Saturday, February 19, 2005
I dreamt that I was at some kind of stage show involving drag queens and that I had the privilege of being able to go backstage. I ran in to Melissa and she wanted to go backstage so I offered to take her. The drag queens were typical drag queens—tall, fabulously dressed and made up, and some convincing and others not. When I woke up this morning and checked something, I realized that I wasn't calling Bill by the wrong name after all (see yesterday). I was mistaken about being wrong! Today I began the tedious process of changing nearly all of the hundreds of passwords I have. My recent research about how to choose a good password has made me realize I haven't been choosing passwords that are secure enough. So I'm moving toward a situation where I have all my passwords stored in an encrypted database and accessible from a single, very long master password. All but the master password are randomly generated and consequently very difficult or impossible to remember or memorize. I'm using password lengths as long as I am allowed, and I'm using as many different character sets as I'm allowed. All this work is tedious because few computer systems describe the limits of what you can set your password to up front, and it has made for some interesting revelations. For example, one system will let me enter a very long password (let's say 50 characters) but it really only recognizes the first 14 characters. No warning is given of this fact. This work of resetting passwords and making them stronger kind of makes me wish something like Microsoft Passport existed but not run by Microsoft. To me it doesn't make sense to trust something like global authentication to a company which has had such a poor security record in the past and continues to have a poor security record in the present. If ever there is a significant breakthrough in raw computing power, parallel processing, distributed computing, or something similar whereby it becomes ridiculously easy for people to run dictionary or brute force attacks, it's going to be all mayhem like you won't believe. I also realize that most of this work is probably going to be in vain (except for systems I control completely) because there will always be weaker passwords which will provide other avenues for malicious people to gain access to the whole system (including my account). Oh, well, at least my own systems will be protected. Backfilled food descriptions for dinner at 2223 on January 8, 2005. Errands in the Castro. It's been rainy for the past few days. Today an Adobe umbrella broke while Patrick attempted to use it, so I left it sitting half in and half out of a trash can on the corner next to Baghdad Cafe. When we walked by the same corner a few minutes later, the broken umbrella was gone—someone had taken it. Hazelnut latte (Patrick) and chai latte (me) at Cafe Flore. Patrick read essays for school. I read from John Weir's The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket. People who are very familiar with American film history and people who enjoy sassy, quick-witted, flamboyant, well-read characters will particularly like this book. Lunch at La Med: I had the pomegranate chicken lunch special, Patrick had the chicken kabob full plate and tea. More cafe-going at Sweet Inspirations, where we happened to encounter Matt W and met his friend Corey, and they joined us to chat a while. Tony Q showed up around the same time. Before they all arrived, however, Patrick and I saw one of the funniest things I'd seen in weeks. At Sweet Inspirations, there's a fountain against the wall, and the water emerges from a horizontal piece of bamboo. A man was sitting at the table right next to the fountain, and he was working on his laptop. Patrick and I got the furthest table in the back on the right side of the aisle. From our table, looking back at the man, and if there are no people at the tables in between, and if the man next to the fountain turns in profile, it appears quite plainly that the water is coming directly out of either his nose or his mouth and falling directly into his laptop! I wish I had had a videocamera to capture it because it seemed so real. Home. I napped while Patrick did homework. Fixed a kitchen shelf—a plastic support had broken. Dinner at home with Patrick: bowtie pasta and chicken sausage with red sauce, bread and butter. This evening we watched a public library DVD of Trembling Before G-d (aka "Trembling Before God" but Patrick tells me you're not supposed to say "God"), a documentary about queer Orthodox and Hasidic Jews who choose to remain faithful to their religion. The film was hard for me to watch because I do not consider myself a religious or spiritual person, and I found it difficult to understand why a person, after realizing that his or her religion says they should be put to death, wouldn't simply reject their religion altogether. The film attempted to answer this question, but the answer seemed to be that the religious teachings were so complete that some of these queer Jews are simply unable to function without their religion because it is such a large part—or the entirety—of their identities. Or, another answer in the film seemed to be that you can interpret the holy scripture in a different way. (But what part of "they shall be put to death" didn't you understand?) To me, the saddest part was realizing that since these scriptures were written there must have been thousands or millions of suicides resulting from these teachings because these queer people were unable to reconcile their faith with their realities. How can such communities live with the burden of so many needless deaths? The answer: Ignorance. My answer: If these religious leaders are so faithful, we should ask that they be the ones to publically put their own queer people to death—and ask each member of their community to take a knife and stab together as one to remain faithful to the ancient writings. Who then will respect these leaders and their followers if they are seen bleeding the hearts of their own herds for the sake of honoring what people might have thought thousands of years ago? This is the brutal power of religion, which can keep people's minds closed to logic and reality thousands of years after its invention. In the film, watch for the scenes which seem to have been inspired by Austin Powers films.