because ... well ... why the hell not ...?

it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

Monday, June 17th

_7:51AM

Ports of Passion:

While everybody else has been out filming (or being filmed), I've been hanging out here going through the legal documents and relevant statutes for the Property Owner's Association out here (the previous board of directors had put big 'X's with masking tape on the undersides of a few chairs at the annual meeting; those of us who sat in the marked chairs were "elected" to be the new board of directors; I happened to be one of the "winners"--like I really needed to be on yet another board of directors) and overhauling the access lists on the pair of Cisco 3620 routers I use out here.

On the plus side, it seemed a good time to get caught up on that--all of the latest batch of Sun Ultra machines are now configured and running smoothly--but on the negative side, the trials and tribulations involved in refining access lists don't generally make all that exciting reading. I'm sure someone could come out with a more popularized book like "Access Lists for Dummies," but the fundamental problem with that is that then we'd have people's access lists being set up by dummies, and that's a slippery slope we just don't want to start sliding down.

Of course, instead of spitting out "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Optimizing Cisco Access Lists for Security and Efficiency" maybe I should just rewrite Cisco's documentation in a way that is more exciting. Hmmmm....

Roughly, almost hungrily, the mysterious Count Monty Cisco pulled aside the lowly server's filters, leaving her quivering tcp ports open and unprotected....

Okay, maybe "Configuring Cisco Routers, the Harlequin edition" is something whose time has not yet arrived.

I'll check again next week; I'll let you know if this situation changes any.

But, speaking of filters, passionate or otherwise, it's both amusing and more than a little flattering that Metafilter.Com has spawned at least a little message thread about me: [ http://www.metafilter.com/comments.mefi/17855 ] I was tempted to comment on it myself, but the site's not accepting new members at this time, so we'll just have to see what they eventually come up with as being the correct pronunciation of my name.

In the meantime, if you get impatient waiting for the Harlequin Guide to Cisco Configuration to come out, you can always check out RouterGod's Celebrity Lecture Series, "Don King Explains IP Extended Access Lists" [ http://www.routergod.com/donking/ ]

Saturday, June 15th

_18:02PM

Jingle all the Way:

"Given extreme wildfire conditions, Jefferson County wants to keep the gateway to the Rockies fire free this summer." -- Jefferson County, one of four counties in Colorado with large areas already evacuated from the 102,000-acre-and-growing Hayman Fire, wants your help in battling what's already become the worst fire season in recorded Colorado history (and the "fire season" has only officially started today). Don't worry if you're not feeling up to digging trenches and wielding a fire axe for twelve hours at a time, because what Jefferson County is really looking for to combat wildfires is a new anti-fire advertising jingle.

I don't know why nobody else had thought of such an approach. Gathering around a campfire and singing a few happy songs is kind of a tradition and, though it's never been known before to be an effective way of putting out said campfires, it's never hurt either.

Unless, I suppose, one or more of the other people in the camp really doesn't like your choice of tunes.

But if you want to join in the fight against wildfires or would just like to get a nifty prize presented to you by Jefferson County, why not send your best anti-forest-fire jingle to the Jefferson County Wildfire Prevention Jingle Contest: [ http://206.247.49.21/ext/dpt/coadm/pubinfo/wildfirecontest/index.htm ]

Thursday, June 13th

_11:43AM

Slice of Life:

More than a year after I'd whipped up the Visible Barbie Project [ http://www.trygve.com/visible_barbie.html ] it's still one of the most popular pages here on Trygve.Com, so it's mildly ironic that, at least in my own small way, I've ended up having something to do with the new, improved version of the real Visible Human Project, being developed over at the Center for Human Simulation at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center [ http://www.uchsc.edu/sm/chs/gallery/gallery.htm ]

Laura VanTine (shown to the right) has been creating the new 3D exterior layer (skin, hair, that kind of stuff) for the updated Visible Human using Maya and the "Shapesnatcher Suite" 3D-capture software package from Eyetronics [ http://www.eyetronics.com/index2.html ]. Fortunately, her part in this effort doesn't involve slicing anybody. Even if she does have a medical background, I'd still figure that this way it's a little easier on the stomach.

My own rather tangential involvement is a lot less exciting: I'd just put together the computer hardware that's used for building the model and my servers out here are getting used for moving the completed files that represent the 3D objects and texture maps back and forth between Laura and the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. Even so, I find it amusing that, lurking beneath the files that make up Visible Barbie, there are some of the parts that make up the new Visible Human dataset.

Now, if you'd seen the Visible Barbie Project, you'd know I'm not nearly as well set up for slicing cadavers (or, actually, as they're doing in the new version, sanding them) as the UCHSC, so for one of my own projects that required thinly-sliced body parts, I decided to outsource the slicing part.

...to the grocery store deli department. I happened to notice a loaf of head cheese lurking behind the counter when I was at the grocer's, so I had the deli operator cut off four slices, ringing up at a whopping buck-fifty. That might not sound like much, but it's the most I'd ever spent on head cheese in my life...by, um, about a buck-fifty margin. But, now armed with a veritable headcheese armada--and I do mean "armed"; I'm sure there are very few deli items more capable of fending off a queasy-stomached attacker than a sharpened slice of head cheese--I left the puzzled deli manager behind (well, yeah, I did explain that I only needed them for photographic purposes) and embarked on my own project of adding tilable head cheese to the web deli: [ http://www.trygve.com/headcheese.html ]

Now that I've completed that project, I haven't figured out a suitable, safe disposal method for either the most photogenic slice of the lot or its three runners-up. Maybe the EPA has some guidelines for this kind of thing. Right now it's still lurking in the back of my fridge, waiting for the perfect moment to strike...or to be thrown out, whichever happens first.

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