I meant to note this shortly after it happened, but I kept forgetting. Like maybe a month and a half to two months ago, I swear I had Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” in my head for five days straight.

Probably most of you didn’t know that I was out in California, but alas I’m back. Good to sleep in my own bed and drive my own car. The two weeks were stressful, due to projects at work, so it is really good to be back, though the stress won’t likely go away any time soon. The weather there was nice, but a little chilly at times. And I’ll complain that the water pressure in the corp apartments was quite lacking. I didn’t eat at as many cafe’s as I should have, but then again, I’ve eaten at most of them before. All in all a good trip, especially since I did a better job of networking this time, introducing myself to people I’ve only see on video conference or in email.

I have jury duty starting Monday, so that will be interesting. Here’s hoping I don’t oversleep. :)

I cannot tell people how to cut my hair to save my life. They get close/decent, but rarely do they do a really great cut. I swear the hair on the top of my head is like twice as long as it should be. It makes me want to fly home just so I can get a decent haircut. Or maybe it’s my hair changing, and it has to be cut differently than before. Man, I was super spoiled by my original barber, who cut my hair for 15 years…

Man, it’s been a long day. Had to get up at 5am to do work stuff. It’s a little after 4pm now. I still haven’t taken a shower yet today and lunch consisted of some dry Cheerios at just before 4. Probably a few more hours to go yet…

The weather finally warmed up this weekend, enough for me to go riding. Since I sort of poorly planned my Saturday, I only had time for a very short ride, I think about 20 minutes, before I needed to be back and get ready for a wedding I was going to. So, the first ride of the year’s a short one, but given how long it’s been, probably not the worst of ideas. I convinced myself to go out again today, which resulted in a 6 mile ride. Lunch on both days was pretty late, so by the time I was getting out, it was starting to cool off pretty well.

I hereby declare, that Georgia is no longer a Southern state, due to its citizens not knowing that there’s a dance to go along with the song, and thus of course the steps to said dance, effective this day, Saturday, February 7, 2009.

It only took nine months (and me calling them to again ask nicely for my money), but paypal finally refunded me the full amount they owed me. Woohoo!

Of course luck would have it that when I finally put my Netflix on hold, I would start watching movies again. I swear I’ve had the same three movies since I can’t remember when. But, this weekend, I was super bored, so I watched “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (which was good and cool ’cause it had Doris Day in it), “Psycho” (I don’t recall ever watching it in its entirety before, even though I saw it during my music appreciation course at A&M, and I slept through basically all of it :) ), “Black Snake Moan” (which was way better than expected), “Meet the Spartans” (which wasn’t as humorous as one would have liked), and “The Other Boleyn Girl” (which was pretty good — I watched it primarily because it was Focus Features film, but in the end, you can’t go wrong with both Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson :) ).

I didn’t watch what I can only imagine was 24 hour coverage of the Madoff Ponzi scheme, but I can imagine that everyone was absolutely livid about it. And to that, I can empathize. But social security is no different, and I think that people should be outraged just the same, yet they aren’t. What’s wrong with this picture?

A couple of weeks ago, I had an awesome idea (well of course I think it’s awesome, it’s my idea). Laurie was having some egregious virus/spyware problems. Problems almost to the point where I thought she’d either have to reinstall or take it somewhere and spend $$$. In the end, though, she was able to get it righted, and last I heard, all was mostly right with the world.

Several years ago I ran across Netsquid. Basically it “takes an Intrusion Detection System like Snort and transform it into an Intrusion Prevention System”. It sits between the internet and your computer, and tries its best to keep you from getting viruses, alerts you when you have one, and will shut you off from the network if you do have one.

I’d sort of forgotten about my idea, but recently there have been some very widespread viral activity. And since Microsoft seems neither to be able find a decent security model, nor find themselves with dwindling consumer market share, I ask myself, why haven’t all of the broadband router companies put this sort of functionality into their routers?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have Linux looking after you, even if your machine is running Windows? The virus protection is super easy and simple, as there are multiple anti-virus products for linux that are well maintained. Spyware gets more tricky, as I don’t think there are any decent spyware detectors for linux. Basically this device would act as your router, inspecting all of your traffic, disallowing viruses and spyware to enter your network, watching out for suspicious outgoing network activity (like noticing c&c traffic or secondary payloads), alerting you to the fact that there’s a problem, cutting you off from the internet (and possibly segregating you off from the rest of the local network), and keep you from visiting phishing sites (via Google’s Safe Browsing initiative). It’s like a trifecta of virus, spyware, and phishing protection.

Technically it’s probably pretty simple to whip up, but nothing I would feel like supporting for 100 million people. Anyone who reads this, implements it, and becomes rich off of it, please grant me some slice of the pie. :) kthxbye