social engineer

Dear LOT Polish Airlines - if you want to get some customers perhaps you should offer the visitors to your American website an option to view it in English. Seriously, dude.

We kind of want to register urbandoggy.com (it's the blog Gnocchi supposedly has on the dogternet).

What could we do with the site, given that it absolutely cannot be Gnocchi's blog?

One idea is to spoof urbandaddy.com. What else?

And this is why you should never take Russian domestic flights.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/world/europe/16aeroflot.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y

So, the hard drive on my mac book died, and the mac service center say that they cannot recover any data. I cannot check right now how much data I've lost since my backup hard drive is back home, but let's assume it's a substantial amount and it would be worth quite a bit to me to get it back. Should I get a second opinion on data recovery possibilities, or can I assume that the mac center got it right and it's really impossible? Are there any details I can get from the technician that would help you answer this question?

This has not been the best of trips.

Ricotta and absinthe muffins are delicious. That's all.

Nothing like a discussion of immigration to ruin one's day.

On the other hand, we finally got our learners' permits!

Let me try to do a book count this year.

Finished so far:

Service Included, by Phoebe Damrosch, a waitress at Per Se. The parts about her actual work are fascinating - her descriptions of staff training, interpersonal dynamics in the dining room and wacky guests are all fantastic. The remainder - all of the middle of the book, pretty much - is like every other memoir of a 20-something you've ever read. Love, angst, bar hopping. Feel free to skip it. Do read the last chapter - that's the notes on diners.

Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl. If you are hopelessly in love with M.F.K. Fisher, have read everything she's written, and yearn for more, this will scratch the itch. Reichl doesn't quite have the same literary grace, but she does write about some hilariously disastrous parties, and living in a commune in California in the late 1970s, and tagging along on a wine buying trip to Burgundy. I started this quite a while ago, lost steam in the middle, and finally finished, so it's not exactly impossible to put down. It is nonetheless entertaining.

Lush Life, by Richard Price. A New York police procedural. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

There is a special place in hell for people who steal snow shovels.

I cannot quite explain why a children's choir singing about zombies and werewolves delights me so, but it's really almost unbearable.

"Changing the curriculum is like trying to move a cemetary: everything there is dead, but has many friends who are still living"