dan foo!

(I might have gotten a little of this wrong

route agreggation and increasing payload,
multiway pairing and net-friendly c code,
boxes that filter on source routed pings,
these are a few of my favorite net things!

multicast native and option-free packets,
vlans that don’t break and short A-S pathlinks,
inter and measures with meaning to bring,
these are a few of my favorite net things!

when my links toast,
when the spam grows,
when my throughput hits ground,
i simply remember my favorite net things
and then i dont feel so down!

far reaching coverage and routing thats stable,
aggregate flow stacks and mice that are able,
to back off when shown that the nets being zinged,
these are a few of my favorite net things!

routers that do red and balance net loading
video fs with higharchacle coding
raw packet traces to dissect and see
all my of my aboslute favorite net things

when dns freaks
when my routes leaks
when i lose a peer
i try to remember my favorite net things
and then go buy more net gear

visualizations of virtual networks
discovering features and new ios quirks
vendor built stacks that respect tcp
these are a few of my favorite net things

snmp tools like mtrg
knowing how to unconfig your pvc’s
measurement boxes that sniff oc3
these are a few of my favorite net things

when my page stalls
or they pass laws to invade free net speech
i simply remember it could be worse
at least there’s still sites i still read

cool network geeks and their company perks
analysis in which true inside lurks
stable peer sessions and route symmetry
these are a few of my favorite net things

multimode fiber with an optical splitter
bgp sessions config’d not to litter
reverting to at and back to ip
these are a few of my favorite net things

when popups leap
when copyrights creap
into my browsers cache
i simply remember that SDMI will mostly burn and crash

stock trading websites that havent yet crashed
mp3 players with plenty of flash
having my cellphone talk to my pc
these are a few of my favorite net things

linux on open and freebsd
persistence in tcp’s http
finally remembering my pgp key
all of my absolute favorite net things

when backhoes sting
or time waits bring
servers to the ground
i simply remember my favorite net things
and then i dont feel so down!

I’m running a little behind blogging about my life. I’ve got some things to catch up on. Let’s start with the SLAPP threat I got on Saturday from a former computer teacher of mine.

The two of us made eachother’s lives hell the 4 years I was at Mineola HS. I found a number of security vunerabilities in the computer network there, two of which required this woman to go to every single one of about a thousand computers and change every password on it. heh. Hey it was her job to take care of those things and she didn’t do it!

Now on the other side this teacher was the biggest hypocrite I could ever meet. She was constantly on a power trip where she could break all the rules. Her first semester at my HS she let a number, let’s say 3, of her lacrosse players play in a playoff game after they’d been suspended. They lost the game anyway :-). However, after that she’d uphold the rules to the strictest definition she could come up with, and without any tact to speak of. One time she refused to allow entry into the computer room to the students working on the newspaper because their advisor was on strike. She would vigorously prevent students from parking in the teachers parking lot even 30 minutes before school ended. She policed the hallway for people eating food. She was a terrible harassment to just about everyone there. Of all the people I know from my HS, none can point to a positive achievement.

At the same time, a new administration was put into place at my HS. They cracked down on student speech hard. That was the reason for the newspaper advisor going on strike. Alternative means of dissidence such as the internet and out of school publications quickly became the only way for students to communicate freely. I started this trend with a number of websites, ironically, the one this teacher got angry about was NOT anywhere near the worst of them. The one she got mad about was one where I basically said the same as the paragraph above. I stated what I thought about her. I stated why I thought that. And I listed completely factual recountings of events and runins with her from myself and numerous other people. When I graduated I took that page down.

Google cached it. 2 years later, after making an off the cuff remark on my now current blog about how I only wish this teacher would leave the school already, she must have gone on a Google searching rampage and found the cached page from 2 years ago. This put her over the edge. She ended up contacting a lawyer and writing a very entertaining Valentine’s Day card of sorts to me. They said I was guilty of “making statements that could be damaging to her character” “lowering her estimation in the eyes of the community” “providing a public forum that is openly critical of a teacher” and that the impact of such actions was “virtually incalculable”. Their reasoning was that “a teacher is a leader in the school and community and the ability to maintain that leadership is linked to their ability to practice the teaching craft. These postings diminish the ability of [this person] to hold themselves out in the community and therefore people will view her less worthy of trust or allow her to work.” They also requested that I immediately post a retraction and an apology because they didn’t think the 2 year old posting could be removed from Google.

So… first off let’s criticize the letter a little. Besides the numerous grammatical mistakes, ever changing margins, repeated paragraphs, incorrect knowledge of how Google works, and leaving the search terms they used in the URL they referenced, it was still a stupid letter. I’m not allowed to criticize a teacher or let others criticize a teacher? Since when are teachers immune to such things just because they’re teachers? And a retraction? A retraction of what? That I don’t like her? I can’t change that. Nothing I said was false either, so I can’t help anything. An apology is even hard to come by, I was simply stating my opinion. I didn’t do it by making personal attacks even though it would have been very easy. I even censored some of the things people wanted to post because they were derogatory. And remove the page from Google? Do it yourself! You can. The page is right here: www.google.com/remove.html “remove an outdated URL”.

This type of threat has a cute little acronym I think I’ve mentioned before. This, more than the last lawsuit I was threatened with, DEFINETELY is a SLAPP, a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Partcipation. Read more about SLAPP’s here:
http://www.casp.net/

So far, I’ve amended my previous apology to my superintendent to include information relevant to this teacher. I also took the courtesy of removing the outdated page from the Google cache. I have not and will not post any retraction. I’m also writing a response which hopefully I can get the EFF to rubber stamp.

Time to wrap this entry up. Here is the letter, completely unedited. I added meta tags to this block so Google can’t index it. I hope they work right.

So I signed on MySpace this morning and guess what new feature they put up???

A school plug-in!

My other blog got listed on hackaday.com! My article “HOW TO: Cure Cancer and Other Diseases” was linked on their front page. Sweet!

Woohoo! I’m Mike Purdy’s mentor for senior project. We’ll be doing a research project titled “Hackers effects on Information Security Culture.” I’m going to LOVE this!

When I was out at the Trailer Park on Friday night I saw the Critical Mass pass us by. There were hardly any riders because it was so cold out. I was reading BoingBoing this morning and check out what happened to them last Friday: NYC Bicycle Abuse

This is getting totally ridiculous. Don’t police officers have better things to do? How can you just “spare” 50 cops on scooters in freakin NYC? I’m going to have to bring a camera to Critical Mass from now on.

Lately I feel like I’ve been living a double life as a restaurant reviewer. I’ve eaten out every night for about 5 days now. Yesterday I went back to The Green’s on Montague St. out here in Brooklyn. It was really awesome. I would even say it was better than Zen Palate. Cheap too. Tonight I went out to Vegetarian’s Paradise 2 near Washington Square. Just as good. Their top dish is this soy bean appetizer thats fried to be like chicken nuggets. It was only 6 dollars and man was it good. I’d go back anytime.