as I live a few more questions

The Crunch is Coming: Welcome to the Post-Abundance Era

We're closer than we think to an age when gasoline becomes a luxury and restaurant meals become unattainable.  The sense of abundance that characterized the late 20th century is likely to evaporate for the great majority of us.

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The Flip Side of the Chinese Economic Miracle

I can't believe it, but for once I am in agreement with Stephen Harper's government: I'm happy that they are raising the issue of human rights with the Chinese.  The video below comes from another one of the "new YouTubes", called metacafé, and it shows how disenfranchised the poor in China really are:

Underground Video Of Tyranny In China - video powered by Metacafe
 

Now think about this: If I were posting this video in China, I could probably expect a visit from the police and a quick escort into the Chinese prison system. Kind of puts our problems with our various levels of governments into perspective.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

For a long time I had wanted to watch Long Day's Journey Into Night.  I finally had my chance when it was on Turner Classic Movies several nights ago, when I "taped" it using the PVR feature in my new desktop PC.

Wow.  I can see why Katharine Hepburn wanted to do this role so badly that she took a pay cut. 

What a haunting portrait of addiction and family dysfunction this play was.  I might actually go do a bit of reading of comment and criticism of Eugene O'Neill's work, now that I've finally seen it.  And I won't erase it from my hard drive, just yet.  I think I want to see it again.

Greed and Pride = Greater Computer Virus Threat

Oh, great. A deadly combination of greed and pride may bring down existing voluntary anti-virus coalitions, often our first and best hope for alerting the rest of us (i.e. those outside governemnt and big business) to new viruses (and their fixes).

Several years after �the beginning of a widespread effort between public and private parties to create an environment that would allow broader dissemination of vulnerability information, friction among the players is now scuttling such efforts. The [American] federal government, a key promoter of numerous information-sharing programs, announced last week it wants even more information from private network operators on vulnerabilities, infrastructure, traffic routing, disruptions and outages. At the same time, government officials and quasi-government agencies such as CERT have been making less and less information available to the private sector.

In response, many network operators and private security researchers, the sources of much of the data now available. have recently announced plans to take their information about viruses and worms and other hacks back underground, where, they said, it improves overall security and represents a lucrative revenue stream.

This reversal of efforts to create open exchanges of security data comes at a time when government agencies are being urged to change their secretive ways. In the short term, at least, the struggle will mean less free information available to the thousands of enterprises that depend on existing information-sharing programs to stay current on security and vulnerability matters, insiders said.

(Carlson, C. and Fisher, D. 'Sharing efforts crumbling: enterprise security could be threatened', eWEEK, August 9, 2004, p. 1)

Hacked in Fifteen Minutes

O.K., I'm putting this Plain Layne business to bed and focusing on work today. Most of last week I spent assessing a large collection (around 700) of recently-published, practical titles in computer science: stuff like ASP, C++, C#, Cisco, Citrix, Java, Javascript JSP, J2EE, Linux, Perl, PHP, Solaris, XML, computer and network security, peer-to-peer networking, etc. etc. Good stuff!

Every so often, especially if the book is not in a subject I am familiar with, I will take the time to flip through the book and scan passages in order to get the gist of what's going on; you sometimes have to do that in order to determine if a particular title is suitable for the collection. (Eveything we don't keep goes to the Libraries annual booksale, and the profits go back into further collection development.)

One book donated is titled Know Your Enemy: Revealing the Security Tools, Tactics, and Motives of the Blackhat Community, by the Honeynet Project team. In a nutshell, a group of 30 professional computer security experts set up a collection of production systems ("honeynets") to deliberately be probed, attacked, and compromised by blackhats (hackers). In doing so, the project team members learned a great deal more about hackers' tools, tactics, motives, and even their class structure. One devastating quote from this fascinating look into the mind of a blackhat:

A random computer on the Internet is scanned dozens of times a day. The life expectancy, or the time before someone successfully hacks, a default installation of Red Hat 6.2 [UNIX] server is less than 72 hours. A common home user setup, with Windows 98 and file sharing enabled, was hacked five times in four days. Systems are subjected to NetBIOS scans an average of 17 times a day. And the fastest time for a server being hacked: 15 minutes after plugging it into the network. (Source: Schneier, Bruce. Know Your Enemy: Revealing the Security Tools, Tactics, and Motives of the Blackhat Community. Addison-Wesley, 2002. pp. vxv-xvi)

Now, if that doesn't get you scrambling to install and/or update your firewall and viruschecking software, I don't know what will. Get cracking!

Cynical, Jaded, and Bitter

Life is throwing Layne yet more relationship grief to blog... Evil Ex is back sleeping on the couch and in serious, serious trouble.

God, I can only imagine what she must be going through. I wish there was something more I could do than offer virtual hugs and advice (which, frankly, I often don't take myself).

Sometimes I'm so glad I'm not in a relationship, when I see how painful it can be.

Gmail Bidding Frenzy

Gmail accounts are being auctioned off on eBay for as much as US$262.00.

The Enneagram: A Brief Introduction

I first learned about the Enneagram in November 1997 at a workshop put on the Beginning Experience of Winnipeg.

I guess I'd better explain what Beginning Experience is. The Beginning Experience (B.E.) movement began in Texas in 1974, and has since spread to Canada, the U.S., Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. The purpose to B.E. is to help separated, divorced, and widowed people to work through their pain and grief, provide a safe space for them to work through their emotional healing and begin a process of self-awareness, and ultimately to free them to live again and love themselves, others and God. It is, at heart, a faith-based peer ministry, organized and led by former B.E. participants (of various Christian denominations) who have undergone some training and have become lay facilitators to help the newer participants through the first steps of the grief and healing process. I went because I had never dealt with my guilt and anger over the failure of my 2-1/2 year marriage in 1991.

B.E. consists of retreat weekends, as well as a weekly "levels" program, levels 1 through 4 of weekly classes. Lower levels focus on the failed/ended relatonship; upper levels tend to focus more on self-awareness and personal growth. After a participant completes level 4, there is a Level 5 available: Enneagram workshops.

I attended two 10-week sessions during 1997-1998 as part of a group of about 20 B.E. facilitators. Our workshop leader was a tiny French-Canadian Roman Catholic nun called Sister Thérèse, a member of the Holy Cross religious community and a co-founder of Contemplative Outreach Canada. I took lots of notes during the sessions, and put them away in a binder, along with my Myers-Briggs personality type stuff, etc. I had to put the Enneagram aside to deal with more pressing matters (i.e. burning out of my job AND coming out the closet to myself). I had other, much more serious, things to worry about than some silly personality system.

Last year, I decided to pull out my 1997/1998 Enneagram workshop notes and read through them again, and I was surprised at how much wisdom there was in what Sister Thérèse had said, and how that fit in with my previous readings on self-awareness (Anthony de Mello, for example). So I made the decision to contact her again. I have since been talking with her regularly as a sort of spiritual counsellor or "guru". I have learned a lot more about the Enneagram along the way, from Sr. Thérèse and from my readings, and what follows is my (admittedly amateur) attempt to explain "what's it all about":

The War (Dead) President

From MichaelMoore.com, a startling photomosaic of George W. Bush, made from the pictures of the Americans who have been killed in Iraq since he took office. Nothing else could bring the message home so eloquently as this one image. This is a war about which he lied to his allies and to the American public, a war extracting a deadly toll, and possibly the start of a new Vietnam.

Click on the image to get the higher-resolution image and the full effect.

(Source: Mark Frauenfelder, from Boing Boing blog)

Gay Sexual Ethics

The response I get is always the same when I tell my gay friends what I am reading: a guffaw, usually followed by a cheap joke. "Gay sexual ethics? Must be a short article."

(Aside: my friend Brian pointed me towards an interesting article on gay.com: "What's the link between sex and intimacy?", where five queer people talk about their experiences.)

Out of all the entries that I have made since I first started this weblog, which post do I think has had the most impact on my life?

It's the one where I quoted extensively from the article by Rev. Ron Rolheiser on 'moral loneliness' and my explanation of why I agreed—and disagreed—with Rolheiser's stance. That one post has sparked several conversations with other people (significantly, only by face-to-face or by private email, not via the comments section of this blog). Obviously this is a topic that either touches people deeply, or hits a raw nerve, or is completely disregarded as useless, outdated, 'old-fashioned'.

As I have said before, one of the things I like about being a librarian is kicking the tires on electronic databases that the Libraries has bought or is considering buying. Several weeks ago, during just such a tire-kicking session, I serendipitously came across an article written by Dr. Daniel Helminiak, a professor of psychology at the State University of West Georgia, where he teaches psychology and spirituality.