system should be entirely cross-platform. That is, it should work the same on Windows 95-Vista, Mac OS 8.x-10.x, and Linux >2.4.x.

A quick look turned up a promising, though expensive, solution: the VME BioDrive, specifically the XD version. The BioDrive incorporates biometrics - your fingerprint, in this case, that locks out the secure portion of the drive to anyone but you. There’s also an unencrypted area that anyone can access. The major con is that it’s nearly three times more expensive than competing products without the biometrics.

Another less-expensive solution (that has less features) is Lexar’s JumpDrive Secure II. This one has built-in encryption software, but the downside is that it only works on Win2k/XP or Mac OS >10.2. Linux is either unsupported (gibberish for encrypted read/write) or completely open. Quite a few other drives are similar to this - they offer encryption, but only on one or two operating systems.

I’m opening this one up for discussion - anyone have any brainstorms or examples of how their school/company handle document security with the prevalence of USB keys?

So this morning the list had 168 members. Now, to be fair, submissions have been more or less piling up since I decided to spend time working on the new theme. Then, last night, I decided to overhaul my moderating screen to require less fiddling around in phpMyAdmin, and the nine bloggers that had been submitted proved an excellent test bed for my new screen. I’m happy to report that all the bugs are worked out. So, here are the new nine members:

• L. Swaffer - A medic and her dog
• Leon Benoit - My Blog
• Jeremiah Barba - steady believing
• Tim Silvester - Outside Russell
• Szweda Blog
• Stephen Moody - StephenMoody.info
• John Bjerk - attempting:Lucidity
• Rachel Patrick - re:patrick
• Rob Loach - ivman’s blague

Do enjoy reading up on these folks.

You know the old saying - when man builds a mousetrap, nature makes a smarter mouse? I’ve found that to be true in the area of spammers. Not only has the amount of spam I’ve been getting in my school account been on the rise, the number of trackback spams on this site has been up, too. Things with subject lines that should have never gotten through. Thanks to Spam Karma 2, most of my spam has been caught. But there’s always some that leak through. SK2 provides a neat little interface that allows me to see exactly how they got through and adjust my settings accordingly.

All that to say, if you see something in the launchpad or comments area that shouldn’t be there, don’t worry - I’ve been checking periodically, and I will catch and kill those comments or trackbacks. In the meantime, bear with me as I try to adjust my mousetrap accordingly. Oh, and if you notice that your comments are constantly being munched, sign up for an account - that should definitely help matters.

On another note, I’ve got five or six additional BJ bloggers that I want to add to the list, so if you’ve submitted a site within the last two or three weeks, it’ll go up soon, hopefully. As always, keep your eyes and ears open for any other BJ-related bloggers!

Notice anything different? Do a complete refresh (Ctrl + F5) if not, then come back and read. Don’t worry; we’ll wait for you.

:hums quietly while your server refreshes:

Ah, welcome back! You may have wondered why I was silent for two or three weeks. Among other things (like changing job descriptions) I was updating this site’s look and feel. There’s a lot you can look at, but before you get too far I pontificated on this site’s new layout. You can read all about it here if you want to take the time.

Since that took a while to write, I won’t recap it here. Just go read it yourself! I will, however, mention the props and hat tips to all those who at one point or another helped me through this transition:

Austin Matzko (Il Filosofo), for serving as that constant back-of-the-mind reminder that once - just once - I needed to get something out the door on time.
Brad Garrett (Son of Bradezone), for his suggestions and occaional whap upside the head regarding my CSS and overall design questions.
Jared Sutton, for his ideas on HTTP design and some occasional critique action.

These are the ones that were constantly either in my head or over my shoulder as I prepared this new offering. Stop by their sites and see what they have to offer; they’re all quite good at web design themselves, and their work speaks to that.

I hope you enjoy this new design. Please let me know via comments on this page (not on the explanation page, if you please) if you come across something that’s broken.