Looks like I got on today’s episode of CNet’s Buzz Out Loud again. Listen for my email near the end. (Or read it off the show notes.) Although, it would’ve been nice if they hadn’t shot it down as inaccurate straight outta’ the gate. Harsh buzz.

Wicked! Zero Cool’s got a new show!

So the wife and I are watching an episode of Law & Order from 2003. (Yay re-runs! Thanks, writer’s strike!) In it, a bank transfer is initiated electronically and darned if those wily prosecutors don’t want to find out whodunnit. Fortunately for Sam Waterston, the bank has a crack team of one, count em, one nerdy-style lady who runs a “traceroute program” to “backtrack the IP address.” Say huh? You know, a traceroute program, “the same kind of software they use to nail internet hackers.” Oh! Thanks for the explanation. I’m guessing that’s different from the DOS command “traceroute.” The reason I make this summation is because it’s actually got a GUI that we get to see. (Yippee!)

This GUI, which clearly states the name of the application as IP Address Track 1.0.5 (Glad they got the upgrade from 1.0, even if it was mainly a bugfix patch.), lists a “Datastream” field (complete with Matrix-style rapid-streaming illegible text) and “Globalposit” graphic (which just seems to be a black sphere with gridlines overlaid). But the very best section of this IP Address Track is the IP address display itself, outfitted with a password-cracking-style IP box that ticks through the IP numbers one at a time (not as a whole octet) as if correctly “hacking” the IP - digit by digit.

And the very best part of this very best section? When the leet bank tech lady finally “backtracks” the IP, we get this statement from her: “392.163.1.104 - That’s a US address.”

I feel the time is right to interject a teensy bit of geek-school. IP addresses, the house numbers of the internet, are a combination of 4 8-bit binary octets separated by periods. Several blocks of these addresses are reserved for private use on non-routed networks. The most common of these reserved groups, the 16-bit block (192.168.0.0), is what most people would find on their home network. Each of the 4 numbers in an IP address is an 8-bit binary number, that’s 2 to the 8th power. Doing the math on that, we can see that with 8-bit binaries, there’s an available 2×2x2×2x2×2x2×2, or 256, numbers. Since these numbers start with zero, and zero is one of those 256, the possible values for IP octets are 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255. Even ignoring the tons of those values reserved for private networks and network infrastructures, the maximum number is 255.255.255.255!

And now back to our show. “392.163.1.104 - That’s a US address.” That’s not even possible! The last time I checked, 392 was waaay bigger than 256. Now I know in television and film writers often use (212) 555-XXXX non-real telephone numbers to keep psycho TV fans from drunk-dialing House’s cell phone to ask him if he’ll play doctor with them, only to rouse a very sleepy Bob the Exterminator at two o’clock in the stinkin’ morning! But using 392.163.1.104 as an IP address is like our hero tell his heroine to call his cell phone, (21543) 332237-298A99012$345. It’s just silly.

Although it’s not as silly as Las Vegas’s Danny McCoy pulling the image of a killer off of his reflection in another guy’s eye, himself reflected in a van’s rear-view mirror, all of this in a grainy traffic camera. WTF?

We’re under attack!

Gotta love blowin’ up the interwebs. I’ve added the NetDisaster toolbar to the top of every page on the site. So at any time you can choose your destructo du jour and start smashin’! Enjoy.

Caution: Blades are sharp. Exercise care when using.

Boy, do they ever mean that!

So I cut the end of my thumb off. Yup. The whole end. Not a slice, not a gash, the tip. Off. O. F. F. Off. That’ll sure wake you up in the morning.

Backstory: We were having some friends over for dinner. Missy’d planned on painting the bathroom, so I offered to cook dinner. I was going with an Asian theme. Teriyaki chicken, fried rice, stir fried veggies…. I’d even gotten sticky rice and seaweed wraps for some sushi fun. (Love me some wasabi.) So I’ve got all these fresh veggies lined up on the kitchen counter and I’m prepping the stir fry. In our household we don’t just cut up vegetables with a knife. No sir. We have a Pampered Chef slicer dicer thingamabob, complete with absolutely useless veggie pusher to keep you from cutting the tip of your finger off. I say absolutely useless because it doesn’t really grab the veggies well. The slicer blade slices great, it’s just the safety doodad sucks. So being smart grown-up man-child, I just run the veggies over the blade with my hand. (I think you can see where I’m going.)

I should probably interject at this point that I’ve started the day with full-on laryngitis. I’m currently unable to generate a single vocal utterance save for a high-pitched squawk at what should be my loudest. And boy, does that squawk hurt. So, were I to injure myself in any drastic fashion, I’d be thoroughly unable to signal for help from, say, a Registered Nurse, were there to perchance be one in the vicinity. (A Registered Nurse, I might add, who is loving the laryngitis as it makes it ever so easy to simply ignore me. “What dear? Oh, I’m sorry. I couldn’t hear you.)

So there I am, through the carrots, past the bell peppers, moving on to the cucumbers for sushi wraps…. SQUAWK!!! (Man, does my throat hurt.) Holy crap! Is that my…? But where’s the…? What the…? SQUAWK!!! And here comes the bleedy.

So that’s it. I’m typing this now with somewhere in the neighborhood of 37 pounds of gauze on my right thumb (what’s left of it, anyway), realizing how often I use my right thumb and just how hard it is to type wearing 37 pounds of gauze digitally. I think I’m done computering for the weekend. Maybe I’ll finally get to play some Xbox. Oh wait…. CRUD!