so, about maybe 2 months ago, one of my teeth become incredibly sensitive to hot and cold. it was awful. i'd grab a cold bottle of water, take a big drink of it and then i'd feel like someone was drilling into my jaw. horrible.

over the course of the last two months, it went from hot/cold sensitivity, to occasional pain, to pain whenever i touched it with my tongue, to just plain constant pain. so i had to call the dentist yesterday morning, have them take a look. because, as you probably know, mouth pain sucks.

it was my upper right side wisdom tooth. both of my wisdom teeth on the left side were removed in the early 90's by an oral surgery student at the university of the pacific dental school. it cost me only $400 for 2 local-only extractions. lots of cracking and bleeding later, i was less two painfully impacted molars. i never did get around to having the others removed. that is, until yesterday.

lucky for me, the dentist could see me immediately. when i got there they took some x-rays using some new tech i'd never seen before. it was a usb x-ray thing they stuck in my mouth which made me gag. x-rays always make me gag, but this one took the cake. good for me it was fast.

turns out the dentist also does rudimentary extractions right there in his office, and after seeing the x-rays, decided he could do it himself. so, much cracking and pinching later, my problematic wisdom tooth was out.

so what was causing all that pain? that particular tooth, on the side facing the tooth in front of it, had a giant cavity in it. a cavity so big it went down to the inside of the tooth. it was frightening. it was filled with unidentifiable organic matter. it was disgusting. glad it's gone.

so what, you ask, does this have to do with security? well, i'll tell you...

just because you can't see it from the outside, or can't get to it, doesn't mean it can't hurt you. badly. patch your boxes. no matter where they are. otherwise, you are going to be in a world of hurt when someone manages to stuff a couple hundred kbytes of kernel rootkit into that cavity and then twists it around a few hundred times. heh.