The Catch All

You ever hear that saying, “Ya can’t polish a turd?”, well, it’s an oldie but a goodie. Earlier in the month, Apple released Safari 3 to the world, including us Windows users. I played with it for a little bit, had some likes (uses almost the whole screen, built in spell-check) and dislikes (doesn’t show link location when hovering, smooths fonts way too much), but one contest in particular has really shown the turdiness of Safari.

In this years PWN 2 OWN contest, a contest in which hackers must use/develop a zero day exploit to take control of a computer. The operating systems that were available were Windows Vista, Mac OSX, and Ubuntu 7.10. Well, the Mac was taken over in 2 minutes flat because of a vulnerability in the Safari browser. A line of java code that ran without the user having to click anything. Coincidentally, the hacker says that the same attack wouldn’t have worked on a Vista machine running Safari, but for now, I’ll just stick with the trusty FireFox and the No Script add-on.

I know I haven’t written much in the last month, but fear not, I shall start again with a somewhat exciting post.

On February 25th, I took myself and my ‘03 Honda CBR600RR to the track to meet with some friends, associates, online forum friends, what-have-you. The plan was to have a good ol’ time (which we did) my riding our motorcycles as fast and aggressively as we could.

I had a few mishaps on my trip to the track. I stopped in Georgia to fill up my bike and my gas can and my gas cap is not the standard locking gas cap on a hinge that most bikes have. No, mine is a Vortex “race” gas cap. It simply screws on and off. Well, I screwed it off to fill the tank and left the cap on my tank as I went inside to pay. When I came back out, I simply hopped in the truck and left. About 5 miles down the road it dawned on me that I had not screwed my cap back on so I turned around to head back to the gas station to look for it (after securing the unsealed hole with, what else, duct-tape). I walked around the gas station and up one side of the on-ramp and back down the other side to no avail. My gas cap was gone and I thought that my weekend was going to be over before it even started. I called Jim West and thankfully, he had the same gas cap as I had and was going to let me borrow it since we were in different groups. This was later alleviated as I was told of a motorcycle salvage yard 10 miles away from the track. Thankfully, they had a gas cap.

Enough with the sob story, let’s get to the meat and potatoes of this post: the experience. I stayed the night at the track, in a tent. Not the most comfortable solution, but it was good enough, and it was cheap, both of which I am a fan of.

I learned a great deal about my riding and what I need to work on while at Talladega. I owe a lot to Chris, who offered to follow me, make note of what I was doing wrong, and then tell me how to improve. Most deal with body positioning, not setting up for a turn in one step instead of two, and hitting the apexes of turns. I’ll get to work on improving all of these things when myself and two friends head to Barber Motorsports Park later in the month.

Of course, I have a few pictures, thanks to Kelly at Motion Works Photo.

Think again?

 I was logging on to my Xbox Live account on xbox.com when I got this error message (Click to see Full Version):

Hmm?

Summed up in the face of a child.

Well, it was a valiant effort Mr. Thompson, but you just didn’t make the cut.

Fred Thompson officially announced that we had dropped out of the race today, per his official statement:

“Today I have withdrawn my candidacy for President of the United States. I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort. Jeri and I will always be grateful for the encouragement and friendship of so many wonderful people.”

He never impressed me, seemed like everything he said was pretty scripted, and he’s not even from Tennessee.

Read the rest of the story here.