A few days ago, a friend disbursed some wisdom obvious to the Gen-X class or whatever: that Sarah Palin sounded like an idiot on Couric, that creationists are idiots, and that christians are fools. That latter one was because the don’t accept the blatant appropriateness — nea, the very necessity — of abortions in the cases of rape/incest.

While it’s good fun to see such jolly regurgitation of the political “facts” of the day, that last one needed a bit of a response from your humble scribe. I pointed out that one reason people might oppose abortion even in these cases is because it kills a proto-person who’s not personally guilty of the crimes of the rapist/incestivizor. The argument need not even rely on christian souls or supernatural phenomena. One can try to think about it in terms of crime & punishment.

A quick riposte at the glittering allure of socialist utopia, whose ultimate corollary is such simply predicted fascism.

Headline: facts are stubborn things
Keywords: “.. disinformation … rumours … casual conversation … if you see something … that seems fishy, report it to flag@whitehouse.gov …”
In other words: Report on your neighbours directly to the federal executive.

This is so asinine it gets a “seriously” tag.

Over the dinner table, I wondered aloud about what it would be like to be so young as to have as few memories as a little person. Stuart asked what I was talking about, so I had to explain by contrasting all my decades of memories versus his twoish years.

Stuart repeated

So you would like to be me.

Suddenly, an opportunity to probe his memories. We asked him about what he remembered from the time he was a baby. I don’t think he restricted his response to the queried time frame, but did monologue awhile:

When I was a baby, I was learning how to walk on my feet, how to climb, how to play with my hands, how to play with airplanes, how to read, how to play with trucks, to play on the computers. I knew how to sit down, how to go to the basement to play with my toys.

“Do you remember being sad as a baby?”

No, I was happy a lot.

So far, so good.

A few days ago, 4.5-year-old Eric and I went shopping to a local Staples store. The boy has been using computers for half his life, and enjoys trying out the others on display. He was foiled by all the Vista log-on screens that asked for a sales guy password.

Well, he was not foiled for long. As he poked around the logon window, he came across the helpful “password hint” popup, into which the store staff had helpfully placed some text. Eric said “let’s try that!”, typed it in, and of course it turned out to be the real cleartext password. He poked around the broken-into machine a bit then moved on.

I reported both of us to the nearby cashier, as criminal and accomplice.

A tasty tidbit in defense of self-defense.

When the bad thing comes and seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

Little tech hints. As a part of reinstalling my home server recently, I switch from exim to sendmail (horrors!). I have been trying to reestablish all the spam-related filters, but it has been a pain. "milters" for clamav, dkim, not too bad. Having to read up on sendmail's configuration language, well, an eye opener.

To enable SPF checking (via the Return-Path:) header, despite being piped through .forward/procmail for local delivery, add to sendmail.mc:

define(`LOCAL_SHELL_FLAGS', `P')dnl

To enable others to perform SPF checks to block forgeries from nonexistent *subdomains* of a domain one owns, add *wildcards* to the zone

$ORIGIN my.domain.org
* IN TXT "v=spf1 ..."
* IN SRV "v=spf1 ..."

2.5-year-old Stuart spake thusly:

Go away, Frank!
(Are you serious?)
Yes.
(Why?)
Because I don’t like you.
(Really?)
Yes.
(time passes)
Help me put on my shirt!