raindrop on leaf - This is one of the most remarkable images I have seen in a while!

st. james park; church and king, downtown toronto.
the morning rain was followed by a great weaher this evening and while coming back home from work i noticed these big raindrops that were gathered on the leaves.

I really like Mediterranean Food. It looks like I’ve got another place to try out besides Aladdin’s Eatery. And! They even have respectable hot sauce, it seems! mmm…spicy kafta rolled.

If you do happen to go to Aladdin’s, try the Almaza - it’s a Lebanese beer that is quite good.

I learned how to tie the Pratt Knot last night - also sometimes referred to as the shelby knot. The reason for the descretion is apparently Jerry Pratt, its American inventor, used the knot for thirty years before Don Shelby publicised it on local television. It came about in the New York Times and Daily Telegraph in 1989.

In any case, I was recently informed that the Windsor knot is slightly dated for the “modern man” and is also quite a big knot. With the Pratt, you not only get a slightly smaller knot (good for those medium-bodied ties), but also a nice little dimple in your tie just below the knot. It’s bugging me out a little bit, though, because you end up with the small end facing the wrong way. I realize that you can’t see it and you could even twist it if you wanted to, but the fact that the knot is originally designed to flaunt symmetry is difficult for my logical mind to process and stop thinking about. We’ll see how it goes.

I drove by this accident about a half-hour after it happened yesterday.

For those not wanting to click the link, a motorcyclist collided with a mini-van and the rider (not wearing a helmet) did not make it. This happened right across from the entrance to my hotel, so I got a good, close look at the scene on my way to the client. Not the way I wanted to start my morning, nevermind the poor guy on the ground.

This is almost like the other morning when I was driving to South Bend, IN. I saw a dirt cloud rise up on the median about a quarter mile ahead of me. Realizing there might be an accident in progress, I slowed down. By the time I reached the area, traffic was still moving, but I looked across the median to see a car on the other side of the highway, facing oncoming traffic, with an 18-wheeler bearing down on it! Luckily, the truck driver must have slowed down initially as well, because he was able to stop, but not by much more than a couple feet in front of your car. Not a sight I’d like to see after pulling a few (?) 360’s across the highway median.

Hopefully, today will be uneventful!

I’ll be at defcon this weekend in Vegas. It’s usually a good time - last year I took a helicopter over the strip (which banked over the Luxor), hit up a foam party, and generally enjoyed myself. I plan to do much of the same again this year.

Some good things to remember when you get in an argument or heated discussion. These are either things to avoid, or things to watch out for in order to avoid the ongoing abuse in our conversations.

via Jon Galloway - a 4th grade teacher is teaching some important lessons.

Here are the rules:
Each week, you get a salary of funny money (I think it can vary depending on grades and behavior, but the details aren’t important). There are cheap, flashy toys you can buy with your funny money.

Catch number one: You must pay rent on your desk. The rent turns out to be a significant amount of the funny money.

Catch number two: You can save up and buy your desk. This takes several weeks of saving. After you’ve bought your desk, you no longer pay rent, so you’ve got more money each week.

Catch number three (my favorite): After you’ve bought your desk, you can buy another student’s desk. They must pay you rent (unless they save up and buy the desk).

What’s funny is that the same thing happens every year - the boys blow all their money on the flashy toys, while the girls all save up and buy their desks. Then the girls buy the boys’ desks. Then the girls buy all the best goodies. The boys get outraged at having to pay rent to a girl, and that the girls have all the money.

Interesting results, too…

I was having some problems today setting up a Cisco PIX 6.3.3 for remote access using the Cisco VPN client. I am using the Windows Server 2003 Internet Authentication Service to handle user authentication, for which Cisco has excellent documentation on setting up.

I hit a couple snags.

First, I wasn’t able to use the Client-Friendly-Name parameter when defining the remote access policy. For some reason, it was not picking up *Pix. When I used Client-IP-Address, that worked fine.

Second, I would be able to auth, but the connection would hang at the “Securing communication channel” stage. Unfortunately I had forgotten to add the dynamic crypto map set into a static crypto map set. Oops. The following command fixed things up:
crypto map mymap 10 ipsec-isakmp dynamic dynmap

Now I just need to get all my ACL’s set up properly so I can go where I want to.

I just installed Debian (again) and had to look around again to find out how to stop using 100dpi fonts, which are too big for my liking. I finally found a thread on Google Groups that mentioned the files to change.

This default can be modified by editing the following conffiles:
xdm /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers (see xdm(1))
xfs /etc/X11/fs/config (see xfs(1))
xinit /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc (see xinit(1))

Ah, much better.

whoa…liquorice altoids:

Maybe at a store near you…