I started tying flies yesterday just for fun. here are my first few. The small dry fly is an Adams with a body who’s dubbing could have been a lot more even and with wings that are too narrow (I used 16 hackle on a 12 hook). The furry black one is a woolly bugger and the big fluffy dayglo one is my own invention called a Ziggy Special (named after my cat).
I turned on VS today to check if there was anything on fly fishing showing. I watched a father and son harvest a bear. They were dressed in hunting camo gear. Dad had the tripod and video camera set up and son had a high powered rifle with high powered scope.
A big black bear came sauntering out of the forest to take a drink at the waters edge about 200 ft away. After much giggling anticipation son took the shot and the bear took the hit, ran off and died a short way away.
I have a few questions about the whole affair and maybe a few bear hunters can help me out:
Is this sporting? Taking a shot at 200 ft from a high powered scoped rifle doesn’t seem like much of a challenge. The world record sniper shot is almost 4000 ft (and it killed an armed human enemy combatant). There’s no stalking involved in bear hunting – especially when you consider there’s son and dad standing in the open 200 ft away with the bear ignoring them complete with VS channel film crew standing next to them with broadcast quality film gear.
Is it a right of passage? I’m not sure what son learned from the whole experience. To take the easy shots? That bears don’t really give a shit about you until you shoot them?
Is it an impressive feat that will give son the street cred to start life? When your guests come over and sit in your family room next to your bear rug to watch your home video of an easy shot and the death of a beautiful piece of American landscape that was trying to get a drink of water, I doubt they’re going to be impressed.
Does bear meat taste particularly good? No, it tastes like greasy beef and it tastes like crap if the bear has been eating dead fish. And I doubt you’ll be eating 300 to 500 pounds of greasy bear meat.
And why call it “harvesting” when it has nothing to do with subsistence and all you’re really doing is getting kitted out in the latest Cabela’s catalog gear and playing cowboy in the forest with your video camera.
So really this looks to me like a fashion statement. Look tough with gun, shoot big bear on TV, pose with big bear for closing shot. Skin and decapitate bear for bear rug and trophy to show girls how manly you are and leave carcass to rot.
I guess I’m a little confused about why this is on the ‘sports’ channel.
I spent the day in Denver at the AFFTA fly fishing trade expo. It was awesome. I spent most of my time stalking Lefty Kreh (fly casting god in case you don’t know). He’s about to turn 85 and the guy still casts like a champ. He gave a talk on general fly fishing tips including how to stop snapping your 7x leader on big fish and how to cast with a knot in your fly line. He also did a casting demo where at one point just to prove how effective it is to use your whole body, he split a rod in half and used the top 4 ft to cast a line 70 ft.
I bought myself a little birthday present – a set of Cloudveil waders and Simms wading boots – so I’m all set for winter steelhead.
We totaled it all up and 3.5 hours spent on the phone to both t-mobile and AT&T and the iPhone works. Strangely enough she actually seems to think it’s worth it. Whatever. I’m sticking with my Blackberry for now. Who needs an interface that’s good enough to lick and those sweet animation effects and that beautiful touch screen and super-bright display anyway.
I gave a loved one an Apple iPhone as a gift this afternoon. The happiness lasted until she started trying to transfer her cellphone number from T-Mobile (who we love) to AT&T (the only network with iPhones).
After spending 40 minutes on the phone with an AT&T customer service rep she had to call T-Mobile and when she called AT&T back they had lost all her data – which meant another 40 minutes. It also meant they had to do another credit check which dings her credit a second time.
She asked the AT&T rep if she could speak to a manager, got a deep sigh and the rep hung up on her. Of course she didn’t get a name.
…she’s sitting across the way from me right now singing “…every rose has it’s thorn” And amazingly she’s about to try a third time to activate her phone.
She’s not alone. Googling for AT&T iPhone Nightmare yields thousands of miserable customer stories.
People are quick to blame AT&T but in my humble opinion Apple are complete bastards for partnering with the crappiest network in the USA – and for turning my gift into a curse.
Google has a Live Caucus Map in case you’re watching the Iowa caucuses this evening.
Google recently fixed a glaring vulnerability in gmail that allows an attacker to forward copies of all or some of your email to themselves by adding a filter to your gmail account. But not before someone lost their domain name to an attacker who then proceeded to try to sell it back to them for cash.
The gmail bug was a cross site request forgery exploit. The attack is incredibly simple. If a user is authenticated to a website, an attacker simply gets that user to load a URL that causes the user to effectively take some sort of action on that website. So by clicking a link in an email or on a website, or by simply loading up a malicious web page that contains an image URL with the correct query string parameters, an attacker can get an unsuspecting user to “do something” on a website they’re a member of.
Wikipedia has a good summary on CSRF and I recommend you read it if you haven’t already. Avoiding CSRF vulnerabilities in your web apps is easy: In all forms that require a user to be authenticated, simply reauthenticate them using some user-specific transient data. You could, for example, include a users session ID in a hidden form field and when the user submits the form check that the session ID in the form POST matches the session ID in the users cookie.
If your session ID’s change every time a user authenticates to your website, it effectively defeats this attack. For extra security you may want to either encrypt the session ID in the form’s hidden field, or set the hidden fields value to an MD5 hash of the real session ID.
The Google CSRF required a form POST which was only slightly more complex for an attacker to implement. But many CSRF attacks don’t require a POST and parameters can therefore appear in a URL query string. The effect of this is that your website can be exploited by one of your users simply loading an image on a malicious web page or in a malicious email.
A Microsoft quote from an NY Times article I’ve already cited has been bugging the crap out of me. It bugged me when I first blogged about this article and it bugged me as I wandered around B&N last night doing the last of my xmass shopping. I wound up in the management section and picked up a book on the top 10 mistakes leaders make. Staring at me as I flipped open chapter 5 was confirmation that I wasn’t nuts.
Here’s the quote that bugged me:
“I’m happy that by hiring a bunch of old hands, who have been through these wars for 10 or 20 years, we at least have a nucleus of people who kind of know what’s possible and what isn’t,”
I’ve lost count of how many times as a software developer I’ve sat down and said “I wonder if this is possible?”. When I created WorkZoo I wondered if it was possible to aggregate all the worlds jobs into a single database – and I got pretty darn close. When I created Geojoey I wondered if it was possible to have a rich pure Ajax application with a client-side MVC model – and it was. When I created LineBuzz I wondered if it was possible to post inline comments on arbitrary text on any web page – yes it’s possible. When I created Feedjit I wondered if it was possible to scale to serve real-time traffic data in a widget. We’re serving almost 100 Million real-time widgets per month now.
I started coding on an Apple IIe and later moved to IBM PC’s so in my youth Apple and Microsoft were symbols of innovation and I wanted to innovate the way they did. Apple’s still doing a great job, but it breaks my heart to see MS floundering like a fish out of water in the new world of broadband, browser standards, open source and dynamic web applications.
Come on guys. Get it together already!! Fire those know-it-alls, hire some new blood and pretend for a moment that the past doesn’t matter and that anything is possible.
