Aaron Adams’s Lame-ass Blog

From today’s MDJ concerning the InfoSecSellout idiocy:

InfoSecSellout had not released his worm into the wild, but hadn’t informed Apple about the vulnerability either, instead choosing to post about it on his own blog “to dispel notiions that Mac OS X is somehow more secure than Windows.”

And from David Maynor a year ago, in the MacBook wireless fiasco:

“We’re not picking specifically on Macs here, but if you watch those ‘Get a Mac’ commercials enough, it eventually makes you want to stab one of those users in the eye with a lit cigarette or something,” Maynor said.

Contrast those comments with this comment made by an analyst who discovered a security vulnerability with the iPhone:

The principal security analyst admits “It’s not the end of the world; it’s not the end of the iPhone” and it appears it hasn’t changed their enjoyment of the iPhone itself. Even the security firm’s founder states that while he may more cautious about using a random public WiFi network, “you’d have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands to get [the iPhone] away from me.”

iPhone good. Mac bad.

Any vulnerability found in the Mac is meant to punish Mac users for their smugness. Mac users are irrational cultists who have lost all sense of reason and, in typical mind-numbed robot fashion, worship Steve Jobs. Mac users and Macs deserve to suffer.

But the iPhone… It’s not the end of the world. A confirmed iPhone vulnerability is no big deal, versus two high profile unproven vulnerabilities that were hailed as the Mac apocalypse. Everything is both hunky and dory in the iPhone world, and I’ll keep using my iPhone in my coffin as I’m lowered into the ground.

Two pieces of hardware built by the same company, running variants of the same OS. One is at a perpetual brink of disaster that will prove once and for all that, ha ha ha, Macs suck just as much as Windows (a weird thing to gloat about) and you smug Mac bastards are about to get the punishment you deserve. The other is our special baby, and no matter what the problem, it’s not that bad and everything is just fine.

Sickening. Those who accuse Mac users of being biased and irrational are themselves equally as biased in favor of their own darling device. Don’t pretend to be impartial when you’re as attached to ideas and outcomes as the rest of us.

Report: Man with Almost No Brain Has Led Normal Life

The condition is called Dandy Walker complex and is a genetically sporadic disorder that occurs in one out of every 25,000 live births, mostly in females.

Leave your joke in the comments.

Here’s a picture of a place in Dayton named Kelly’s Corner Cafe which has now shut down because of Ohio’s insanely stupid smoking ban.

Thanks to Weird Dayton for the picture.

From the article linked at the beginning of this post:

According to Krueger, the store lost business after the smoking ban. “There was a significant difference since we had to enforce it,” she said.

“Ninety percent of my customers smoke, and when the cash flow is cut in half, basically overnight, it doesn’t take long before I can’t afford the supplies and manpower it takes to run a business.”

It’s OK Ms. Krueger, there are other people in this world who know what’s better for you and your customers than you do, and they’re willing to use the police power of government and turn ordinary citizens into criminals to save you from yourself.

“The saddest part to me is about our personal and property rights being taken away.”

Exactly right. The only business the anti-smoking kooks in this state and country care about is the business they’ve built spreading falsehoods about smoking and second-hand smoke.

A commenter (and friend from long ago) in another thread reminded me that I hadn’t posted pictures of the finished patio yet. So here they are.

This is just after completion when we begun placing the tchotchkes.

Same for the side.

The finished product. A little sparse, but we’re working on it. I use the fire pit to burns sticks and mail I don’t want to put in the trash.

The table where I enjoy grilled meat a few times a week. That’s little grumpy in the foreground. The shade really helps. That shed will eventually be replaced.

The walkway to the garage door along the side of the house. That old fence is something we hope to replace next year.

The reclining throne from which I rule my domain.

At some point during the colossal waste of time that was my few years in college, I took a phychology course taught by a professor named Campbell. It was unmemorable and boring, but I did leave the class with one realization. Apparently this professor had a sister who died, and he was left to take care of her daughter (his niece). The sister, while alive, had a habit of slicing a tomato in half and pouring salt on it, and then eating the tomato. Since the sister died while the niece was very young, the niece never saw her mother do this. However, when she grew old enough, the niece started to cut tomatoes in half and pour salt on them and eat them without anyone ever having shown her how.

The point was, some behaviors and tastes are inherited. They’re hard-coded into your brain and, given the opportunity, you act upon them.

Many times as I’m enjoying a cigar, I think about the pictures I have of both my grandfathers with a cigar in their hand. Both stopped smoking when I was very young, and I have no real memory of either smoking a cigar in person. Neither of my parents smoked cigars. However, as I approached my 18th birthday, I wanted to try a cigar for seemingly no reason. And try one I did. I started out with some of the cheap cigars you get at the drugstore. And then I met Steve.

Steve was my neighbor’s cousin. Physically, he was what you think of when I call someone a biker. He had a head full of gnarly black hair and a matching beard. He was heavy set with a deep voice, and although I don’t know anything for sure, I got the impression he had some problems in the past he had since resolved. Among the stories I remember, a drunken Steve crashed his convertible through the front window of a 7 Eleven while parking. When a very stunned store employee looked at Steve after the wreckage finished falling, Steve pulled himself over the windshield of the convertible and asked for a pack of Cool 100s. That story may be complete bullshit that Steve made up, but his personality made me believe the story could be completely true.

One summer evening, much like the evening during which I’m writing this post, I wandered over to the neighbor’s patio where Steve was visiting. He asked what I was smoking, and when I told him what a cheap thing it was, he stated that it wouldn’t do. He was going to show me some real cigars. We hopped into my car and drove to Kroger.

In the tobacco section, we found… brace yourself, cigar fans… 3-packs of Cuesta Rey 1884 Maduros. No kidding. They came in a nice blue and gold box and the cigars were wrapped in a gold foil inside. I think all three cost somewhere around $5. For those of you not familiar with cigars, finding that quality cigar in a grocery store these days, at that low price, is unheard of. You have to go to a tobacconist to get them now.

When we returned home, we opened up the pack I had bought and the smell was something great that I had not experienced before or since. I don’t even know how to describe it. Fantastic. Steve had a cutter and showed me how to cut a cigar correctly (which I promptly forgot for a dozen years) and we each lit up a smoke. The taste and smell of the cigar was a sensation that I wish I could have again.

I don’t know if my senses have dulled with age or familiarity, but I seem to remember cigars in general had a stronger or more distinct taste and aroma in years past. Our local tobacconist has told me several times that, because of the popularity of cigars over the past decade or so, some manufacturers have had to use tobacco of a lower quality in order to be able to manufacture enough cigars to meet demand. I can’t verify the accuracy of that information, so I can’t assign it as the reason for the perceived difference. But I remember smoking any size of La Unica, Arturo Fuente Maduro Curly Heads (no longer made) and the cedar-wrapped ones whose name I can’t remember, Santa Rosas, Punch and Hoyo De Monterey Double-Maduro, Rothschilds, and others, and each had a very distinct character. Now, I can tell slight differences between each, but not as much as before. It is me, or the cigars?

Cigars have become yet another one of those things in my life for which I have a great passion that I don’t share with anyone. I’ve had some friends with a passing or casual interest in cigars, and a few who have said they like cigars but never light one up, but nobody with a real interest. Such is my life.

There’s no real point here. I was just inspired to remember a little bit about an enjoyable event from the past.