The Zoo over Ambuscade Street

Required online Anti-Terrorist training is So Much More Fun with Erik on the phone. His answers are so completely not the answers the government is looking for from me - primarily variants on the "kick their collective asses!" theme. Erik's temper has become even hotter than mine, although he can't compare on the grudge-keeping. ^_^;;

Gracie O'Malley the Pirate Cat, in the course of pillaging the house (again) has started losing teeth. Cleverly, she's managed to do this in places where Erik walks barefoot - he's had two teeth embedded in his feet thus far. I'm amused.

As a completely random aside, my copy of Love Mode is reserved for me at TRSI. Yay! I have a terrifying number of manga titles ordered for November - October and December were managable, but I have roughly twice that number coming in next month.

No official word yet on Buck's move, but Fu-Master's is in motion, and the NMCI Machine Can Not Be Stopped. I hope.

Not that a short hallway and three doors is going to do anything to stop Fu-Master's voice, since he never learned the concept of the "indoor voice," but it might reduce it to a normal conversational volume.

And this article rocks. I don't go anywhere near those lengths to protect my non-work stuff, but I've considered it.

The attempt to render a child's point of view can read like a Sunday-school text crossed with Hemingway

Um - no. Thank you. One Hemingway was one too many, Hemingway-Sunday school pastiche would make me rip my own hair out so I could make a noose for myself with it.

And speaking of pastiche, reading Glen Cook's Garrett series has been quite entertaining - the books start out in finest hard-boiled detective fiction style, and gradually morph into Cook's more natural style - so gradually and naturally, in fact, that I didn't really note the change in style until I finished one book last night and immediately started on another. But it works well, and they're fun books (quick reads, too).

NMCI sucks. You can take this to be fact, graven in stone set down by the gods themselves. NMCI sucks. However, one particular statement really jumped out at me from this article:

“Any pop-up ad that appears in a webmail message could potentially contain a virus when it opens," she said. "An attachment that comes in from a webmail message could possibly bypass all the safeguards all the way to the user’s computer.” In addition, just opening a Web browser window to these commercial webmail sites can leave a computer open to outside attack.

Which is then followed by:

“You can still go to a search engine to look on the web and surf,” said Baber. “This won’t prevent any of that.”

Ow. Brain...broken. Contradition does...not...compute...

Now, I take off my security hat (because it's been pretty badly damaged), and put on my networking hat.

Now, completely hypothetically, I have a large group of users who share the same four computers. These users need to get to a website hypothetically run by the DOD to get information on a daily basis that is important (though not critical) for them to get their jobs done. Now, this hypothetical website requires two things: IP registration, and a client software. The second is a difficult but not insurmountable obstacle on NMCI. And it's difficult only if my users follow the rules. I can't tell them to break said rules, and it's possible that methods of circumventing said rules will, in the future, become impossible, but for now...

The first is more problematic. Said user must register their IP address, and so therefore must use the same IP address every time he wants to access the site. This requires that the machine have a static IP address. Under Previous Management (aka: me and my team), this was a simple process. Under NMCI? Completely and totally impossible. Absolutely no way to do it.

Should I mention that it's taken me over a month and untold hours on the phone to determine this? It's lovely being able to go home with the satified feeling of knowing you've earned your paycheck. At least, I assume it is.