How to piss off a teenage son...

well actually, "he started it" :-)

By constantly fighting with a girl who is half his age, his sister!

I finally got tired of it.  And decided if he wants to act like a little girl, I will treat him like one.

No more LOTR.  No more Star Wars.  No more Harry Potter.  No more cricket.  Manchester United? -- dream on!

So I rigged up squid (the proxy server that all his web accesses are forced to use) so that any accesses to his favourite sites (espnstar, cricinfo, jkrowling, etc) are immediately redirected to barbie, barney, sesame street, etc.

You should have seen his face, says my wife!

The youngest...

Two of the youngest adults in my extended family have suddenly become the oldest, today.

(malware) Internet Explorer Unsafe for 284 Days in 2006 - Security Fix

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/01/internet_explorer_unsafe_for_2.html

"For a total 284 days in 2006 (or more than nine months out of the year), exploit code for known, unpatched critical flaws in pre-IE7 versions of the browser was publicly available on the Internet. Likewise, there were at least 98 days last year in which no software fixes from Microsoft were available to fix IE flaws that criminals were actively using to steal personal and financial data from users

...

In contrast, Internet Explorer's closest competitor in terms of market share — Mozilla's Firefox browser — experienced a single period lasting just nine days last year in which exploit code for a serious security hole was posted online before Mozilla shipped a patch to remedy the problem

:-)

A vegetarian I know sent me the following link:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20061215/hl_hsn/kidswithhighiqsgrowuptobevegetarians

The first thing that came to my mind when I read the article was "aahaa! This proves that Bush is really stupid" :-)

And then it hit me: I had just linked someone's personal preference into a semi-objective indictment of that person simply because I don't agree with that preference.

That's bad. Very bad. I need to be more careful when justifying my opinions.

^{PS: the article also said "There was no difference in IQ score between strict vegetarians and those who said they were vegetarian but who said they ate fish or chicken" so if the vegetarian who sent it to me was trying to score a point against me it didn't work! Since I hardly, if ever, eat red meat, and this kind of empirical study does not tip on a binary (yes/no) scale, I can certainly claim to fit this category.}