Category: Life

I went to Best Buy today to buy some hard drives for the Rice Tea movie. The way back by bus involves a stop over at the local Elmvale bus station.

While waiting at the station, my boyfriend was resting his head on my shoulders. He then wandered off to check the schedules. At this point, a crazy woman approached me. She said, and I quote,

If I saw my son kissing a gay man, I’d cut off both their heads [woman does slicing motion] and hope that they’d hit the ground at the same time.

Jay overhears this and comes over. I reply “I don’t care because I love him.” The crazy woman wanders off. We hadn’t kissed, but if there was any time to do it, this was it. I look at my boyfriend – “kiss?” And he gives me a great smooch. The woman is appalled and makes a grunting sound that would make Chewbaca proud. I then yell out “We can French kiss if you want!”

Artist’s Impression of Said Crazy Woman

There were young people by us, no older than 18. They laughed. So did we. The woman proceeded to tell the strangers around her about how horrible people we were. No point in getting upset over her, she evidently had some screws missing.

I just designed the emblem for Confcon 2010 for PhreakerD7 and ThoughtPhreaker. Hopefully it’ll be to their liking.

While I was waiting a prescription to be filled out at a pharmacy the other day, I heard the full conversation of a woman berating a worker for what was entirely the woman’s fault. She was insulting the employee, raising her voice, and generally failing at being an adult.

She walked past me after her tantrum was over. I let her know what I thought of her behaviour. She wasn’t pleased, and continued walking on.

A minute later I hear her high heels walking through the store. She was looking for me. She was quite angry, and asked if I worked at the store. I told her I didn’t. When she failed to succeed in belittling me in a manner she deemed satisfying, she stormed off.

I realize this wasn’t any of my business. However, it’s not right for people to insult others like that, and those workers in the interest of self-preservation are prohibited from standing up for themselves. Someone had to.

In this final segment about Websense, I’m going to show you how, as a web developer, you can prevent your site from being blocked. It all comes down to this PHP code which you can insert in the top of your web page:

<?php
  if (ereg("208.80..*..*", getenv('REMOTE_ADDR')))
     header("HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden");
?>

In the first line, we compare the IP address of the person visiting with the block used by Websense. If it matches, the second line stops the page from loading and issues an error to the client. Websense doesn’t see what’s on your site, and consequently, has no grounds on which to block it.

As far as user agent strings go, Websense spoofes its bots to appear like regular web traffic. Blocking on a basis of IP is the only way to go.

I’ve completed the first draft of the film script for Rice Tea. In this initial process, I concentrated on streamlining the story and shortened the dialog. Next up is revising it to make sure that it maintains audience interest and that its reverence for accurately depicting technology doesn’t get too anal.

Other Developments:

• “Rice Tea” won’t be the title of the film. It’ll be called something that sounds more related to the subject matter.
• Shooting is set for mid-July.
• The film will be free as in beer and as in speech. One key benefit of going this route is that it enables me to utilize an excellent variety of Copyleft and Creative Commons music.
• A community will be set up to enable third-party contributions to development. More on this later.