St. Andrew's Day

Today is St. Andrew's Day. St. Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland. St. Andrew's Day is the Scottish equivalent to St. Patrick's Day, though it is far less well known in North America. Ironically, St. Andrew's Day is celebrated more by ex-patriot Scots than native Scots. (This is probably why St. Andrew's Day is a little bit better known outside of Scotland than St. George's Day for England — April 23 — or St. David's Day for Wales — March 1). My mother, a Scottish nationalist, was always a little bit disappointed that I missed being born on St. Andrew's Day by a few hours.

This St. Andrew's Day I find myself thinking about my "roots" and my national identity.

Yesterday, the Canadian government fell. American media outlets that don't understand such things seemed to imply a collapse of governmental order. This isn't the case. The ruling party, the Liberals, were in a minority situation, meaning that they had more seats in the House of Commons than any other party (so they formed the government) but fewer seats than all the other parties combined. Certain pieces of legislation, when voted on and defeated, can result in a call for a "non-confidence vote". If the majority of parliament votes for "non-confidence", the governing party is required to ask the Governor-General to dissolve parliament, and an election campaign gets under way. This is the same as any other election campaign, but it's brought about by the minority government.

Okay, so much for the Canadian civics lesson. I heard about the non-confidence vote when I was channel surfing Monday night and came across the C-SPAN coverage of the vote from the CBC. I didn't know it was coming, though the Canadian government apparently did. This highlighted how out of touch I am with Canadian news.

When I first moved to Monroe, LA, I read the Toronto Star (where I used to work) online. After a while I stopped, partly out of homesickness and mostly out of a lessening connection with the city. Now I'm woefully ignorant of Canadian current events (except for what little filters through via The Daily Show, or the Colbert Report, both of which had hilarious segments on Canada last night).

I didn't really think of myself as Canadian until I was in my twenties. I was born in Scotland and grew up in a Scottish family. Until high school, my best friend was an English immigrant so the two of us revelled in our "not Canadian-ness". Now that I no longer live in Canada, I find I'm losing my Canadian identity. I am a Canadian Football fan, but you just don't see the games down here. (More specifically, I'm a Toronto Argonauts fan. Torontonians bug the hell out of me by going out of their way to ignore the CFL. Instead of watching some of the most exciting football on the planet, they'd rather watch a dull NFL exhibition game. End of rant.) Very little Canadian news filters down here. I've lost touch with most of my Canadian friends. Right now, about the only thing connecting me to Canada is my family, those few friends that still stay in touch, my accent, and my love of butter tarts and Tim Horton's doughnuts.

I've noticed that my Scottish identity has increased. While I miss my family, I no longer get homesick for Toronto. Weirdly, I do get homesick for Scotland, in spite of Scotland being a foreign country to me. I guess it must be an instinctive and ancestral attraction, as I was 4 when we moved to Canada and I've only visited Scotland once, for 3 weeks 13 years ago.

I may be losing my Canadian identity but I'm not gaining an American identity. My accent is wrong. I have no nostalgia for this place. My political views are certainly not the norm for this area, and probably too far to the left for most Americans (though as a Canadian I considered myself centrist). Being a secularist (the current neo-con label for anyone who's not an evangelical Christian) I don't fit in well with the Bible Belt.

(This having been said, I don't see Alana, the kids, or our friends as foreign, either. This is a very strange feeling living in a foreign country, and yet surrounded by foreign friends and family that aren't foreign. I don't think anyone can understand this unless they've been through it themselves.)

Not having a national identity is a bit disorienting, but it's not a negative thing. I get to pick and choose a national identity when I need it. I've always been particularly Scottish on St. Andrew's Day. I get to be Canadian on Canada Day, and still participate in the 4th of July. When a country inevitably does something stupid I get to pick and choose my nationality. If Americans get peeved at Canadian softwood stump fees, I can claim to be Scottish. If there's an anti-American riot in Scotland over a G8 summit, I'm Canadian. I have two different passports (a Canadian passport and a British/Euro passport, both expired) and a Green Card, so I have plenty of travel options.

On reflection, maybe having a strong national identity is more of a negative than a positive. After all, wars are usually fought between nations or between religious groups. Americans have a strong national identity but can't figure out why Europeans are repelled by that. The two world wars ravaged Europe for largely nationalistic reasons. Europeans have suffered the downside of intense patriotism, so they find patriotism in Americans to be disturbing. (At some point in the future I'll explain why Europeans misunderstand American patriotism, and why the patriotic feelings of Americans is quite different from the feelings that plunged Europe into war.) Perhaps the world would be better off if people lost their sense of nationalism.

Or perhaps not. The recent riots in France have a lot to do with young people who live in a country where they don't have a strong national identity. Without nationalism the world might plunge into the chaos of tribalism. Perhaps what is needed is not a loss of nationalism, but an identity that transcends nations. Europe is trying this now, with mixed results. Canada and the U.S. have forged a "North American identity" (even if it does ignore Mexico and Central America) without consciously trying. Maybe the road to peace isn't the dissolution of national identity, but the creation of continental identities on the road to a worldwide (or human wide) identity.

Anyway, it's St. Andrew's Day and I'm wearing blue (I don't have anything tartan to wear). If we had a flag pole I'd run one of my Scottish flags on it. While on many days my national identity may be conflicted, today I am Scottish.

Thanksgiving - not what we planned

The Thanksgiving weekend is over, and it didn't turn out the way we had planned.

Alana was sick throughout the weekend with the flu or something. It didn't slow her down too much, but she felt miserable through most of it. That pales compared to what happened to Logan.

Logan was over at Alana's ex's place on Thanksgiving day. He was swinging on a swing. Like all little kids, he couldn't resist jumping off the swing. He landed funny and broke his left arm. It was a clean break, thankfully, but he was in a lot of pain. Alana and I were in the middle of cleaning out our storage locker when we got the call. We were literally in the middle of it; almost all the stuff was out of the locker. Alana took the Tracker to the hospital. I stayed behind with Sabine (our dog) and put everything back in the locker after fixing some collapsed boxes. By the time I closed the locker, dumped the garbage, and walked back to the apartment Alana was on the way back home.

Logan's doing quite well. He's home now and in pretty good spirits. His arm is in a splint, not a cast. He has to see the orthopedic doctor on Thursday. He might get a cast then. He seems to be doing quite well, though he is beating himself up about doing "something stupid". I guess that's a sign he's growing up. His arm will probably still be in a sling or a cast for his 7th birthday (January 20).

Friday was, of course, Black Friday. This is the day that stores begin to make money, as it's the traditional start of the U.S. gift buying season. Black Friday sort of has a Canadian equivalent: Boxing Day. In Canada, Thanksgiving is the second Monday in October (makes sense, as the growing season is shorter in the northern latitudes). There's no day of big sales in Canada prior to Christmas, at least not like they have down here. The day after Christmas is Boxing Day, a statutory holiday. For years it was illegal in Ontario for any store in a non-tourist area (or for certain types of places, like convenience stores) to be open on that day. It may still be illegal, I'm not sure. It didn't stop a number of stores opening that day with deep discount prices on stuff. Those that stuck to the law opened on December 27. That's Canada's closet equivalent to Black Friday.

Alana and I were up at 4:30 to head out to the stores. We saw something we thought of buying as a Christmas gift in Wal-Mart but there was no way we were going to deal with the lines in Wally World. Good thing, too, as they only had a handful of the item we were thinking about getting and it was sold out in 5 minutes. Instead we went to the mall. McRae's had a bunch of things we wanted; they opened at 5. By the time we got there they were packed, but we found everything we wanted. We went to Sears and J.C. Penny's, but didn't buy anything. We got some stuff at Office Depot, Michael's (a cool carousel for holding the paint I use for miniatures), Target and Toys R' Us.

The thrill of Black Friday this year was muted over last year; last year was the first time I'd ever risen at the crack of dawn to go shopping! I still enjoyed it, during those moments when I was actually awake. The sales weren't bad, not great but not bad. We knew what we wanted before we went to the stores, hit those sale items and then moved on. I'm sure that's not what most stores wanted. Most stores slash prices on some items as "loss leaders". They entice you into the store with the loss leader in the hope that you will continue to shop there.

We crashed that afternoon for a couple of hours. Our Thanksgiving Day meal was to be two Cornish hens, but Logan's broken arm spoiled that. We were then going to do the hens on Friday, but we both fell asleep until about 4:30 p.m. They are still in the fridge!

Friday night Jason and his mom came over. They visited with us and slept over. The next day Alana and Jason's mom went shopping while Jason and I playtested my Call of Cthulhu miniatures rules, which I'm calling Death May Die. The playtest went very well. There are still "bugs" in the game, but the test showed that the game mechanics are mostly sound. Jason seemed to enjoy the game, which is a great sign. This was the first time I'd played the game with someone else (up until now I had mostly playtested it solitaire).

I include some pictures of the game, below:



This is a shot of the game as it was initially set up. The police, at the bottom left, are raiding a bootlegger's home. What most of the cops don't know is that the bootleggers, fronted by an Arkham, Massachusetts mob boss, are involved with a cult. The cultists are currently trying to summon a monster (top, left). One of the people on the police side is Henry Armitage, of Miskatonic University (a well known figure in H. P. Lovecraft's fiction). The main cultist is Wilbur Whatley (also well known in the literature).



You probably can't make out what's happening; I didn't take the time for good pictures. It's midway through the game. The police have cleared out most of the thugs. O'Bannion, the local gangster, has gone insane from one of Henry's spells and shot at one of his own men. Henry lost is Nightgaunt, though (a bat-like creature), which could have been of great help to the good guys.



This is near the end of the game. The police captured two thugs and killed another two, but they lost a couple of officers and Henry Armitage. The cultists managed to summon the creature, a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath. The Dark Young and the cultists (along with a routing thug) are seen in this shot. Now the police have only one chance to tie the game: capture Wilbur's strange book.



The game is over. The police were unable to capture Wilbur Whatley's copy of the Necronomicon. This shot is after the Dark Young ate the remaining police officers (except for one who managed to run away).

The game was close, but in the end it was a clear win for the cultists (played by Jason). We both made mistakes and forgot rules (sad, considering I wrote them!), but I probably made the biggest mistake by misplaying the Nightgaunt. I'd like to play the scenario again, which is a good sign. At some point I'll post close-up pictures of the figures on my web site.

So that was our long weekend. It's back to work tomorrow. I'm not looking forward to it. I have an install to prepare for and a couple of installed sites that will be calling with support questions. This wouldn't be so bad if a part of our system worked properly, but it doesn't. Hopefully it will Real Soon Now. Alana's not looking forward to work, either. Things are pretty hectic at the local Medicaid office between regular applications, Hurricane Katrina applications, and people calling about the Medicare drug plans (a duty that was thrown at Medicaid by the Feds).

Oh, yeah, and I get a year older this week. Can we just fast forward to Christmas?

Canada beats Denmark (over toy blocks, anyway)

I just learned, through Slashdot, that Mega Bloks won its lawsuit against Lego. Mega Bloks is a Montreal company that makes blocks that are very similar to Lego. Sounds like they are cheap knock-offs, right? Some have suggested that they are.

Personally, I prefer Mega Bloks. Their blocks might not be as good a quality as Lego's blocks, but their sets are very cool. Their Dragons fantasy line has actual orcs! I've been collecting them for use as skirmish miniatures, and they are very cool. While Lego people have the typical Lego yellow, round heads, Mega Bloks' fantasy figures have human (or orc) faces, Viking like ships with rounded hulls and fabric sails, and very cool rock formations. We have used their Alien Agency line (think "men in black" and Majestic-12) as Delta Green miniatures. I want to get one of their more complicated military sets at some point.

Lego sued Mega Bloks in Canada, with the suit finally coming to its completion with the Supreme Court of Canada this week. Lego's patents had been expiring since the 70s, and the last of its patents expired in Canada in 1988. They sued Mega Bloks claiming trademark infringement. Their argument was that the look and feel of plastic stackable blocks was part of Lego's trademark. They claimed the bumps on the blocks (which allow them to connect) was an intrinsic part of Lego's trademark. The Canadian Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, declared otherwise. The Supreme Court said,

..."purely functional" features, such as the well-known geometrical pattern of raised studs on the top of the bricks, could not be the basis of a trademark.

Trademark law should not be used to perpetuate monopoly rights enjoyed under now-expired patents...

They continued with:

The fact is ... that the monopoly on the bricks is over, and Mega Bloks and Lego bricks may be interchangeable in the bins of the playrooms of the nation – dragons, castles and knights may be designed with them, without any distinction.

This isn't the first dispute between Canada and Denmark. Both claim tiny Hans Island, between Ellesmere Island and Greenland. It's unlikely to result in a shooting war, and it's been called "a friendly dispute". Here's a story on the island from the CBC News site: www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/
2005/07/25/hansisland050725.html.

Latest Cthulhu write-up online

The latest Delta Green/Call of Cthulhu write-up is on my web site. You can find it by going to http://www.hyperbear.com/cthulhu.

This write-up is for the session that was held back in early October. The latest session was on the weekend of November 12. I hope to get that one online within the next month.

Rootkit affected CDs

Slashdot (www.slashdot.org for the non-techies in the audience) published a link to the list of 52 CDs that include Sony's rootkit. I'm suddenly very thankful we didn't buy the latest Switchfoot CD!

The Washington Post is reporting that Sony will replace any tainted CD on the list with one that does not have the rootkit program. They are also offering to give folks MP3s, but only after they have received your old CD.

You can find the list at cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/titles.html.

The latest in this weird, ongoing saga is that the rootkit had even more open source code in it, in violation of the license agreement with that software.

Finally, today's Foxtrot cartoon is appropriate:



Updated 11/23/2005 to fix the URL to the titles affected by Sony's rootkit.

Sony rootkit issue deepens

In my November 4 post, titled "Sony distributes malicious software; cheaters rejoice", I described how Sony was distributing a "rootkit" program as part of a copy protection scheme, and how this program could be used by hackers to get into your system.

The issue has intensified in the last two weeks.

For the full story, see the Schneier on Security blog rootkit posting. See my earlier blog entry for information on what this "rootkit" is. I'll assume you've read it. If not, go read it. I'll wait...

...Back? Cool. Summarized, here's what's happened:

• Mark Russinovich discovered the rootkit on October 31, 2005.
• Soon after, Sony gave instructions on how to remove the cloaking that hid the rootkit. They did not give instructions on how to remove the rootkit. Removing it could potentially crash your machine and make it unbootable (without reformatting and reinstalling everything).
• Sony claimed that the rootkit did not "phone home" (i.e. that it did not access the internet and send information about your system to a home base). It was soon discovered that it did just that.
• On November 4, Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG's president of global digital business said, "Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
• On November 9, McAffee — the computer anti-virus people — released code to detect the rootkit. Their products do not remove the rootkit, just the cloaking portion.
  
• On November 11, blog outrage and mainstream media coverage resulted in Sony "temporarily halting the production of the copy protection scheme".
• Also on November 11, Symantec — another computer anti-virus company — released a tool for removing the cloaking. Their products do not remove the rootkit, just the cloaking portion.
• In spite of the fact that trying to remove the rootkit can cause Windows to crash in a horrible manner, Microsoft didn't mention the rootkit until November 13. It announced that it would update its security tools to remove the cloaking, but not the rootkit itself.
  
• On November 14, Sony announced it was pulling infected discs from store shelves, and replacing infected discs with uninfected discs for free.

An an initial estimate said that half a million computers were infected. According to a post on DoxPara Research's site there are actually half a million nameservers infected. A nameserver is a computer that turns internet domain names (i.e. www.hyperbear.com) into IP addresses, and vice versa. Each nameserver is attached to at least one computer, and usually hundreds, thousands, and more computers. Half a million is the lowest possible estimate for infected computers.

If a criminal organization had distributed rootkit in this manner, the police would be all over them. It' s unlikely that Sony will have much trouble, even though they've broken cyberlaw. They've also broken copyright law, as part of their copy protection scheme seems to include an MP3 encoder in violation of its user agreement.

The Department of Homeland Security is none too happy with Sony, as the rootkit was found on Department of Defense computers. It's left up to the student to decide how this could hurt national security.

What burns me is how the anti-malware companies have utterly failed to protect against this infection. Sony has been distributing these discs for some eight months. None of the major malware programs caught it. Even though it was distributed by CD, it should still have been caught. An article on Groklaw.net states that Symantec and other anti-virus companies already knew about the rootkit, and that First 4 Internet — the British company that created the rootkit for Sony — contacted them to make sure it would not turn up in their anti-virus programs!

This results in some unhappy questions for Microsoft. Was Microsoft told ahead of time by First 4 Internet about the rootkit? If it was, why did Microsoft allow the inclusion of malware on Windows platforms without some way to remove it without crashing the operating system? And if Microsoft was not informed, are Microsoft's security programs as good as the anti-virus companies? After all, shouldn't Microsoft's own programs caught the rootkit if they didn't know Sony was distributing it? What does this mean for Windows Vista, the next Microsoft operating system, which will come with "digital rights management" (i.e. copy protection) bundled with it?

Lots of questions and few answers. The only people laughing right now are those who own Apples, and those who don't buy Sony CDs. There's a call to boycott Sony music. Like Sony needed another reason for people to pirate their songs.

Halloween Revisited

I set up an ID over on Photobucket in order to host pictures for my blog. Jimmy Pope held his annual Halloween party in Texarkana back on October 29. I took pictures at the party. The first roll of film was developed, and the pictures are now online.

You can see the pictures by clicking on this link: http://photobucket.com/albums/c87/agoodall/
Jimmy%20Halloween%20Party%202005/

The pictures are in thumbnail format. Click on the picture and you will get a larger version of the picture, and a full caption.

We first went to Jimmy's Halloween party last year and enjoyed ourselves quite a bit. This year we were both in dire need of relaxation when it rolled around. Alana spent her evenings the week before the party sewing the cloak for my costume. She was still sewing parts of it in the car on the way to the party! You'll notice that Alana and I aren't in the pictures. Those shots are on the next roll, which I hope to get developed Real Soon Now.

A wonderful time was had by all! We picked up a box of 100 Raising Cane's chicken fingers (the best in the world!) in Shreveport for Jimmy, and they were still warm by the time we got to the party. I was dressed as a generic fantasy nasty critter, sort of like I did the year before. I have an actual theme costume in mind for next year. Alana insists she wasn't in a costume, but she had on leather boots, leather jacket, an "I'm no Princess" t-shirt, and a gun, so I think that qualified.

The only real downside to the party was that I discovered it's almost impossible to eat while wearing my cloak; the sleeves tend to drag through things on the table. Oh, and I refuse to wear a mask next year, as it's very hard to mingle and, well, breathe while wearing a mask. I didn't sample the "brains" (jello and alcohol set in a brain mould) but Alana, several times from what I've heard. *grin*

Jimmy throws a wonderful party (thanks Jimmy!) The bar room had a casket on sawhorses for a bar, and the TV played The Rocky Horror Picture Show throughout the evening. The living room was full of helium balloons and streamers, which was a nice touch (even if it did make picture taking problematic). The dining room was incredibly laid out, both with decorations and food. I understand that all of the chicken was devoured before morning. I know not everyone liked the fog machine, but I loved it, particularly since the airsoft gun Alana was using had an under-barrel light and a laser, both of which look great in the fog.

Can't wait for next year's party!

---

Here are some pictures from Halloween night.

This is how we decorated the front door of our apartment. The witch hangs on the door in front of a bubbling cauldron. The cauldron wasn't bubbling too much that evening. The flames are white material that flaps upwards due to a fan in the cauldron. The rain soaked the material, preventing it from bubbling.

This is the same part of the apartment, but a different angle and with a better idea of how it looked at night.












The front of the apartment below our bedroom window. This is where we put up our "graveyard". Not visible are two ghosts we had hanging from the window shutters.

Our favourite part of the set up is the skeleton coming out of the ground to take candy from a dropped candy bucket. The bucket is shaped like a silly ghost head. We glued artificial candy to a transluscent container lid and placed that on top of the bucket. Inside a bucket is a florescent light. This picture doesn't do it justice; it's a pretty cute set up, and takes away a little bit of the fright a skeleton might have for small kids. Or, at least, it would have, if we had any kids actually show up this year!

Now, a couple of pictures of our own little monster! This is Logan in his army costume before he went out trick-or- treating.










And this is Logan, outside, with the veil of his hat pulled down. How stealthy is that!

American program (programme?) notices Canada

We're watching the Colbert Report (pronounced "Coal-bear Re-pore") tonight. It's on after The Daily Show. It's been running for about three weeks here in the U.S. Apparently it's only now running in Canada. It seems to have caught its rythm the last couple of weeks. In fact, while it's not as satirically clever as The Daily Show, I find myself laughing out loud more to the Colbert Report.

Anyway, tonight Stephen Colbert mentioned that the show was now playing in Canada. He spent a whole five minutes on the Great White North, with a sprinkling of Canadian jokes throughout the rest of the episode. He even mentioned Nunavut! The best joke started with him saying, "To those Canadians not living in Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver, this is a television..."

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that at least one major Canadian newspaper runs a story tomorrow about how the Colbert Report noticed Canada. Why? Because an American TV show mentioned Canada without it having to do with softwood lumber (though he did talk about that), immigration (though they did send an intern up north to become a Canadian citizen), or cheap medicine (though that was the main punchline of the skit).

Sony distributes malicious software; cheaters rejoice

It was all over the tech news sites yesterday and Wednesday. Sony has distributed malicious software, known as malware, on some of its CDs.
The software involved is something called a rootkit. It's a program that hides files from the computer's operating system. In order to listen to Sony's copy protected CDs on a computer (the one that started this was Get Right by the Man by the Van Zant brothers) you have to use the media player that comes on the CD. If you load the CD into your CD-ROM drive, it installs the player, the rootkit, and several other files on your computer. The rootkit hides the files, and any associated directories, from your operating system. The files and the player prevent you from copying the CD more than 3 times. They are hidden so people can't simply disable the player and copy the CD.

A lot of people are upset about this, and not just folk who want to copy CDs. The security expert that found the rootkit discovered two important facts:

1. The rootkit ate up between 1% and 2% of his CPU usage, mostly due to poor programming. The program will impair your computer's performance.
2. It's almost impossible for the average user to uninstall the rootkit. The above average user who makes use of standard deletion techniques could cripple their computer!

So, in order to play Sony's music from a copy protected CD, you have to install poorly written software that could wreck your set up if you tried to uninstall it!

Mark's Sysinternals Blog has the technical details of how he discovered the rootkit program at http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/.

The software is similar to that used by hackers to hide viruses and spyware. If it was distributed widely, Sony would have put a hacker tool on every computer playing their CDs. The tool has already been used for malicious deeds. There's a game called World of Warcraft. You can play it online. To prevent players from cheating the game with cheating programs, Bungie
— the company that runs the game — scans players' computers for cheat files. This is, itself, controversial. Anyway, some players are using the rootkit distributed by Sony to hide cheat programs while playing World of Warcraft!

The Security Focus website has an article on the World of Warcraft issue at http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/34.

Sony is apparently "fixing" the issue with a version of copy protection that doesn't use rootkit, and they have delete instructions on their web site. That's little consolation for the havoc this could cause.

How did I become "edgy"???

I seem to be out of step with popular music. People first accused me of this back in high school, when my taste changed in grade 11 from something close to my parents' to what is now called "classic rock" (but was simply "rock" or "progressive rock" back then).

Apparently, at the age of 42 (almost 43), I listen to "edgier" music than most people half my age. A case in point. I created a mix CD of music suitable for Halloween. I didn't think it was that "out there" (it had the Beatles, for heaven sake!) but apparently it was. I took it to Jimmy's Halloween party on Saturday. It didn't make it more than half way before someone asked to have it pulled. In it's place was some rather bland pop music CD.

So when did I become non-mainstream??? Me, of all people??? When I was in high school, what I listened to was pretty common. Nobody in my class admitted to listening to disco or pop. Rush was very popular. Led Zepplin, and The Who were also big. I never got into the Stones. I remember doing a movie for grade 12 Film Arts class and surprising my peers by using Pink Floyd for the theme music, not because Pink Floyd was strange but because they couldn't believe I was that "with it". Now stuff that's worse than late 70s disco is the rage while interesting alt-rock languishes on college radio.

I saw on one of the music stations up high on the digital tier mention of death metal. I used to know the names of a couple of death metal groups (though I never cared for it), but I hadn't heard of any of these. I remember when metal was played on mainstream stations (I may still have AC/DC's Back in Black on vinyl in the storage locker), now it's only played on the odd VH1 offshoot or late on a weekend night on classic rock stations. This is just more of the "lowest common denominator" trend I mentioned in my previous "Clear Channeling of America" post. Thank god for KXUL.

When Ashlee Simpson (the less talented sister of the horrible ditz Jessica Simpson) has the number one album on the charts, you know it's a sign of the Apocalypse.

Disappointing Halloween

The rain continued until sometime this morning. Including Logan, when he got back from Alana taking him out trick-or-treating, we had one visitor. No other kid showed up at our door, not even Logan's friend from down the street.

I took some pictures of the apartment with the digital camera. I'll try to post them later.