Hi. My name is Moses.

So New Yorkers can often be abrasive, and when I got back from Australia it was a bit of culture shock - even though it shouldn't have been since I do, after all, live here. But every time I want to write them all off, one of them (one of them anonymous native New Yorkers) does something nice for me. Thank you James, for fixing my car for $25 when I didn't have the $40 you asked for.

Then I went bar hopping with Nam and Bri all night. There was a brief guest appearance from Rishi. Brad called, but didn't make it. I hear that he is going to be on the DVD. The White House was the worst bar ever, and it had the worst ratio possible (0:1). We played pool at Mulligan's with Moses and his partner who are musicians and were recording there stuff that day. I am so bad at pool. We wound up at the Hyde Park Brewery where there was beer and live music involved. I got to drive Bri's Acura (aka "The Ack").

Reboot

The Company has this evil spyware installed on my work notebook. It downloads new software and reboots every day without asking first. I commented to Adil yesterday that I thought the systems at work were all designed to make work as difficult as possible, because it is really hard to think of a software product that I have to work with which is actually easy to use, or isn't buggy. We sell most of this shit too, so it astounds me that we are in business at all. Come to think of it, the shit which isn't overly complicated and impossible to use is second rate. Our instant messaging system [1] is in all ways inferior to Jabber. We are also required to change all of our passwords (and there are a lot of them) every three months so I can't remember any of them. I would seriously like to calculate the amount of lost work due to the (in)security measures that they have put into place. Some executive somewhere decided to make it a bureaucratic nightmare to get access to new systems, and require us to change them constantly once we do get them, so guess what? People write down and share their passwords all the time. Security is a joke exactly because of the insipid security measures.

I think it is time to take the Micro$oft technical support approach and press the reset button and start over.

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[1] Which we sell, bundled with some other second rate shit.

"Reversible"

Store password using reversible encryption for all users in the domain from a Windows XP control pannel

Isn't that just a euphemism for encryption that doesn't work?

Update:

Just like my raincoat! President Scroob in Spaceballs

I Know What You Mean (TM)

Don't you hate it when somebody (possibly even yourself) says something, and then somebody else (usually not yourself) says "I know what you mean" and then proceed with some banality which proves rather conclusively that they have no idea what you are talking about. Sometimes this is because the first somebody hasn't expressed themselves well, but just as often it is because the somebody else is a dolt.

P.S. I would love it if everyone would comment on this entry starting with "I know what you mean..." :)

Getty Photographs

So I finally got the B&W slides which I took at the Getty way back in Back Issue #47. I am planing on borrowing e's film scanner and pick out a couple and scan them properly, but just as an exercise, I tried scanning them using my flatbed scanner and my lightbox. I thought they actually came out somewhat allright. This is a relatively low res version of the 600dpi scan. Anyway, you get the idea.

Getty

There are some really great pictures of the back of Tyler's head in there. Actually there is a great portrait I took of tyler on the roll of Provia I shot there which is really good. It was a very "Tyler" photograph.

LA was great. Good times.