Leaf Creature

I believe that the image below is one of the few that could change history. Study it carefully, for this is a scout working for our future insect masters. He/she/it is obviously scoping out territory and gauging our expected response to their impending invasion.

Fig. 1: One of our future insect masters.
Sony alpha 200, Minolta Macro Zoom 300mm, f5.6 @ 1/200 sec., ISO 400.

Enclicken the image for a closer look.
Together we can fight for our futures!

Follow up to "Please Stop...Fire...Neighborhood"

Fig. 1: Playing with Fire

Sony alpha 200, 300mm, f5.6 at 1/250".
Klicken für größeres Bild!

Fig. 2: Later that same evening...
Sony alpha 200, 105mm, f4.5 at 1/2".

WTF!?

I tried to think of a better title for this post than a simple follow up to my previous post "Please stop setting fire to my neighborhood" but I really couldn't. I thought of a few, such as:

• - Please stop setting fire to my neighborhood, part two
• - Please stop setting fire to my neighborhood, part deux
  
• - Burning Children for Fun and Profit
  
• - Pyromania
• - Douchebags on Parade

...but none really seemed to fit.

The pastor and elders of the church across the way cleaned out the hedgerow around the parking lot and churchyard and now the conflagratory actions of the pyromaniacs living behind the church are out in the open for all to see.

Kinda strange that this "parent" would allow his/her children to get so close to an open flame. Of course it is kind of difficult to determine who is the parent and who is the child here.

Please stop setting fire to my neighborhood.

I live in a strange neighborhood. Well, really, all neighborhoods have their black sheep, outcasts, weirdos, but we seem to have more than we need.

Now, don't get me wrong...I am strange in and of myself. I have quite more than my fair share of antennas and satellite dishes on and around my house. Some have compared my homestead to SETI. I just tell everyone that I'm waiting for contact from the mothership.

There seems to be a phenomena in my neighborhood with people liking to set things on fire. Specifically, setting fires for communal enjoyment. What I mean by this is open burning. Several times this week and numerous times since spring began, several neighbors have had open fires going in their backyards.

The people across the back of the churchyard across the street from me have had an open pit fire going nearly every night this week, the college frat house behind me set one alight about twice a week and the neighbors to the east of my parents tore out and burned their entire privacy fence.

Within the city there is a law against open burning. One would think that with the gestapo in our town as active as they are that the pyromaniacs would be sanctioned for their crimes...especially since we live about 1/4 mile from the fire station. But, no, the fires continue.

It would not be so bad if the fires were done safely (as in not at all) in a fire pit. At our local home and garden shops they sell numerous varieties of fire containment vessels from large terra cotta vessels to small fire pit tables, all of which are available inexpensively and have provisions to prevent the fire from actually escaping and burning down a house or entire neighborhood.

The pyromaniacs in my neighborhood do not use such vessels. They only have short rings of bricks set up on their backyard lawns. I think this is so that once the inevitable drought sets in, any fires they set will surely spread.

Thankfully my homeowners insurance is paid up.

Phantom Pager Syndrome

I have a syndrome. I call it "Phantom Pager Syndrome". This is going to sound weird, but stay with me.

You see, I have had a pager, cell phone or both...sometimes even more than one each...since I have started working. That's about 17 years now.

I wear my pagers/cell phones on my belt, on the right side, just above my right leg. For the last few years, I have felt strange vibrations in this area...like a pager set on vibrate. I feel it all the time. Even now as I type this, it seems like someone is trying desperately to get hold of me.

I generally set any communications devices I have to ring and vibrate, because I can't always hear the ringing due to ambient noise or the speaker location versus the case muting the sound. When I feel a distinct vibration, I check and listen for the ring. I leave the ring turned all the way up because I don't hear very well anyhow.

Well, since I have the phantom vibrations, I'm checking my phone ALL THE TIME!

I have the most annoying ring that I could imagine. It is a ring that I like because it is loud and I keep the ringer volume all the way up. That way I have an incentive to answer it...to shut it up. It is called "Vintage Phone" and sounds like an old bell phone ringer. It is great! This way when my phone rings I can always tell it is mine. Plus, it is a unique ringing sound that is quite well done that I bought from a company that specializes in ambient sound effects called SoundRangers. I thought a unique solution such as this would a) annoy people, b) ensure that I know my phone is ringing and c) not be stupid like some other ringers I've heard like whatever the current popular top 40 hip-hop song is.

That is not to say that I don't have other ringers, for example...
- For my friend Chris, I have the theme to "Benny Hill", since he is always horny.
- For my boss, I have the "Imperial March" from Star Wars, since he's like Lord Vader sometimes.
- For my friend KL, I have the theme to "Dynasty" (an '80s prime-time soap) since everything she gets involved with has some kind of extreme drama.
- And for my co-worker APK from Sri Lanka I have the "Monkey" sound from the classic MacOS...it's been around since System 6. (Not very PC, I know!)

But these "Phantom Pages" are getting quite annoying. I started having problems back when I was working for the contract computer service company. At that time I was carrying two pagers and two cell phones! Thankfully, I have only one cell phone now...my own. If I didn't have to have it, I wouldn't!

In another related issue is the Nextel walkie-talkie feature. Not only is it annoying to see and hear people using this feature rather than holding a proper phone conversation (since we can now hear BOTH sides of the conversation) the chirp that it makes really bothers me. This is because I had a Nextel when I worked for the contract service company...every time that thing would chirp, I would cringe. It got so bad that at one point I thought I was going to go completely mad. All day long it would chirp with my boss or co-workers wanting something. Even to this day, hearing the Nextel chirp makes me shudder.

I suppose this is enough rambling for today...

Ask and ye shall receive...

I got an invite today in the mail from the HR department at work. It is an RSVP to attend the annual "Service Awards" banquet. For us office workers, it means that we have been employed by the RTA for a number of years evenly divisible by five.

This is my fifth year of working at the RTA. I have to say that it is the best job I have ever had. The strangest thing is that I kinda asked for it.

I used to work downtown for a law firm as their IT manager. I handled all the day to day maintenance of the servers, computers, phone system and the like. I even did more mundane things like court running, serving papers, refilling the copier, processing the mail and all that jazz.

While I worked there, I noticed a lot of activity at a building across the street from the building I worked in. Someone had bought the old, decrepit building and was doing a complete refurb on it. I didn't know who was doing it, but they were doing a great job of it.

I went to lunch one day with an attorney friend and on the way back to the office, we passed by the building on Third Street. We had to stop at a traffic light and I was able to get a pretty good look into the second floor window. A second floor room with lots of server cabinets.

I immediately thought to myself, "Boy, I'd like to work in a place like that. Lots of infrastructure to take care of."

Within a matter of weeks, I was contacted by a guy from a company who was desperate to get someone that knew Windows networking to maintain a couple of companies. His current guy left to pursue other interests. I was desperate to get out from under 'Frank'*. So, we hooked up, I got hired and went to work with the clients that he was desperate to service.

One of the clients was a company south of town that was owned by a Japanese conglomerate. They made glue for the auto industry and there were a lot of Japanese personnel there. This is where I picked up a few choice naughty Japanese words and first came into contact with the Japanese version of Windows.

The second company was the RTA.

Strangely enough, the RTA is the company that bought the downtown building that was being refurbished and the company that had the server cabinets on the second floor!

I have actually worked for the RTA for six years: one year as a part-time contractor working for the now defunct company I left the law firm for and five as a real, live employee.

After the company went under, my current boss immediately hired me in to be a permanent employee in the position I was working in anyhow.

So, I guess I asked for it.

My boss says that he only expects five years of work out of a person. Well, I'm not ready to leave. Sure, I have looked around to see what is out there and what the prevailing wages are and compare that to the pittance I make now. But, I have it pretty good where I am. We have great insurance, a great retirement plan, the salary isn't bad and me and Chris get away with absolute murder. Plus, my boss is pretty great, too. Ah, who am I kidding...I'm too lazy to look for another job!

I will never forget the first time I met my current boss those six years ago. He had planned a little verbal quiz to test my skills. He is a skeptic, which is great really, and doesn't necessarily trust everything any salesman says to him. In the case of my former boss from the now defunct company, this was wise.

He asked me if I knew what a RAID was.

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. A way of protecting data on a set of hard drives by using more than one, either striping the data across them or mirroring.

After I gave him the five-minute explanation, he had no more questions for me. :) I guess he must have been satisfied with my answer.

I'm just glad to be out from under 'Frank'*.

* When you think of 'Frank', envision Bill Lumbergh from Office Space. Then you will understand.

Evil is a Long Distance call...

I have a big interest in the phones and the phone company. I have always wanted to work for the phone company in a central office, and I would love to get my hands on a central office switch...like an AT&T 5ESS or Nortel DMS-100. Sure, playing with my Nortel Meridian PBXes at work and my Asterisk VoIP switch at home is cool, but I want to learn how the big boys do it. I try to learn all that I can about telecommunications technology, and any time I come across any news about telecom issues, I try to find out as much as I can about what is happening and how things work so I can get a good idea of what is going on.

There is a minor news story circulating about a town in Louisiana that was assigned a telephone prefix of 666. This seemed to be upsetting to a number of people in this small town, so they forced the phone company to get a new prefix. Their justification is that the number "666" is the mark of the beast. That is, the Devil.

This is not an old* a new story. I remember some years back a bible college in a town, I think in Virginia, got new phone lines and were assigned a 666 prefix. They didn't want it, so they asked their phone company for a different prefix, and the telco obliged.

NANPA is the North American Numbering Plan Administration. This is the company that is tasked with keeping our phone numbers straight, assigning new NPAs (area codes), handing out new central office codes (prefixes), and making sure there are enough numbers in an area code to cover the explosive growth of cellular phone users and what to do if an area code starts to run out. Their website is chock full of interesting information, and if you have any interest in how phone numbers are made, this is where to get your info. While NANPA covers the US and its possessions, it works closely with the CNA, or Canadian Numbering Administrator, to make sure everything is kosher since Canada is a plain old long distance call and has been fully integrated with our dialing plan since the late '40s.

I was bored, so I went to NANPA and CNA and did a little research on where there are active 666 prefixes in the US and Canada. I was surprised to find that there are 107 places that have 666 prefixes that are actively assigned. There are 115 records in all. Most of the remaining records have a status of "Unassignable", for whatever reason. This could mean that the people under the telco that wanted it in the first place found the prefix to be distasteful, so the telco returned it to NANPA and had it marked unassignable to prevent this from happening again.

It is just strange to me that some people go ape over the numbers "666" appearing in places. Phone numbers are more or less permanent, so I can kinda understand the issue there for believers since they don't want to be associated with the beast. But there are a number of stories out there of people coming unglued over a purchase at the megamart coming to $6.66. It is strange to me how people attach such significance to a number and/or its appearance. If the mark of the beast is "666", even though some are now suggesting that it is in fact "616", does this mean that it is six hundred sixty-six? Or is it a collection of three individual sixes? Why, then would a number 6.66 be construed as being evil? How about 6 ³³/₅₀?

The UPC barcode was developed by NCR here in Dayton, Ohio** IBM and first used in a grocery store in Troy, Ohio...a town a few miles north of Dayton. The barcode has three check stripes, one on either end and one in the middle, that assure proper orientation of the barcode to the computer. It just so happens that the spacing of the check codes is the same as the number 6 in the rest of the code. This, of course, proves that barcodes are evil and they they will surely be used as the new, futuristic mark of the beast. I have even seen a Christian-themed movie about the rapture and second coming that depicted the use of tattooed barcodes as a tracking mark required by the antichrist. Of course, everyone knows that UPC barcodes are not evil because they contain "666", but simply because they were developed here in Dayton. Duh!

I have been in numerous buildings, especially hotels, where there is no floor 13. Here we have again another superstitious phenomena attaching some type of spiritual significance to a number. In Asian cultures, the number 4 is considered bad luck, whilst 9 is the greatest of luck. People in Asia and other parts of the world have been known to shell out huge fortunes for license plates for their cars featuring strings of lucky numbers..."9999999" and so forth.

It is just strange how such spiritual significance can be attached to a number. And it is stranger still how the concept of lucky and unlucky numbers vary from culture to culture. How long have we been programming ourselves to consider 13 quite unlucky, and that 666 is the number of the beast?

I could understand that someone might be a little perturbed if they moved to a new town and were assigned the Devil's old phone number. Imagine the wrong number calls you'd get to that number! It is, though, seemingly apropos that 666 is a prefix assigned for use in Salem, Massachusetts, the site of the Salem Witch Trials back in late 17th century.

For a list of the locations in the US and Canada of the most evil phone numbers, check out a synopsis of the NANPA and CNA prefix data I have compiled at http://www.sassie.net/snet/eviltel.txt.

EvilTel would be a great name for a phone company...

* not an old story? Then how have I heard of one before? Corrected 12/31/07. Duh...I'm such a dingleberry...I guess I need to start proofreading.
** it was not, in fact, developed by NCR as I found out. I guess I should check my facts, too!

The Impending Alien Invasion

I complain to damn much about everything, so I've decided to try to not complain in my blog entries. Well, not complain as much. Like I said in my last post, I guess I am turning back into the unpleasant old curmudgeon that I used to be.

Anyhow, I read on CNN today...after reading about Benazir Bhutto's assassination, which came as a terrible and saddening shock to me and could thrust Pakistan back another 100 years politically...about the asteroid heading for Mars.

There is a 1 in 75 chance that the asteroid will hit Mars. And thankfully it is Mars and not Earth, which is a planet close to all of our hearts and our current optimal choice for a galactic residence. Astronomers are all excited about seeing an impact like this (maybe if it happens, perhaps) since they have not really seen one before. Sure the Shoemaker-Levy comet impact on Jupiter was cool, but that is a gas giant. There would be no crater left behind to look at and study.

Mars is awful close to us, and there are observatory satellites in orbit spying on our little red neighbor, so scientists and the general public alike are in a good position to see the impact and study how it affects the Martian environment. It has been said that the Tunguska blast in Siberian Russia around 100 years ago was an asteroid about this size. That blast flattened trees for 25 miles in every direction. If a similar event happened, say over New York, that could be very unpleasant indeed. By the asteroid hitting Mars, astronomers should get a pretty good idea of how a similar impact would affect our planet and what might be the best way to avert such an event.

Scientists are putting a lot of effort and money into looking for potential space-borne threats to our little planet. This, in my opinion, is a good idea. We can recover from certain threats, like wars and global warming and all that. These are things that we have brought upon ourselves, and we should be able to get ourselves out of these messes in relatively short order. A comet or asteroid...well, that is pretty much game over. Like in the movie Deep Impact, there would obviously be sort of a feeling of dreaded, depressing doom that there is not one thing that we can do to stop our eventual destruction. That would be a bummer of a feeling. I think if I was faced with this kind of situation, I would go out and buy a really expensive BMW because one of my goals is to have one before I pass from this earth, and with the Earth no more somehow I don't think bill collectors will be hounding me for the payments.

I remember back in high school I did an oral report in history class about UFOs and how they relate to conspiracy theories. It was a convenient subject, being that I live so close to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base...our area is rife with stories and theories about UFOs. "Hangar 18" on base being where they perhaps took the alien bodies and pieces of spacecraft after maybe crashing in Roswell and taken to "Area 51", and the supposed "nuclear reactor" that was "built to provide power" perhaps but never actually saw even a single atom of uranium because it was maybe built as a convenient cover for the alien tomb or perhaps not. In my report, using the principles of physics and optics, I explained how light can be manipulated by natural phenomena to appear to be alien in nature. I showed several video demonstrations involving lasers and interference patterns that can cause the light waves to bend, spread and converge in interesting and unique patterns...sort of conveniently explaining away what some people can believe are UFOs as tricks of the light.

In the many years that I have lived here, I have seen lots of weird stuff around the base. Strange lights floating around, bizarre "aircraft" taking off and landing, that kind of thing. But for those of us that have lived here for a while, it is all rote. We see these weird things and it doesn't faze any of us. I remember driving home from work one day, and as I exited the highway to get to my street, there were four stealth bombers on maneuvers over the base. It was great to see these huge planes flying around so gracefully with each other, the pilots being quite adept at some slick handling. But, again, while many that don't live so near the base would find this to be extremely exciting...something that they would only see if they lived in a war zone or at an air show...for us it is something that we see almost every day. It is old hat, status quo, same old same old. Meh.

I am a huge sci-fi fan, especially Star Trek. I'd like to believe there are aliens, and that one day we will all live in relative harmony with each other. Even though I would like to believe there are aliens, I have never seen anything that would serve as confirmation...in my mind...that aliens really exist.

When it comes to UFOs and aliens, I think there are six types of people:
1. The Non-Believers: These people don't believe in aliens, UFOs or the possibility of life elsewhere. Period.
2. The Agnostics: These people don't know what to believe, having no compelling evidence either way, and don't really care.
3. The Doubting Thomases: These people doubt that aliens exist, but are open minded enough that if they have compelling evidence presented to them, they could believe.
4. The Blind Faithful: These people like to believe that life exists elsewhere, but have never experienced anything truly bizarre and unusual and are generally on the lookout for proof that aliens exist...or at least an alien society slightly less screwed up than our own.
5. The Believers: These people believe that life exists elsewhere, and that UFOs are real, and have had one or more unusual experiences that they consider to be proof of same, but are not wholly and completely fanatical about it.
6. The Zealots: These people believe that UFOs and aliens are real, they have been here and contacted humans or have claimed they have been abducted by aliens and want to make sure everyone knows about their alien anal probe down to the last detail.

It isn't really a scientific approach to the issue, but something that I have been thinking about...at least inasmuch of trying to write an amusing blog entry. I like to think that I am in category 4. Nothing strange has ever happened to me, at least that I would consider to be alien contact, but I would like to think that we are not alone. I would certainly think that no sufficiently advanced civilization outside of our solar system would actually give a damn about us; in fact I would go as far to say that if there were alien societies elsewhere, they would probably want to stay as far away from us as possible.

One of my favorite all-time flicks is Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In one scene you see the inside of what is supposed to be Indianapolis ATC (air traffic control), with a controller (played by the always great Carl Weathers) managing a few flights. All of the sudden, radar indicates a signature with no transponder ID heading straight into the flight path of two commercial aircraft. The object is described in detail by the pilot, and the object does a close fly-by of the leading aircraft. The event is witnessed by the pilots of a second, trailing aircraft. Afterward, a seemingly important, Isaac Asimov-looking gentleman asks the controller to contact the pilots of both aircraft and ask if they want to report a UFO. The pilots eventually respond with what seems like a lot of trepidation that they would not like to file any reports of any kind.

I have to wonder how many unusual events like this go unreported by pilots. Certainly strange events like this have happened, and there have been reports few and far between. I think it may be taboo in the realm of airline pilots to talk about incidents like this. Is it because of the possibility that they may be made out to be freaks? Could their reports of strange incidents like this be construed as mental instability that could put their certification at risk? Since this is a pretty high-level connection to the government, how much does the government know about incidents of an alien nature? How much has been covered up? Somehow, I don't think we will ever know the truth...some people wouldn't be able to handle it.

I certainly hope that I now don't seem like a wacko or a freak to anyone that reads this diatribe, but I find all aspects of the UFO phenomenon, from the truth to the lies, the conspiracies, the zealots that preach of alien encounters and bizarre medical experiments, infinitely interesting.

Really, I'm just all about the BMW.