A recipe we’ve been playing around with, and took to a Halloween party Saturday night. It’s quite tasty. For a single serving:

• 1 ounce vodka
• 1 ounce vanilla liqueur
• 1.5 ounces apple juice
• 1 tbsp. real pumpkin
• Cinnamon (dash)
• Nutmeg (garnish)

In a shaker with ice, shake up all the ingredients (yes, shaken, not stirred). The pumpkin should be pureed—canned pumpkin, in other words. The best apple juice I’ve found is all-natural—the cider-looking stuff.

You can rim the glasses with graham cracker crumbs, and even do a spritz of whipped cream on the drink—you could consider that the "pumpkin pie martini."

So apparently the Storm Worm—an email-propagating trojan that’s creating an unknowingly-large botnet—has learned how to figure out when security researchers are probing it and is retaliating (Via Boing Boing via Slashdot):

The Storm worm is fighting back against security researchers that seek to destroy it and has them running scared, Interop New York show attendees heard Tuesday.

The worm can figure out which users are trying to probe its command-and-control servers, and it retaliates by launching DDoS attacks against them, shutting down their Internet access for days….

As researchers test their versions of Storm by connecting to Storm command-and-control servers, the servers seem to recognize these attempts as threatening. Then either the worm itself or the people behind it seem to knock them off the Internet by flooding them with traffic from Storm’s botnet….

Now, if I were approaching this news from a science fiction (writing) or a conspiracy theoretical angle, I’d be seriously wondering if this isn’t the rise of a distributed sentient AI.

(*cough* Skynet *cough*)

This isn’t a new idea. William Gibson back in ’98 wrote a script for "The X-Files" based on the same premise: a computer virus (several, actually) was loosed upon the internet to spread and evolve and bootstrap itself into a networked emergent AI.

Then, of course, it tried to kill everybody who tried to stop it.

Jen posted something along the lines of what I was thinking; first there was National Novel Writing Month, now there’s also a National Blog Posting Month, what’s next?

Any why are they both for November? Did the NaBloPoMo guys just follow the model too closely?

Okay, enough rhetorical questions. (The answers, by the way, are National [insert meme here] Month, they aped NaNoWriMo, and yes.) For what it’s worth, I’m half-seriously considering trying NaNoWriMo (that’s the one where you try to write a 50,000-word novel in a month)—I know, I know, I’ve said this before—but by now everyone should know I’m full of grandiose schemes and ideas, right? Right?

At any rate, blogging every day isn’t really that much of a stretch, since I’m more or less doing that already (not here recently, but certainly between my other two blogs). But the novel… you’d have to average 1667 words per day just to meet the 50,000 mark.

(For reference, my longest piece (I think it’s my longest) here on chuggnutt.com is this, at about 3500 words, just over twice what that daily average should be.)

Something to chew on. At least the idea’s out there in the ether now. And it looks as though Jen will be participating in both—though I like her idea of National Cookbook Writing Month (NaCoWriMo?) in an ironic sort of way…

I know I’m a day behind on this, but every now and again, Slashdot posts a story that is so incomprehensibly gibberish-sounding that I point and laugh. Yesterday was one such: Time Dimension To Become Space-like.

‘We show that regular changes of signature on brane-worlds in AdS bulks may account for some types of the recently fashionable sudden singularities. Therefore, the fact that the Universe seems to approach a future sudden singularity at an accelerated rate of expansion might simply be an indication that our braneworld is about to change from Lorentzian to Euclidean signature. Both the brane and the bulk remain fully regular everywhere.’

What the hell is that? I can’t even follow it. I can’t even pretend to follow it. I think Slashdot is trying to write dialog for a Star Trek episode again.