Here are some loose ends that somehow manage to keep falling through the cracks (probably because I haven’t made the time to expand upon them:

$10,000 Safari flaw fixed. A recent security conference offered a $10,000 prize for an immediate successful hack. It was won by a hack of Safari using a MacBook Air by means of a Java script error. Apple sent out a fix that also covered a few other flaws. If you use the Net, you should check the Apple site regularly for fixes just to be safe. Hackers do, looking for open “doors” they can exploit before you close them…

House of Hackers is the name of a new “ethical” hacker association that attracted 1,100 new members within a week of its formation. They assume that “…all express admiration for the work of the most skilled, clever, unique, provocative, intelligent, intense, intriguing and interesting people in the human society.” They left out “modest”, “humble” and “egotistical”. Theoretically, they cooperate with security to ensure that “open doors” are discovered and closed before “evil” hackers discover and exploit them. Working so far…

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My wife, Dawn, sometimes clips or forwards things of interest for me to peruse at my leisure. Here’s one example taken from The Joy of Working by consultants Dennis Waitley and Reni Witt, reminding us that not even the most successful people succeed every time:

• The greatest quarterbacks complete only six out of ten passes.

• The best basketball players make only half their shots.

• Major league baseball players reach first base only about forty percent of the time—and that includes walks.

• Top oil companies, even with the consultation of expert geologists, find oil in only one in ten wells.

• A successful TV actor is turned down twenty-nine out of thirty times after auditioning for roles.

• Winners in the stock market make money on only two out of five investments.

So the next time you’re passed over for that big promotion or your great idea falls on deaf ears, remember that even Babe Ruth struck out far more often than he hit home runs. Keep swinging!

I got these from Jamie at Perr Bear. I didn’t fact check them, so don’t shoot the messenger if any don’t work…

• Peel a banana from the bottom and you won’t have to pick off the little “stringy things”. That’s how primates do it. And take your bananas apart when you get home from the store. If you leave them connected at the stem, they ripen faster.

• Store opened chunks of cheese in aluminum foil. It will stay fresh much longer and won’t mold!

• Peppers with three bumps on the bottom are sweeter and better for eating. Peppers with four bumps on the bottom are firmer and better for cooking.

• Add a teaspoon of water when cooking ground beef in the skillet. It will help pull the grease away from the meat.

• For richer scrambled eggs or omelets, add a couple spoonfuls of sour cream, cream cheese, or heavy cream before beating.

• For a cool brownie treat, make brownies as directed, then melt Andes mints in a double boiler and pour over warm brownies. Let set for a wonderful minty frosting.

• Add garlic immediately to a recipe for a light flavor and at the end of the recipe for a stronger garlic flavor.

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Here are a few of the things that slipped through the proverbial cracks this week but are still worth mentioning:

TechCrunch has two separate reader reports of a phishing scam targeting Facebook users. The scam involves a notice appearing on the wall of user profiles as a message from a friend saying, “Hey, I got a new facebook account. I’m going to delete this one, so add my new profile…” with a link that appears to direct to the new profile but actually directs to a URL on view-facebookprofiles.com, a domain registered (and whois protected) on Namecheap and hosted at Softlayer that looks identical to the Facebook login page. Users fooled into resubmitting their Facebook details on this page then have their Facebook accounts hijacked and all of their contacts receive a similar message, propagating the phishing scam. It’s not yet clear what the phishing scammers are planning on using the compromised accounts for or how far it has spread, but beware…

Adobe has launched a basic version of Adobe Photoshop available for free online. Photoshop Express will be completely Web-based so consumers can use it with any type of computer, operating system and browser. According to Yahoo! News, Adobe says providing Photoshop Express for free is part marketing and part a strategy to create up-sell opportunities. It hopes some customers will move from it to boxed software like its $99 Photoshop Elements or to a subscription-based version of Express that’s in the works. More…

Remember Apple’s Newton? It brought handwriting recognition to hand held computing years ago but never quite found its niche market. Well, Apple’s kept its patents viable and now seems poised to reintroduce it for Mac OSX, other applications and the iPhone according to a report by Arnold Kim for Mac Rumors. “Apple has started hiring for a new Handwriting Recognition Engineer. The job description specifically seeks someone who would be responsible for ‘advancing Apple’s handwriting recognition technology for Mac OS X’ and ‘to other applications and the iPhone.’”…

There you have it. I’ve cleared my desk and I’m taking the rest of the week off.

Got this from James. It was apparently taken in Norfolk, UK. No other info available. Seems kinda sweet, doesn’t it?

Here are a few of the things that slipped through the proverbial cracks this week but are still worth mentioning:

If you’re afraid of being in a bank during a bank robbery, don’t go to the bank on Friday mornings between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. …

TIVO Patent Upheld, Dish May Have to Disable DVR. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a ruling by a lower court that Dish Network DVRs infringe upon TiVO’s patent on a ‘multimedia time warping system’. According to some analysts, this could not only make Dish liable for damages, it could force them to shut down their DVR service, harming their customers. The patent in question has already been reexamined once and the ruling on appeal (PDF) was unanimous.”…

Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday she might be willing to garnish the wages of workers who refuse to buy health insurance to achieve coverage for all Americans. The New York senator has criticized presidential rival Barack Obama for pushing a health plan that would not require universal coverage…

One out of four children involved in a divorce and custody litigation undergoes the so-called Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), consisting of the manipulation of children by the custodial parent, who incessantly tries to turn them against the other parent by arousing in them feelings of hatred and contempt for the target parent…

Capturing images of fleeting events — a horse’s gallop, a bullet’s impact, an electron’s escape — is easy if you have the right equipment. Faster camera shutters used to be enough, but recently lasers have let physicists break the femto- and attosecond barriers, compressing the temporal resolution of images down to the time it takes light to cross a hydrogen atom…

When people bitched about the iPhone’s 3G sansness, one counter was that it didn’t matter, since AT&T’s 3G network was far from ubiquitous anyway. AT&T is stepping up on their end this year, planning on smothering another 80 cities in sticky, delicious 3Goodness for a total of 350 markets, and all of the top 100 cities. Topping it off, the whole thing will be HSUPA by mid-year, for snappier uploads in the 500-800 Kbps range (vs. HSDPA only, D standing for downlink). Next piece of the perfect mobile internet device puzzle: an iPhone that can use it…

And finally…

A survey claims that having an office romance actually improves your quality of work. Researchers found the thrill of a fling “raised energy levels and led to better professional capacity.” One in five people quizzed by Italian sexologist Serenella Salomoni admitted to an affair at work. “We discovered that people who had an office romance said they were happier, more energetic and more productive.” Nearly twice as many women as men admitted to having a fling in the workplace, Dr Salomoni added. One in three owned up to having a relationship with a superior to enhance their career.

Got this from James…

Here’s a sterling example of how to win a Darwin Award; float a live surge protector on a pair of flip-flops in the pool… while you’re in it! Seriously, how did these jackasses not kill themselves? Hmmm… Maybe they did. Look for them in the 2008 Darwins.

A new year means, among other things, cleaning out the old and starting fresh. And so it is with my desktop. I have scads of links scattered about that I intended to post but never got “a round tuit.” So before I drag them all to the trash and into virtual oblivion, I thought I might post a couple I thought were worthy but somehow slipped through the cracks:

Holiday Mixer

My mother-in-law, Pat, sent me this AP photo of the S.T. Griswold & Co. “Holiday Mixer.” Seems Griswold decorates one of its cement mixers every year and drives it around the town of Montpelier, Vermont, through New Year’s Eve churning up a unique mix of holiday cheer for local residents. It takes a crew of six a week to decorate the truck with more than 30,000 lights and, yes, the cement drum still turns! More info

Airstream Holiday Light Show

I don’t know how I missed this, but Denny Wilson didn’t. I know you’ve all seen the original video of the house that was decorated with lights and synched to Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s Wizards In Winter. There have been a few copies - other houses with lights synched to other TSO songs - but nothing as unique as this one:

There. My desktop is clean. I think I’ll take the rest of the day off.

                     Click to enlargeWhen told by Roman officials to surrender the Catholic church’s valuables, St. Lawrence brought the city’s poor and sick. “Here is the church’s treasure,” he said. Rome didn’t find this amusing and legend says that he was put to death in A.D. 258 by being roasted on a grate, although some scholars say he was more likely beheaded.

In either case, folks in southern Europe still mark this day every August 10. It is customary there to eat only cold meat in recognition of the reputed manner of his death. Fair weather on St. Lawrence’s Day presages a fair autumn. More 

Hey, whadaya know…

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

suck (2x)   hurt (1x)

“Hurt”!? Gee, I thought I’d at least rate a PG-13!

Well, it’s the last Friday of the month, time for a wrap-up of newsy things I never got around to posting…

Google is giving Microsoft headaches. For $50, they’ll give corporate users access to a suite of business applications that matches Microsoft’s Office. I’ve talked about Google’s Internet-based applications before and this is a big challenge to Bill Gates. He managed to hold off Netscape’s challenge to Internet Explorer, but Google has a lot more money and this is a much bigger deal, so the outcome of this battle is not so predictable…

The Net recently endured a massive DOS (denial of service) attack. There are 13 servers, called root servers, that are vital to all Net operations. In short, they digitize URL addresses. They were hit, all at once, by millions of requests for service; previously programmed via viruses into computers all over the world by unknown hackers to “hit” at a designated time with the obvious intent to close down the Internet. Operators were barely able to hang on; it’s generally agreed that no other service could have withstood such an attack. No one has claimed credit for the attack but many suspect China which hates the Net because it can’t control it…

Subatomic particles react with others at great distances compared to their size and no one knows how or why. So IBM is leveraging the phenomenon by creating a “grab free” message system. They’ve developed an encryption method that uses the photons (light particles) in fiber-optic cable. When a nefarious hacker attempts to intercept, or “grab”, a message, the photons that are displaced effectively “know” it and cause a complete message disconnect. The “grabber” gets nothing and the originator knows to send the message by another means…

Illegal software recently cost U.S. businesses $2 million in settlements. The Business Software Alliance (BSA) recently collected that much with just two months of effort. They relied on whistle-blowers and Internet sleuthing. Publicity about BSA’s effort has made believers of many IT managers who’ve decided that software copyright violations don’t save money in the long run. Worse, it’s embarrassing to have to explain to management why they were breaking the law…

Adobe is launching its full package in native Intel Mac. That’s Photoshop, InDesign and other tools in the CS3 package. Written for Intel Macs, they will be much faster than the current package which emulates the PC version. This comes just in time to benefit from the Mac OSX Leopard launch…

Music publishers aren’t buying Steve Jobs’ call to drop DRM (copy protection).  “Just because a lot of legacy music is out there without copy protection is no reason we should forego revenue on our new stuff…” And China doesn’t enforce intellectual property protection laws so any new music in demand is readily available from there soon after initial publication…

Hi, my name is Tim, or Joe, or Sam. Though we haven’t had a formal introduction I’m sure you know me, or at least what I represent here. I’m fat guys. I’m nerdy guys. I’m short guys, bald guys, dorky guys, spazzes, weirdos. Hobos, and guys without great jobs, cars, or clothes. I just wanted to take a second to talk to you about something very important to me, something it doesn’t seem that you realize:

If you are physically attractive and dress in such a way to grab the attention of attractive males, you will also grab the attention of us unattractive males… more

(From James via Best of Craigslist)

Michael D sends this bit o’ folklore…

Although the origin of playing practical jokes and pranks on this day is hazy, many folklorists believe that it may date back to 16th century France. At that time, New Year’s Day was March 25, with a full week of partying and exchanging gifts lasting until April 1. In 1582, the Gregorian calendar moved New Year’s Day back to January 1. Those who forgot or refused to honor the new calendar were the butts of jokes and ridicule.

And according to weather folklore, “If it thunders on All Fools’ Day, it brings good crops of corn and hay.”

It’s also my daughter-in-law’s birthday (No fooling!) Happy birthday, Kim!

Here are the stragglers, news I didn’t get around to posting this week… I still can’t bring myself to call them “leftovers…”

Circuit City says  it plans to cut 3,400 employees. And it’s also outsourcing its internal IT department to IBM. IBM will provide a range of information technology services, including data center management, help desk operations, network management, desktop support and security administration. The agreement covers more than 600 Circuit City stores and 43,000 U.S. employees. …

Sandisk announced a 4GB version of its microSDHC card, a new High Capacity (HC) version of their microSD. Two Verizon Wireless V Cast handsets, the LG VX9400 and LG VX8700,  are already compatible with the new standard. According to SanDisk, it will hold 4,000 photos or 16 hours of video.  Look for it at Verizon Wireless in May for $129.99…

Apple, Dell and Sony  have been added to a lawsuit filed by nonprofit  Washington Research Foundation according to financial news network Bloomberg. The lawsuit claims they infringed on four patents dealing with wireless data between computers and other devices. Logitech, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Plantronics are also named to the suit. I feel their pain. When it rains, it pours, doesn’t it?…  

According to (unnamed) “people familiar with the matter,” Web advertising company Double Click is talking with several potential suitors, including Microsoft,  about a possible sale. Private-equity firm Hellman & Friedman acquired Double Click in 2005 for ~$1.1 billion and  has since sold off a number of divisions. They are seeking at least $2 billion… 

BMW has prevailed over Infiniti in a court battle over Nissan’s misuse of the letter “M” to describe its cars. BMW has been adding M badges to souped-up versions of its high-performance cars (think M3, the M5, M6 and other variants) since 1978. Infiniti, meanwhile, more recently registered M45 and M35 as trademarks for its middle range sedans and offered an M6 sport package for its lower-priced G35…

It’s time again to file our income tax returns. Comes around every year and I’m never ready for it. If I’ve calculated properly during the year, I’ll owe about a dollar. We’ll see…