Yesterday, or was it today? I was riding my bike to work/school in the middle of the snowing, and the sky was white, the land was white... I felt like I was in the midst of the veins of a huge snowman. I'm ... a little bit tired. Rock climbing makes me sore, and school plus work is tiring. Joy. I am, however, kept afloat by the love of the one I love.

Na klar, a bit of levity helps too. I've been reading about continuing efforts by the U.S. military to simulate the entire world. It reminds me of some science-fiction novels I read, especially Tad Williams' Otherland series.

I caught wind of this, and feel a deep urge to study and break it.

Sometimes you hear about things that make you think, "How the fnord did they do that? That's neat!" This briefly made me think I was having one of those moments, but it turned out to be noting novel. The ability to mark pages of memory as execute-only is something a lot of other (non-x86) CPUs do. It's a good thing, clearly, but it's nothing new.. and in the age of modern languages, where data has legs and native code isn't the only code (interpreters and virtual machines), such techniques are less effective. To be very concrete, big parts of MS Office are written in VBScript, and while you can protect the VBScript interpreter with such things, that's of little consolation when you can tweak the script.. because guess what? It's data, and it controls program flow far more than the variable data that was pretty much the only kind of data yesteryear. Buffer overflows will still happen, they're just a little bit more restrained in what they can do.

Today, I had a conversation with a friend on IM, and I recalled a prior IM conversation with someone else on the idea of 'vice capitals' for countries.. He's going to be in NYC this summer working for the ADL this summer. I suggested that NYC was the vice capital of the United States, in that while DC represents best the special interests, politics, and such of the United States, NYC best represents the Kultur. He, perhaps jokingly, suggested that Las Vegas would be a better candicate. Maybe he's right -- it certainly fits better with the European stereotype of Americans.. Things to think about... in what ways are New York City and Las Vegas different and similar?

CNN reported on something that's about 25 feet from my office.

Sadly, it looks like the elections in Iran, although with low turnout, ended up winning a lot of conservatives positions. Conservativism here is alive and well. I won't be surprised if a day comes where it'll be illegal for me to say FUCK in my BLOG, here in the U.S.

Gotta go