1 question.

1 chance.

1 honest answer.

That's all you get.

You get to ask me 1 question.

Any question, anything, no matter how crazy, dirty, or wrong it is.

But I dare you to repost this.

And see what people ask you!

Comments are screened.

1. I'm exhausted. Today is day three of hit the ground running and no time to rest. It's mental, not physical, work, but (a) that's where I live, is in my head; and (2) adrenaline is adrenaline.
2. Spending three days and several $200+ conference calls, and risking days of technical support, in order to save $400 over the next two years, when you routinely spend over $10,000,000 a year, is simply idiotic. Self-evident, you say? Tell that to my current least-favorite customer.
3. I keep having to correct people on this point: an amendment to the U.S. Constitution is part of the Constitution. Don't say Nowhere in the Constitution does it say X if it says X in an amendment. That's the reason we have a process for amending the document. (Corollary: Income tax is not unconstitutional, and separation of church and state is absolutely constitutional.)
4. Several people have asked to be on my kink filter. Okay, you're on it. Don't expect much — I haven't done anything kinky in a long while.

Thanks — just wanted to rant and rave a bit.

Greetings. As of 3 November 2008, I've decided to make this journal friends-only from this point forward.

If you'd like to read my journal, please leave a comment here. Please indicate where you know me from, and don't be upset if I don't add you. These days I generally only add people who at least know someone I know. (Accordingly, if we have an LJ friend in common, let me know in your comment.)

I'm feeling my age today. In 1988 I was working for the University of Maryland, whose computer science department was an early presence on the Internet and was the second or third site hit by the Morris worm on November 2.

A lot of people worked a lot of overtime that weekend.

The silver lining is that the Morris worm incident pretty much created the computer security field.

I don't know if I ever mentioned this here:

I work at a secure government facility. Accordingly, web browsing is done through a filtering proxy that blocks access to certain sites because of content or for security reasons. These sites include, but are not limited to:

• MySpace
• Facebook
• Black Rose (including the BR '08 attendee area)
• FetLife (duh)

So if you leave me a message there, though I might get notification of such, I can't answer until the evening on week nights.

Additionally, I work in an egg carton (euphemistically referred to as "cubicles"), so to keep the noise pollution down I keep the sound turned off. So, though I am usually logged in to Gmail (and hence Google Chat), I don't have any audio cues when someone writes to me or responds in chat, and I don't always notice the taskbar entry blinking. Don't be offended or worried if I don't respond right away.

Thanks. Just thought I'd mention that.

It's been a while -- I thought people might like a status report on rene and her new bionic knee.

First off, she's doing okay. She still uses the cane but mostly just as a kind of security blanket. She can get around just fine, can drive some, and has been working at the office a few days a week (working from home the rest of the time). She's mostly off Vicodin and uses ibuprofen when she can.

Unfortunately, the weather lately has been taking its toll, as I feared. Between the cold and the dampness her knee's really been hurting, and having to favor one knee for so long is making the other knee start to hurt. rene being who she is, now she's worried that they'll have to replace the other knee and maybe both hips. I think that's going to be a ways off, and I keep trying to tell her that although she's had problems for nearly a year, she only had the surgery a little over two months ago.

The pain level is starting to take its toll, though. She can usually sleep okay, but not always, and if she doesn't sleep well it just makes things worse the next day. Like I said, she's mostly off Vicodin, but some days are better than others.

One other piece of good news: rene hasn't smoked in 75 days!

Is my calendar correct? This is the big 21? Congratulations!

Wow, we have really lost our way in the space program.

The Ares I rocket is what NASA wants to build to carry four astronauts into orbit, to rendezvous with the rocket that will then take them to the Moon. Well, apparently on top of the fact that

• the Ares rocket may be too heavy for the launch pad crawlerway
• and was originally too heavy to achieve orbit, it also
• may shake its crew to death during takeoff,
• assuming it doesn't drift into the launch tower and explode.

Maybe we should go back to the Saturn V plans we managed to keep NASA from destroying. We know those designs work.

Anyone have any experience with black powder firearms?

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