MuseBlog

Continued from v. 2013.

So, how many of you are about to finish school this year — either secondary school or university? Congratulations to all of you, regardless!

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From the “Digimon Adventure Movie.”

-ibcf

Robert writes:

Last week, my co-worker (and successor as Muse‘s Q&A columnist) Lizzie Wade came to Science headquarters in Washington, D.C., for a big staff meeting. Lizzie is our Latin America correspondent, based in Mexico City, and doesn’t visit us nearly enough. Here we are in the hall outside a conference room. Yes, she really is as much fun as she looks.

Don Pedro. Your silence most offends me, and to be merry best becomes you, for out o’ question you were born in a merry hour.

Beatrice. No, sure, my lord, my mother cried, but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born. — Cousins, God give you joy!

—Much Ado About Nothing

Also (and actually) born today: Optimatum and Rós þyrnir. Joy to all!

So, who is involved? KaiYVes, Agent Lightning, Randomosity, fireh, Catwings, ibcf — anyone else?

You can’t stay in WD 101 forever.

More tips and moral support for getting in, getting ahead, or just staying in the game.

Our Web provider, Dreamhost, says we’re okay:

As soon as we learned of the “Heartbleed” OpenSSL vulnerability, we began to patch any and all systems that it may have affected. Fortunately this was a very small subset of our systems and was mostly isolated to a small group of mail machines. As of early yesterday, all of our systems are patched. As a preventative measure, we are also re-keying the certificates on any systems with that bug. We have no reason to believe that any of those machines have been compromised, but in the interest of proactive security, we feel that changing SSL certificates is the best option.

DreamHost.com was not vulnerable, but the machines that redirected traffic to our actual site were. This was corrected quickly and those machines will also have their certificates re-keyed.

We can confidently say that our shared servers, VPS guests, and dedicated machines are NOT vulnerable to this issue because they run Debian “Lenny” and/or “Squeeze”. The most common version of OpenSSL on our network is 0.9.8o-4squeeze14, and the “HeartBleed” vulnerability in OpenSSL’s heartbeat module exists in versions 1.0.1 and 1.0.2-beta.

Not quite Muse news, but close:

Cricket magazine is having a sort of homecoming for grownup readers. Here are the details, snatched from an email announcement from the publisher:

Remember when you got your first Cricket? Or maybe you rushed to the mailbox for your issues of Ladybug or Spider.

Whichever magazine you loved, we want to hear from you! Tweet: My favorite @CricketMag memory is…#celebratecricket or post it on our facebook page and you may receive a copy of Cricket’s 30th anniversary commemorative book. This delightful treasury of exceptional stories and poems, great art, and reminiscences is illustrated throughout in black and white and contains 20 pages of color reproductions of Cricket cover art.

Robert writes:

Polly Shulman came down from New York yesterday for the retirement party of our friend and frequent editee, the renowned geoscience writer Richard Kerr. Here’s a picture of Polly, Dick, and me in Dick’s strangely bare and reverberant office.

Polly was her usual ebullient self. Her latest book in the Grimm Legacy series has just gone off to her editor, and she’s pondering new projects — maybe something a little different. More news as it becomes available…

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The vernal equinox is occurring right…now! Is everybody ready?

*Or autumn, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere, of course.

Robert speaketh:

Attention, all cephalo-fans! The domain name www.squidfanpage.com, which I’ve owned for a few years but never used, has just expired. I bought it for Squidblog but wound up using www.squidblog.org instead. So if you’d like it for your very own, any domain registrar will be happy to turn it over to you for $10 to $20 a year.

Speaking of which, April Fools’ Day is coming up. I haven’t had time to cook up anything for MuseBlog this year, so I’m planning to rev up SquidBlog again unless some of you newly empowered Authors can hatch something else between now and then.

A place to post things you’ve written and to talk about writing in general.

Continued from v. 2013.

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We owe both of you so much.

Known Muser birthdays and “K Days” this month*:

02-01 Keiffer’s birthday (1997)
02-02 Groundhog22’s birthday (1989)
02-06 Choklit Orange’s 6K Day
02-08 Birthday of Cerulean Pyros (1996)
02-09 Drama Llama’s 5K Day
02-16 cromwell’s birthday (1996)
02-19 Castle’s 6K Day
02-26 KaiYves’s birthday (1993)
02-26 Kai D.’s birthday (2001)
02-26 Zinc’s 6K Day

You turn 5,000 days old this month if you were born between May 26 and June 22, 2000.
You turn 6,000 days old this month if you were born between August 30 and September 26, 1997.
You turn 7,000 days old this month if you were born between December 4 and December 31, 1994.
You turn 8,000 days old this month if you were born between March 9 and April 5, 1992.

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And slightly zoomed in:

Kai writes:

I drew this picture this weekend, “Forecast”. It’s inspired by the idea that a change as small as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings alters the state of the atmosphere enough to make the weather difficult to predict.

Known Muser birthdays and “K Days” this month*:

01-01 Jadestone’s birthday (1992)
01-03 Armada’s 6K Day
01-03 Lady Bunniful’s birthday
01-23 Kittymine’s birthday (1993)
01-25 Cinnamoon’s 7K Day
01-26 Glassboro’s birthday (1995)

You turn 5,000 days old this month if you were born between April 25 and May 25, 2000.
You turn 6,000 days old this month if you were born between July 30 and August 29, 1997.
You turn 7,000 days old this month if you were born between November 3 and December 3, 1994.
You turn 8,000 days old this month if you were born between February 7 and March 8, 1992.

*Note: Listed MBers who have been inactive for several months won’t appear on next year’s birthday calendar unless they show up again.

Continued from v. 4.0.

Exactly what it sounds like.

Previously in this topic: both Seriously Awesome Comics and Manga, Anime, and Graphic Novels

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The long-dreaded WordPress upgrade went as planned. So far, everything seems to be working normally. Let us know if you notice anything off-kilter.