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Today one of our ISPs, Expedient(Warning: Opens annoying talking flash-based woman talking over your music), sent me a potato clock. I think it was to mark the 10 month anniversary of a new circuit we haven't quite been able to turn live yet (fault of another 3rd party vendor, long story) :-)

You'll notice the sticker on top is not centered, and that made it rest on this like 1/32" lip around the right "potato cup". That was going to drive me mental, so I was able to re-center it, now my inner Monk is happy.

Aside from that, it works great. It took me 10x as long to set the clock as it did to get it powered by potato, but it's pretty much staying right on time after 30 minutes anyway.

This is not the first such strange vendor swag they've sent me. The last thing I can remember was an Expedient branded USB hub, that had a keyboard controller in it. The Keyboard controller was so that whenever you plugged it in, it could send "http://www.expedient.com" to your default browser and open their homepage when you attach it. It also had a button on the top that would send you to their site, which is why it needed to be a "keyboard". I can't put my hand on that thing at the moment, but if I ever do, I'll definitely update this entry. It may not have survived my move from my last cubicle.

Photos:

There are several pointed questions I'd like to see people ask our presidential candidates. I'm going to start a list below, if anyone goes to an event, and can get one of these off before being tossed out, I'll buy you a coke. If it gets a reasonable answer, I'll buy you two cokes. If anyone has anything to add, tell me and I'll add it.

I'm going to do them by issue type and candidate, I guess. Most of them are probably pretty interchangeable. I started thinking of these in the context of "questions I would want to ask Rick Santorum", so I'm starting with him.

Today I got a customer satisfaction survey from EMC. It was specifically about RSA and how we like their products and the company in general. Cynically, I have to believe that it's not entirely a coincidence that they did this survey during BlackHat & DefCon because, well jeez maybe because half of the people receiving this aren't even in their home fucking state? There was a comment field to one of these asking "why do you feel this way".

The key point I took away from RSA's communications today is that all implications are that it's likely their token seed database was taken and that token codes are predictable, and may be able to be matched to customers.

They didn't say this, clearly, but every action they suggest to mitigate risk points to the fact. The mitigation steps they give are:

I think I've finally found the perfect job for the little Asus EEE, since it's just too weak to show good video. It has the following tasks: