Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

I’ve got a new short story, about black holes, astronomy, and redemption and prepared food, in the latest (August) issue, on newstands and in mailboxes now. Well, probably before now, I just got back from vacation. It looks like so:

Check it out.

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

I’ve always enjoyed his film criticism, and particularly his desire to find a way to use film criticism to elevate both film making and film watching. He’s a passionate advocate for the joy and awe of movies, and I’ve learned so much from him that even in disagreement I feel like I’ve learned something. I long enjoyed his occasional forays into essays on other subjects, and in recent years he’s written more and more about his life, his career in newspapers, and lately even creationism and his own Catholic upbringing. And sometimes in his essays, aided by his years of experience honing his writing, he manages these moments in his writing that make me shake my head in admiration.

And sometimes, he just totally cracks me up. Here’s him writing about Vincent, a Chicago guy who is the subject of a documentary, but in discussing it Ebert’s able to… well, here’s a long clip:

One person in the doc speculates that Vincent has spent a lot of his life being stigmatized and isolated, and the suits are a way of breaking down barriers. I confess that the first time I saw him, I saw a man with unfocused squinting eyes and a weird suit, and leaped to conclusions. But by the time I saw this documentary, things had changed in my life. Anyone seeing me walk down the street would notice an unsteady gait, a bandage around my neck, and my mouth sometimes gaping open. If they didn’t know me, they might assume I was the Village Idiot. You can easily imagine Vincent becoming an isolated agoraphobe, locked onto a computer screen. But he spends hours every day in the fresh air and sunshine, picking up that tan and getting lots of exercise.

That’s why I respond to Vincent, and applaud him. If people take one look at me and don’t approve of what they see, my position is: Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. So here is a man who likes to wear pimp suits and wave them at tour boats. So why not? What are the people on the boats so busy doing that they don’t have time for that? I suspect something like 99 percent of them are more entertained by Vincent than by the information that Mies van der Rohe designed the IBM Building, which stands across the street as an affront to the tinny new Trump Tower. As least they can smile and wave and tell the folks at home about that wacky guy they saw on the bridge.

Yeah. I love Ebert.

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

Vinny: “I always figured that at the end… you know…”
Jeff: “You would have to slit Yosuke’s throat because he had gone bad?”
Vinny, whispered: “That would be awesome.”

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

From the crits of my short story:
“It didn’t feel like one of your stories, and not because it was good.” — Mark
“I was waiting to find out if we were at a Renaissance Faire.” — Kira
“You could lose nine pages and I wouldn’t notice.”
and
“As a reader I hate it when characters are smarter than I am.” — Caren

Of course, that’s only fragmentary and quotes are funnier when they seem inadvertently negative, so that’s not how the crits went. But it’s still funny.

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

I love that when I try to get something 50% improbable working on the Mac, like get some crazy piece of unsupported hardware working, it’s so absolutely chilled out about it. It doesn’t flip out and blue screen or freak out and start throwing errors at me. It doesn’t work, doesn’t work, hey, it works. It’s 95% less stressful than doing equivalent tasks on the PC.

Which, not coincidentally, is now on my desk in pieces and unbootable.

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

Here’s Google Wave. It’s a crazy casserole of Twitter, IM, email, Facebook… but what it really is fascinates me.

Let’s say you’re a company that wants to compete against Microsoft. First, that’s just not a good idea in general, but the most viable strategy you have is to reduce whatever Microsoft product you’re going up against to a faceless widget and then build around it. You don’t want to fight SQL Server (or Oracle, for that matter). You want to fund open database alternatives, standards, and go build stuff that runs on any database… and hopefully Microsoft doesn’t envelop and destroy your value-add.

If you’re an airline, you want planes to be a commodity that consumers don’t care about. If you’re Boeing, you’d really love it if people demanded to fly on your planes, so instead you’re duking it out with Airbus and the things that compose and service your planes are what you’re trying to reduce to commodities.

If you’re Expedia, where I work, you want to have a huge catalog of shiny things, but if one of those things was soooo amazingly shiny everyone wanted it and only it, you’d be screwed. And that one hotel could charge whatever they wanted and make ridiculous money.

Twitter and Facebook right now both have early eBay like advantages: your friends are there, so if you want to hang out, you have to go there. Any competitor has to either build on or extend them (which is good for the platforms, because it builds their user base and enhances their features), or offer full compatibility and migrate people over, or offer something that doesn’t look like it’s competition until it’s too late.

Like Twitter v Facebook: Twitter’s this dumb, clunky thing, has some users, and then bam, suddenly everyone’s on it so everyone wants to be on it, and soon Facebook’s dumping things it does right to offer an experience closer to Twitter…

Anyway. So say you’re Google, and your business is essentially contextual ads. You don’t get to put those on Twitter feeds, and any revenue sharing with Facebook’s going to have to beat the spread they can get themselves. So why not just take a shot at destroying their entire ecosystem?

Because say Google Wave works. Then, like Gmail, they can try and offer the best interface to this new wonder commodity and slap their super-smart contextual ads on it, and they’re off to the races. Facebook’s built a Facebook platform, Twitter’s built a platform for social media jerks to auto-follow and spam each other continually, but Google Wave puts Twitter in the same bucket as the Twitter competitors, leveling them all, and then it makes your social network home irrelevant, because who cares if you’re using Facebook or MySpace if Wave helps suck up all the interesting stuff in them?

I don’t know if it’ll work… but it’s brilliant as a business move.

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

I was trying to get Win 7 set up so I could do some… well, it doesn’t matter, but it involved VMware Fusion, the Windows 7 RC, a lot of reboots, and a ton of me staring at Windows config screens and scratching my chin occasionally. Anyway, it felt more and more off, like there was something I just wasn’t getting, and I got a little more anxious each time I’d try and hook up a network resource and get stuck on the domain, or try some setting tweak that didn’t quite make sense.

A good hour in, I realized the sounds just barely audible over my Mac Mini’s almost-silent fan were actually music. iTunes had shuffled to “Absolutego” by Boris (in fact, “Absolutego - Special Low Frequency Version” which is described by allmusic thusly:

And talk about buildups, this thing starts with a full 25 minutes of heavily down-tuned bass rumblings and doom-instilling guitar feedback before the drums and vocals finally kick in with the big payoff. From there, the band moves through about 15 minutes of thick, fuzzed-out trance rock (again, mostly instrumental) before the drums exit again, leaving in their wake a howling, droning mass of layered guitar feedback. The sound of this is truly massive and unsettling. It takes a good 25 more minutes for the wreckage to clear and the track to finally wind down to a close — it seems strange to say it, but anything less would have seemed like an abrupt halt, such is the magnitude of this track.

Kids… don’t attempt troubleshooting while listening to stuff like this. With your concentration focused elsewhere, it’ll seep into things, melting your brain, and will mess you up severely.

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

Here.

HOST: Is there some cost to you, psychologically or emotionally, in using these techniques?

TONY: Yes. When I came back I was experiencing intense guilt. I’m still dealing with that, and I think that any sane person put in the situation that I was of brutalizing a helpless person, it doesn’t matter who they are, you’re going to suffer psychological consequences. A friend of mine trained with me as an interrogator and trained in Arabic with me. She was sent to Iraq and asked to use these harsh techniques in the interrogation booth in Tal Afar. She refused, twice. She was ultimately taken off of her post. She… she killed herself rather than use these techniques. We’re asking our young servicemen and women to make a choice. To torture people or destroy themselves, and I don’t think that’s how we want to treat our service people.

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

I always do a little eye roll when I see crazy spec ads or package designs for cool products. Yeah, it’s great, you did a funny ad for condoms. I’m sure it made your friends laugh. I’ll throw it on the pile of funny ads for condoms. What else do you have? Quirky wine labels! Outstanding.

What I’m really interested in seeing is how you do something difficult.

#3, I Hate It When by Stefanie Stalder made me happy.

To criticize, it might be a little too much of the “clean look with text” thing. But our of those four, it’s not the most eye-catching or obviously clever. But wouldn’t you hire the person trying to find more difficult challenges and solve them?

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

Andrew Sullivan

One way to look at how the Bush administration redefined torture out of existence, so that it could, er, torture human beings, is to compare their criteria for “enhanced interrogation” with those for rape. Raping someone need not leave any long-term physical scars; it certainly doesn’t permanently impair any bodily organ; it has no uniquely graphic dimensions …. and although it’s cruel, it’s hardly unusual….

So ask yourself: if Abu Zubaydah had been raped 83 times, would we be talking about no legal consequences for his rapist - or the people who monitored and authorized the rape?

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

So the moon book… I wrote a new chapter two this weekend, and it’s all about thrilling stuff like server virtualization, network design, and other deeply geeky stuff. It’s probably totally hilarious and awesome to everyone who’s worked tech support or at a deeply underfunded school or government agency, and I’m equally sure any future editor’s going to read it, frown, and cross through the whole thing with a red pen.

And then I’ll publish it as the author’s cut or or something. Go all Piers Anthony “What of Earth” style.

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

My Mac Mini project is complete. I am soooo loving it. I’m already barely using my dying PC after only a few days, which is surprising. So here’s the scoop.

1: bought a Mini.
2: bought an ergonomic USB keyboard + mouse, hard drive, and the wrong RAM. What I should have bought was *204* pin RAM, not 240. I can’t believe I did that. It was a great moment when I got the case open (there’s a reason Apple considers it not user-serviceable)
3: installed the better hard drive
4: ordered and waited for the right memory, installed it

I really want to put some kind of massive super-antenna on it now, but I’m going to let that go.

What I ended up with is a fantastically quick, stable-as-a-rock, silent Mac that makes writing or doing dev work a pleasant, quiet activity. I love it, and doing a lot of the work myself, it cost less than I’d figured it’d end up taking to get my PC back up. Sometimes being a geek pays off.

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

Writing business plans is like writing a strange, high-level spec that causes my stomach to flip over a lot with anxiety.

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

A business plan for black hats with a modicum of patience
–
1. Wait for one of the URL-shortening services that has no revenue model to go under.
2. Buy it for $1
3. Buy an exploit for which there’s no patch yet (or wait for a patch release, hire someone to compile it)
4. Insert a new advertising interstitial page with the malware payload, so everyone who hits http:/evilu.rl/as29_1 gets pushed to the malware page and then on to their destination
5. Ta-da! The internet’s deep reservoir of existing unverifiable links now feeds directly into your malware factory and only the most paranoid users (who are likely not clicking on blind links anyway) will stay away.

For added evilness, load the malware only on the redirect to certain sites, which will then be blamed.

The great thing about this is that it’s hard to buy up an existing domain with as wide of an existing link exposure, and really hard to build that kind of link network naturally. It’s almost worth building something like is.gd and shaving one or two characters, launching it, and then waiting.

Until someone implements the short URL RFC or otherwise standardizes trustworthy short URLs, this is going to be tempting bad people.

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to bike to work safely for a while now, and downtown Bellevue’s entirely resisted my efforts.

I’m relieved, then, to see that the Downtown Bellevue bike map could almost be replaced with “don’t”:

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

From Caren’s excellent post “What I Have Learned Reading Slush” which I recommend in total. One of them, though, demands further commentary:

10. This line, while usually meant well, is almost always a bad idea: “I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.” This is because I, too, am a writer, and my personal experience is that everything I have ever enjoyed writing personally was always really, really bad. If you have more fun than I do—that’s great. But telling me is going to make me suspicious when I first start reading.

Yeah. Here’s the dirty secret about writing: it’s a fucking horrible experience if you’re doing it well. Writing, say, “Usurpers” I typed, randomly took notes longhand, thought about the story all the time, and felt this world-destroying anxiety about it. To get the rhythm (and the rhythm breaks) down I read it out loud to myself over and over. By the time it went to Asimov’s, I’d read the story out loud to myself 50, 60 times. And every time during a reading I’d tick off a mark each time the flow broke, and each mark would end up being an intense and sometimes far-reaching re-write. That story’s written within an inch of its life, and by the time I was done I had to step away for a while to gain any perspective on whether it was worth sending out or not.

Or my book — when I was done with revisions, there was a point where I wanted to discard it entirely. I’d read the stories so many times they seemed worn, the jokes didn’t survive a hundred readings, and my editor’s assistant told me “Well Derek, no book is truly finished until the author is disgusted with it.”

There’s joy and satisfaction in a piece well-written, but it’s a job, a fucking job, where re-writing is more important than inspiration. The sword-maker doesn’t say “woo-hoo!” when they pull that steel out of the forge and then hope people think it’s awesome. That’s only the start of the work, pounding and folding and shaping, and absolute concentration.

My best writing involved me fighting anxiety the whole time about whether it would turn out awful or great, if I was putting too much of myself into it and would be embarrassed, if I’d gone too far. It’s a scary constricting feeling in the chest, difficulty swallowing, and a massive tightness of stress across my shoulders. If I want glee and happy fun smile time, I’ll go read something. That’s not what writing’s for.

I wouldn’t ever write “I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed writing it”. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

Originally published at Hate Life, Will Travel. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been trying to figure out some PC issues for a while now and I’ll push this to the cloud so some future generation doesn’t have to face this.

Symptoms:
- lot of blue-screen errors
- lot of dead processes, many of them off on rundll32.exe
- weird connectivity issues (DNS timeouts, pages not loading)
- then this week, a couple of weird pop-up issues

Now here’s the thing… I run full antivirus, firewall, the whole kit and kaboodle, and I practice safe computing. I haven’t had any kind of issue like this in ten years, easily.

Interestingly, because I don’t use IE much, I didn’t notice what was going on for a long time, because that’s where it fires off all the pop-up windows (etc).

Anyway, the tale continues.

There are many weird entries in my startup:
yodokuge, rundll32.exe c:\windows\system32\yodokuge.dll”,b
yojinafi, rundll32.exe c:\windows\system32\yojinafi.dll”,s
yodokuge, rundll32.exe c:\windows\system32\yodokuge.dll”,b
munemume, rundll32.exe c:\windows\system32\munemume.dll”,a

Information on this is scant. Here’s a McAffe post on the last one. This is intentional, of course: they’re using randomly-generated names to make them harder to detect and, presumably, harder to troubleshoot.

And it’s all over the place. When I run Hijack This!, there’s a ton of this:

O2 - BHO: (no name) - {4c9e468c-2390-4182-91ff-0f82b3d9ee48} - C:\WINDOWS\system32\vupeteho.dll

O20 - AppInit_DLLs: C:\PROGRA~1\Google\GOOGLE~1\GOEC62~1.DLL C:\WINDOWS\system32\hewalote.dll c:\windows\system32\femawiko.dll c:\windows\system32\munemume.dll
O21 - SSODL: SSODL - {EC43E3FD-5C60-46a6-97D7-E0B85DBDD6C4} - c:\windows\system32\munemume.dll
O22 - SharedTaskScheduler: STS - {EC43E3FD-5C60-46a6-97D7-E0B85DBDD6C4} - c:\windows\system32\munemume.dll

That thing wants to be run in the worst way.

I believe that this is “Vundo.H” which is… well, check out Google… there’s a lot of people who are just hosed.

First, and I can’t recommend this highly enough, if you have a clean box, use it to do the research and potentially the downloading/CD burning/etc you’ll require. There’s going to be a lot of rebooting ahead of you.

Figuring out what you’ve come down with
- crack open task manager, and look for any strange rundll32.exe processes you see.
- scan the process list for any other unfamiliar process names
- open up msconfig (windows-R, type msconfig) and look through the startup list. You should see a bunch of weird rundll32 items.
- if you’ve got it, run Hijack This! which will produce a sweet log file you can scour.
- scour that log file

Optional
- Fix yourself a cold beverage, because this is going to take a while

Tools
- Hijack This!
- I used Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware 1.36

Fixing (how I finally got it to work, your mileage will vary)
1. In task manager, try and kill off the weird rundll32 processes. You may have no success as they spawn new ones, but if it works it’ll save you a lot of trouble down the line
2. Run your anti-malware tool of choice. The first time through, you’re probably not going to make much progress, so do the quick scan, it’ll find like ~20 things in memory/startup/whatever. Fix them. It’ll ask you to reboot. Don’t.
3. If you can, run a full anti-virus scan, with updated definitions and everything. Hopefully it’ll turn up a metric ton of files with names like wuwuaua.dll.bak and so on, and be able to nuke them.
4. Reboot in safe mode. Run a set of full scans. Fix everything.
5. Repeat step 4 until nothing comes up. This will take a couple of cycles.

It took me pretty much a whole evening to fix, though obviously you’re not involved the whole time. I watched a baseball game. Each time you go through the cycle, you’re eliminating places the files can live, ways it can load, and closing off places it can go.

And some of the loops… like the extremely thorough virus scan I just did, take a long, long time (35h). But it finally came up clean.

Anyway, so yeah, future generations: be persistent, patient, and you can win. But if you just wipe, reinstall everything, and go on your merry way, well, I wouldn’t blame you.