prod & ponder

This actually comes from a brilliant bit of comedic marketing by Microsoft, a faux children’s book titled Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House? Helping your Child Understand the Stay-at-Home Server.

In perhaps the mother of all “aim high and negotiate down” opening offers, a victim of hurricane Katrina has filed a claim against the U.S. Army Core of Engineers for $3,014,170,389,176,410. Yes, that’s over 3 quadrillion dollars. And yes, I’m as curious as you are about the reasoning behind that precise figure. The story is reported here.

Correction: I misread the article. The lawsuit is only for a paltry even $3 quadrillion. The $3,014,170,389,176,410 figure is the total of all the Katrina-related claims brought against the U.S. Army Core of Engineers.

Several folks wrote to let me know that my last blog entry was quoted in the Washington Post’s Express. New visitors to the blog, welcome.

15 minutes. That’s how long it took me to break the WEP encryption of my home wireless network. That’s not good.

I vaguely knew that WEP encryption could be cracked and was less-than-ideal, but it wasn’t something I was particularly concerned about. Possible and likely are two very different things, and I figured that breaking a 128-bit WEP key was too much of a pain for anyone to realistically tackle. As it turns out, it’s actually quick and fairly easy. Yeesh. Time to switch the house over to WPA encryption.