Well, I made the move just fine. I made a couple of discoveries, the first being that there is fiber just outside my front doorstep. ADSL will be installed on June 6. The other discovery is that my modem in my desktop computer is, as I thought, inoperable. I’ll be offline until the ADSL service is installed. I’m writing this from my office in Chattanooga. I won’t be back here again until next week sometime. Check back in about a week and I promise you I’ll be updating again.

This has been an experience.

This morning I’m sitting here at my computer for about the last time in Chattanooga. The movers are here packing up my stuff. I’m not sure when this computer will find itself packed so I’m taking the opportunities that I have for using it. I’m also not sure when I’ll have my internet connection back up in Lawrenceville. The modem went out on my computer about a month after I got my cable modem and I have never bothered to replace it.

I’m unaccustomed to this. I’ve moved about half a dozen times in my life, most of them local and all the long distance ones were during my college years when everything would fit in or on my car. All those moves I’ve done the packing myself. These folks packing up all my personal stuff while I sit here typing just seems so strange and foreign to me. I think maybe the thing that is most embarassing about this whole thing is that I can’t think of a single thing that I need to pack up myself in order to avoid embarrasment.

I took some time off from my moving yesterday to visit the Chattanooga Air Show. I saw some beautiful airplanes and fantastic flying demonstrations by the Air Force Thunderbirds and Patty Wagstaff. Good Lord, can that girl fly! I couldn’t get any decent still photos of Patty’s flying that would show what she does. I’ll just say that if you ever get the opportunity to see her fly, go. She makes an airplane do things that I would never imagine could be done.

The photo to the left is of the Thunderbirds doing their precision flying. The four F-16s in the diamond were making a fairly highspeed pass from one direction while the loan F-16 met them head on in a highspeed pass from the other direction. As you can see they were passing very, very close to one another in their pass.

A thread at Spymac.com forums tells us how to play those copy protected CDs that can play havoc with a Mac on our computer CD-ROMs. I wonder if this link will get me in trouble with te DMCA?

I’m entering the process of moving so don’t be surprised if updates are slow in coming. My modem quit working around the time I got hooked up to cable modem and I don’t know when DSL will be installed in my new abode. I’ll let you know how things have gone and are going as I’m able but today I have to paint, tomorrow I have to lay tile, the next day…

I’m not real sure how this should be handled but allowing a search warrant to just be FAXed to an ISP does not seem sufficient to me. I can understand how AOL or Yahoo! could find a police presence daily to be extremely restricting to their doing business but a search warrant needs to be supervised.

Saudi Arabia is on an internet marketing binge, it appears. I’ve heard that they are buying popup ads to promote Prince Abdullah’s eight point peace plan for the region. I’m also finding another site that wants to put you on a mailing list to keep you informed about how Saudi Arabia is fighting terrorism and supporting peace in the Middle East.

Okay, I’m going to look over this stuff as I have time, but, I have a heck of a hard time trusting a country where you can’t buy beer.

As of yesterday at about 3:30PM EDT I officially became the owner of that house I told you about last April. It took a little more time going through this closing than it has previous ones that I’ve been through due to the fact that the house was on the market because of a divorce.The attornies were there making sure all four sides got what was coming to them out of the proceeds, the attornies being two sides to themselves.

Stychen and I have been married for almost 25 years, our 25^th anniversary will be this July, and I’ve kiddingly attributed our many years together to my healthy fear of attornies. After seeing what was going on at my closing, maybe I’m not that far off from the truth.

After reading this I think that I have lost any interest I may have ever had in owning a Nissan automobile.

I needed a haircut so yesterday morning around 8:00 I left the house and went down the ridge to the little town I was raised in. Starting down the ridge I was reminded of why I have lived my life in this area and I became a little melancholy over the fact that in less than two weeks I’ll be living in another state. The lush greens of spring covering the side of the ridge sure isn’t making it any easier to leave. The drive through a rural type setting from home to work and from work to home is what sold me on the house I’m currently living in. I’m glad I had my cameral with me on this short little trip.

Red Bank, Tennessee is the town I grew up in. When I was a child there was a car dealership, a furniture store, two grocery stores, two hardware stores, two pharmacies, a bank several churches, a 5 & dime, a Western Auto and several other businesses that I can’t recall to list. One of the grocery stores was a mom and POP style store with the best ham salad made in their butcher shop that I’ve ever tasted. The other grocery store was a chain store that eventually grew into the biggest grocery chain in the region, was bought by a French conglomerate and sold off to an even larger chain. Most of that is all gone now. My barber, and the churches are all that are still there from my childhood. Most of the store fronts have been torn down for the return of that chain grocery store. The remaining store fronts around my barber are used by an antique auctioneer for warehouse space, a decorator store and an auction hall. The white framed doorway between the blue and green awnings in the picture to the right is my barber’s shop.

Don has cut my hair since I was a squirming toddler. He started out with Mr. Bolton in this barber shop close to fifty years ago. I was one of his early customers. Bobby, the guy in the seat, was probably one of his early customers also. Bobby and I went to high school together. I see a lot of people that I grew up knowing in this barber shop. Mr. Bolton, the original owner, died a few years ago at the age of 96. He had been retired for two years when he died.

I guess one of the things I’m going to hate most about moving is finding a new barber. You develop so many relationships that you don’t even think about when you live in an area for a long period of time. It’s those relationships that make the place you live home to you. Eventually I’ll develop those same types of relationships in Lawrenceville but it will take some time. Until I do I guess this melancholy will still strike me from time to time. I’m already homesick.

SOAP is starting to receive some backlash as people are stopping to take a second look at REST and finding it so much easier to implement. Todd brings this out in an item at Flutterby which draws out some words of wisdom from Mark who points out that while a lot of web services can be implemented simpler and easier with REST a lot of other web services can be more simply implemented with SOAP. The arguments being used to lift one method over the other are like the arguments over whether a hammer is a better tool to use than a screwdriver. The point being that you use the tool most appropriate for the task.

I guess it’s the little things that I take the most pride in. I’ve learned to accept the fact that I most likely will never be president, will never win the Nobel Peace Prize, will never be a best selling author or make any national publication’s “Man of the Week” for a cause that I’ve championed. Oh, I do champion some causes.

The cause that brought about this entry is one of privacy. Too many people are using my social security number (SSN) to identify me. I want to change that. This is the story of one small victory in that quest.

A few years ago I learned how easily it is to assume someone’s identity with just four pieces of information. Using only that person’s name, their birthday, their mother’s maiden name and their SSN you can apply for a Credit Card in that persons name with the address of your choice. You can also open up bank accounts with that information and, at that point, you can start renting a place to live under that assumed name and even get a driver’s license. At this point it is going to be very difficult for the credit bureaus to be able to ever seperate the transactions made by the real person and the imposter. Luckily I learned about this from the experience of another person rather than living through this nightmare myself.

It was after learning about my friends problems with identity theft that I resolved to only give out my SSN when required to by law or there was no other possible way to receive a service that I had to have. I’ve been suprisingly successful in doing so. There are four instances where SSNs are absolutely required. They are required when dealing with the IRS, the Social Security Administration, all financial institutions, whether bank, credit card company or brokerage firm, and when applying for a driver’s license. School’s and colleges will also require your SSN but I haven’t actually had the opportunity to find out if there is an alternative to their requirement or not.

One thing to understand, most other institutions that ask for your SSN are doing so in order to check your credit. A SSN is not required, however, to run a basic credit check. A SSN is only required to run an extensive credit check. Basic credit checks can be run using only a driver’s license. Utility companies generally want to be able to track you down if you skip out on them owing money so they will ask for your SSN in order to alert the credit bureaus if you do skip. All the credit bureaus need for this is your driver’s license number.

Now that I’ve got the background out of the way, let me tell you about a little personal victory I had yesterday. I’m moving to Lawrenceville, Georgia and I’m dealing with the usual things that one deals with in a move. Yesterday I set up the accounts with the various utilities. All of them asked of a SSN and most of them were immediately accomidating when I informed them that I didn’t give that out. “Okay, we need a deposit then,” was their reply. No problem with me on that. The City of Lawrenceville operates the natural gas utility for that city. They wanted a deposit and a SSN. If I didn’t want to give my SSN then an even larger deposit was required. It was a little too large and wasn’t refundable until I was no longer a customer, which could be a long, long time away.

I asked, “Why do you need my SSN?”

“I’m not sure, those are just the rules and we follow the rules here,” was the ladies reply. “You can ask the city clerk across the hall, if you’d like,” she added.

So, across the hall I went while the lady who sent me there continued with the rest of the work needed to set up my account. There I met the City Clerk’s assistant who listened politely to me and then explained why they needed my SSN in order to run a credit check. I explained how only a driver’s license was required to run a credit check. During this time the City Clerk came into the room and began listening. Surprisingly he was actually listening and went off to have someone else check out the accuracy of my claim that only a DL was needed for the credit check.

I left with an account with them, them without my SSN and possibly a change in their written policy concerning future applicants. Like I said, I’ve learned to take pride in the little things.

I just learned that the Pubish via E-Mail option in Blogger Pro is now active
but is beta. One of the advantages of this for me is that it will make it much
easier to comment on thigs that come to me through mailing lists. This post is
being made through the e-mail interface. Let’s see how it works.

I keep trying to point out to the people that I train that if I can figure it out it ought to be a piece of cake for someone else to do the same. Evidently Microsoft’s Jim Allchin doesn’t see it that way. Hiding things from view is only effective with personal items like cryptography keys and passwords and even with some of those it isn’t fully effective. Allchin seems to believe that:

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Too much disclosure also would lead to more digital piracy, Allchin testified. He noted that product activation, a feature introduced with Windows XP, essentially locks the software to a specific hardware configuration.

“Web systems such as BearShare and Morpheus enable users to exchange songs, music videos and other digital content over the Internet without necessarily paying any royalties,” Allchin testified. “Owners of such digital content are…affected by the strength of the safeguards that…Windows can provide to prevent misappropriation of such content.”

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I don’t believe that full disclosure of the API of a truely secure system will in any way compromise the security of that system. If it will the system is placing entirley too much emphasis on the lack of technical acumen in its advisary. If MS can figure it out, so can someone else.

While it really comes as no surprise Ashcroft has shifted the governments position toward a pro-gun policy in terms of second amendment interpretation. There’s something about the second amendment’s interpretation by all the anti-gun forces that has always confused me. Their position in the past has been that the second amendment was meant to allow for arms to be guarenteed in a military or militia context only but its the military style weapons that they want to ban. It looks to me like taking their interpretation of the amendment would mean banning sporting arms while maintaining a right to ownership of military style arms like assault rifles and machine guns.