The Evil Eyebrow

My friend Chris, who’s costume has been mentioned before, and who describes his costume here, got linked through from Bad Astronomy. In my circle, that’s like gold, man!

I love election season.

Not only do you get bumper stickers like “Republicans for Voldemort!” , but you get fake campaigns like Zod for President (who came so close to winning last time).

Now we have the Saul Tigh/Laura Roslin ticket. Who doesn’t want to vote for a known alien, who’s species has been reliably described as “racist” and “anti-human” and “monomaniacal people exterminators”? And who wouldn’t want a running mate that is guaranteed to be dead within months of inauguration? It’s a perfect choice!

For my friends, whom I discussed this with:

John Scalzi story, involving time travel products.

John Scalzi story, a short involving Harry Wilson in the Old Man’s War universe.

John Scalzi story, released just yesterday. Screw Tempe!

No, these aren’t “war kittens”, they’re ever so much better.

Kittenwar!

Ah, brings me back to the good old days when Hot Or Not was new.

This year, I arrived a Dragon*Con with an 8 Gb compact flash card in my camera. This let me do two things:

1. Buckle to the pressure and shoot in RAW + JPG
2. Not need to switch out the card during the weekend

Unfortunately, it takes a long time to download ~7 Gb to by computer through the card reader on my computer. It’s been going for 1.5 hours now and I think it’s about 70% done.

I didn’t shoot the Dragon*Con parade (which I’ll explain later) so I managed to not need to switch out the card during the weekend. With my Canon Digital Rebel XT shooting on RAW + JPG, I had around 540 images to take. If I’d been at the parade, I know I would have exceeded that. So, for RAW, I need another 8 Gb flash card.

At least I didn’t do what I did last year which was sprint out to pay an exiorbant amount of money to Wolf Camera for three 1Gb flash cards (and borrow a battery from a very kind friend. Thanks Annie!)

All right. I lied a bit about not blogging.

Kristin and Chris brought a costume to Dragon*Con. Kristin made it, Chris wore it.

They won the Audience Favorite award at the Masquerade last night! It was awesome.

The only picture I can find at the moment is here. I’m sure there will be more soon.

We’re home. We’re alive. We’re tired. As usual, Dragon*Con was a blast, both seeing cool famous people (Battlestar Galactica stars, Firefly Stars, Famous Authors, Not-so-famous Authors, etc.) and hanging out with people we know and like.

Even as I type, the ~500 images I took are downloading to my computer, so you can expect some flickr photos sometime tonight.

It was fun, but my creative energies are very tired. No blogging for me until later.

Today is the last day pre-Dragon*Con which means there is plenty to do to get ready:

Sleep - Won’t be doing much of that at the Con. I maintain about a 4 AM to 8 AM unconsciousness schedule

Charge - We’re geeks, so we have a lot of electronic toys which need to be charged up, and their spare batteries also filled with electrons. I am once again renting a lens from Professional Photo Resources, the Canon f/2.8 L 70-200 IS. The “L” makes it awesome and the “IS” makes it an energy hog, so camera batteries need to be charged.

Pack - That’s easy, but there are several options for party wear to bring, and it all has to fit in the car.

Play - We have friends staying with us tonight, so we’ll be playing games and watching Mythbusters bust the Moon Hoax Myth.

We’re looking forward to tomorrow and the weekend! Downtown Atlanta will be interesting, with 30,000 Dragon*Con attendees and the Alabama/Clemson game at the Georgia Dome with god knows how many fans and tailgaters.

I love this picture.

I drove past this a few times while traversing the Lubbock, TX to Birmingham, AL southerly route (the northerly route goes through Oklahoma City and avoids this spot). This is Louisiana off of I-20.

Because I solved the issue I was having with Thunderbird, I’m ready to publish my public key for all and sundry to use.

What does this mean? Well, from now on the emails you receive from me will be digitally signed and with the public key listed below you can confirm that they are from me¹. Do I suspect that I’m being the target of multiple email address stealing thieves? No, but I’d rather start now than later when it becomes an issue. Insurance is something you purchase before you need it.

It also means that anyone who goes through the trouble (and it is a bit of trouble, no matter what the websites say) to set up encryption on their email will be able to exchange fully encrypted emails with me. Do I suspect that some nefarious group is snooping on my emails? No (although my company explicitly says they have that right, as does my ISP, as does the NSA, FBI, law enforcement…), but I’d rather keep my private conversations private, from anyone. As it is right now, your emails flying around the ether are open for snooping by anybody who really wants to. Sure, innocent people have nothing to fear, but we shouldn’t tacitly agree to the snooping. I am not. I want to spread the encryption meme about and make it that much more difficult to access my communications.

Join me in making it more difficult for the government, or anyone else for that matter, to monitor us. I promise that in the next few weeks, I’ll post a how-to for setting up public key encryption using Mozilla Thunderbird and GnuPG. There was a learning curve for me because most of the tutorials were written by and for people who spend a lot of time in front of a command line interface. I think there’s a market for a how-to that’s a bit more explicit.

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Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (MingW32)

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