E-rant

If you haven’t heard of this one, here’s a quick recap:  “Pro-choice” proponents are up in arms over the fact that the NFL is running a “pro-life” ad during the superbowl.  It happens to feature Tim Tebow and is rumored to be a description of the struggle faced by his mother when making the choice not to abort her baby due to medical conditions.  Their complaint is that the NFL doesn’t run “cause” ads, and are whining about why they are allowing this one and not others.

They have a somewhat valid point.  The NFL doesn’t just run any cause ads – they run specific cause ads!  United Way is a “cause” – the NFL runs their ads non-stop and even requires it’s players to donate time and resources to them.  It’s not exactly the most politically divisive of causes, but helping the unfortunate is most certainly a ”cause”.

Regardless of the status of a “cause”, it simply appears to me that “pro-choice” activists are only pissed off because they don’t have a good way to advertise.  Sure, the pro-life side get a story like Tim Tebow, two time Heisman trophy candidate, to show the type of life that might not have been possible - a nice sweet story – and bam, they’re running during halftime.  So what would a pro-choice ad look like …?

Open with a scene with a young girl having a serious talk with her mom – cut to them holding hands in the waiting room of the abortion clinic and a reassuring nod and loving tender look from mom - cut to the girl running to her mother through a field of poppies after the procedure with a big smile and a happy embrace – and fade.  

Uh… no, that’s just plain creepy.  Almost as creepy as those old Summer’s Eve ads.  I’m sure if the pro-choice community could find some story similarly sweet and sappy, led by a football star, their ad will be ran as well.  But that’d be tough, since all their potential stars have been aborted.  Hard to win the Heisman from the bottom of a biomedical waste disposal bag.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not one of those fundamentalist nut-jobs who crusade for a cause.  In fact, I’m kind of the opposite – an uninspired “meh” kind of guy that doesn’t have the drive to crusade his way out of a wet paper sack.  But now that I’m started on this topic, I’ll go all the way:

…and another thing about these “pro-choice” people:  What “choice” are they really on about?  It seems to me that they’re really anti-choice.  They seem to be a little one-tracked, standing behind the idea that having an abortion is the only choice that matters.  From my perspective (yes, my perspective: I’m one of those idiotic uninformed males that are forced to support whatever unilateral decision is made for the rest of our lives and god help us if we have an opinion on the subject either way), it appears there are two other choices as well – adoption and keeping the baby.  Maybe Pam Tebow exercised her “right to choose” by having the baby – going against the doctor’s recommendation to end the pregnancy.  I guess “pro-choice” just sounds better than any of the alternatives like “pro-death” or ”anti-life”.

But back to the NFL.  I think that they can run any ad they choose to, and should cater to the crowd that will be watching.  I don’t think they’re treading on anybody’s rights by doing so.  If the pro-choice crowd can come up with an ad that’s as sweet and sappy as Tebow’s story, then they should be able to run it, too. 

Good luck with that, pro-choicers.

A long time ago, in a career far, far away, I worked at a government facility that was just way over the top on security.  We didn’t really do all that much – plus there are guards with guns guarding us while we really didn’t do that much.  They even had a firing range, holding cells, a protected area (with buffer zone) controlled by biometric access.  Nutty stuff.  One of the rules that I had previously thought overkill was that you couldn’t bring cameras in.  Why would anybody care what we could possibly take pictures of here?

While having lunch, I found out why that rule was in place.  Sitting here, in the Jovian bunker, getting my daily fix of security newsfeeds, lotto numbers, and lolcats, I came across a link to pictures of somebody’s control systems.  Interesting, I thought and started looking at them since I’m just kind of dorky that way.  There a dozen photos of various parts of the control system.  In fact, if you’re interested, here they are (“here they “were” – they’ve been removed since lunch, but I dug them out of my browser cache for you all to enjoy and posted them here).

Pictures.  So what?  They’re low resolution and a bit difficult to make anything out.  Well, web 2.0 and Search Engine Optimization was kind enough to bestow upon us “tagging“, whereby a social networking site can make content more relevant to searches by allowing (typically) users to provide a phrase that helps describe a blog post, video, movie, or other “user-generated content” (read:”useless crap”).  Tags are great – it’s nice to add words to media so that you can categorize and filter your own useless crap, and your mother-in-law and her gossipy bridge club buddies can more easily see where you work and you can prove to her once and for all that you’re not a freeloading bum milking her daughter for all she’s worth as she’s been saying for years now.   

The images are ok, but the really good stuff lies in the associated metadata contained in the handy tagging features (they’ve been removed from flickr.com since lunch, so you’ll have to go see what they look like in Google’s cache to see what the tag info was).

Start with the user account name:  Sarasota_itsd.   Florida, maybe?  Matches the map on the wall.  Then there are the picture titles that include “Carlton Office” and “SCADA”.   Google up “carlton office sarasota scada”, and the first page of results are about a water treatment plant.  More easy Googling and you find it located here, in high resolution.  And there’s the picture captions and the “tags” that imply they run Allen Bradley ControlLogix PLCs and the Dynac control system suite running on OpenVMS (likely complimented by DynView workstation software).  Compound that with the org chart hanging on the wall and one can extrapolate this is at a pretty modern, yet slightly understaffed water treatment facility.  The org chart which seems to show 12 engineers on staff that report to six executives is probably correct, since the satellite shows 14 parking spaces ‘round back with a dozen or so up front.  That’s also evidenced by the satellite picture taken at roughly noon (shadows facing due north) and that there are (apparently) only three personally owned vehicles in the lots.

A little more googling gives this handy brochure that shows you, yes, that big tank without a perimeter fence around it really is the tank that holds the clean water ready to go into the system.  And if you’re still unsure what you’re doing you can get a tour of the plant as well - but you have to arrange it in advance, since they only have a dozen or so people to run the plant across 24×7 shifts, which means you’ve got only two or three guys on per shift usually.

Just a teensy bit more resolution in those pics and you’d have their IP scheme, too, since they had that printed to the screen for some ludicrous reason on both their XP laptop, their DynView station, and their IBM thinkpad, all of whihc are sitting right next to their DLink b/g/n wireless router.  But no such luck, unless we can find those guys from the TV spy shows that can “enhance” any blurry image enough to know what religion a guy is.

I’m convinced: cameras in sensitive areas are a risk, but not nearly as big a risk as trusting your operations to some moron posting pictures to social networking sites.