{"id":695,"date":"2011-10-29T14:11:22","date_gmt":"2011-10-29T19:11:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2011\/10\/29\/111029-randomthursday\/"},"modified":"2022-04-02T12:19:23","modified_gmt":"2022-04-02T17:19:23","slug":"111029-randomthursday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2011\/10\/29\/111029-randomthursday\/","title":{"rendered":"Random Thursday &#8211; The Saturday Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The following would make a passable series of Facebook posts, but I&#8217;m behind on my blogging quota. Plus, I&#8217;ve had literally one or two people (OK, one) ask when I would be updating the Gazette again.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We&#8217;re planning to attend a charity dinner and dance tonight, and because it&#8217;s within a week of Halloween, it&#8217;s billed as a &#8220;Masquerade Ball.&#8221; This is not our cup of tea, but we&#8217;ll put up with it for the chance to do some ballroom dancing. But we won&#8217;t be going completely unprepared. To wit:\n<p style=\"text-align: center; margin-top: 1em;\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 1px solid #ccc;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/miscphotos\/mask.jpg\" alt=\"My awesome mask\"><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin-top: 1em;\">Pretty awesome, huh?<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">If you&#8217;re wondering if the front-facing camera on the iPhone serves any useful purpose, I think the preceding provides a definitive answer.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">I&#8217;ve refrained from saying anything about the Texas Rangers and outcome of the World Series. Now that I&#8217;ve calmed down a bit, I feel confident in saying that I&#8217;ve seen more polished performances from preschool t-ball teams than the Rangers exhibited in Game 6, and this Series is going to haunt them in the off-season worse than losing in five games last year. I thought I&#8217;d be content if they won three games &#8211; a huge improvement over last year &#8211; but to lose it like they did is almost unbearable. Good thing I&#8217;m not a baseball fan.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">At least until next summer.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">I&#8217;m in the process of simplifying my computer setup, now that I no longer rely on it for my work. I&#8217;m getting rid of an external DVD burner and a couple of external hard drives that I used for backup. I decided to erase the HDs using Apple&#8217;s Disk Utility application, and one of the options is a secure erase using something called a 7 Pass Erase. This essentially writes over the drive seven times and exceeds the US Department of Defense&#8217;s specifications for secure erasure of media. It&#8217;s also been working for seven hours and is only 2\/3rds finished. This is for just a 160gb drive; I can&#8217;t envision having the patience to do this for a 2 terabyte drive. (And I declined the option to do a <b>35-pass<\/b> overwrite.)<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">This does seem like a lot of trouble to go to just to keep people from discovering I have an online account with a temporary tattoo supplier.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Well, in hindsight, this probably wouldn&#8217;t have been that great a series of Facebook posts after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The following would make a passable series of Facebook posts, but I&#8217;m behind on my blogging quota. Plus, I&#8217;ve had literally one or two people (OK, one) ask when I would be updating the Gazette again. We&#8217;re planning to attend a charity dinner and dance tonight, and because it&#8217;s within a week of Halloween, it&#8217;s&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2011\/10\/29\/111029-randomthursday\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Random Thursday &#8211; The Saturday Edition<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-thursday","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9483,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695\/revisions\/9483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}