I was recently talking with a friend about the irritating game of chess that's been bothering me, and he had some good advice on a government group that might be able to help me. I filed a formal complaint with that entity, and we'll see what that gets me. If I can manage to avoid getting lawyers involved any more than they already are, and avoid losing large sums of money, that'll be a very good thing. So yeah, turn my pawn into a queen, please?

My bike is busted again. I would grumble, but I really can't -- I use that bike every day, and considering all the gas I'm saving, and the free small contributions to my health it provides continually, and how much fun it is to bike around, it's been good to me. It makes sense that I'm going to have bike problems more often than the casual rider (although of course less than people doing athletics). This time, the connector holding the handlebars to the frame of the bike looks like it's cracked. I noticed a few days ago when the bike was shifting under me in odd ways -- I thought it was ice. Later in the day, I noticed that the brakes appeared to be higher up than I remembered, but I chalked it up to bad memory.. eventually it broke enough that I took a closer look, and found that the handlebars now can freely rotate. Bleh. It's not busted enough that I can't ride it, for now, but there's the risk that it'll snap the rest of the way through and I'll have a nasty crash. Time to take it to Biketek again :)

Recently, I noticed my site slowing down again, and on investigating of the logs, found that my site is being slurped by various places with a .MIL extension in their domain name. One of the more unusual ones was *.nipr.mil .. What's NIPR? On a bit of googling, I found this:

Nipr.mil, as Francisco suspected, is not a single domain a but a hush-hush web proxy that acts as a gateway for hundreds of U.S. military domains in order to hide their identities. It was established by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in response to a memorandum (CM-5 1099, INFOCOM) issued in March 1999 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling for "actions to be taken to increase the readiness posture for Information Warfare." "Uncontrolled Internet connections," the document says, "pose a significant and unacceptable threat to all Department of Defense information systems and operations."

Umm... yeah. Maybe there's some military search engine they're setting up, or maybe the military likes me (in the same way google likes me). I actually would just find it a bit freaky if these were random user-type accesses, but at least one of them is either a search engine or an attempt to grab everything, and the bloody thing isn't paying attention to robots.txt. I guess I could cut off their IP, or their entire IP range(s).. Hmm.

Here's another commentary, from China, on the Taiwan issue. One thing I've been wondering is what the common Chinese think on the Taiwan issue. It's tempting to dismiss the stuff coming from the Chinese side as being government driven, but there have been actual protests by mainland chinese living here of Taiwan's condition (from their POV, rebellion). I can see national pride, and perhaps agreement with the PRC position that secession is not ever an option. I had an interesting discussion with my officemate, who is Taiwanese, on the issue yesterday..

Stumbled across this.. Pretty cool! It somehow has access to CMU's APs, and locates everyone.. I didn't know that APs were clever enough to get directional data like that.. They might triangulate, but I wouldn't think access points would normally tend to have the software to notice people not attached to them, and they apparently have a wide variety of APs. I wonder how it's done..

Oy, I have so much to do before the semester ends! I somehow need to make it back to cowtown to get my car soon too...

Reading, he looked up, saw a piece of bread, and reached out towawrds it, eyes returning to the book. Hmm... try again... still nothing. He looked up.. the bread wasn't there.. and then.. .. Reading, he looked up for a second, thinking for a moment he had food there.. Imagination does strange things. Back to the book.