Alkahest

I’ve had the Sony Reader now for about a week.  In that time, I’ve taken it on a plane trip, read three full books, multiple days worth of the NY Times and I’m in the middle of two books right now.  Observations so far:

The electronic paper is very readable.  On my plane trip, I must […]

Yesterday, I bought a Sony Reader - the electronic book reader that uses E Ink’s electronic paper.  The electronic paper display on the reader is very nice.  It uses encapsulated white and black pigments that can be brought to the surface of the page.  The only power consumption involved happens when you make a change.  […]

Thanks to Luis, I find out last week that Tracks 1.5 has been released.  Tracks is the implementation of the  “getting things done” methodology which I prefer.  1.5 is pretty nice.  In particular, I look forward to hiding actions until a particular date.  In the past, I’ve wanted to track a todo some six months […]

The CTO Project makes an interesting observation that faculty are a bit like some corporations. They feel obligated to use Web 2.0 technologies in order to engage student interest and actually make some token effort to be up to date. But that they only want these technologies if they can exert complete control.
Trust […]

A few years ago, I was accused of using the word “interesting” in subtle ways.  Sometimes it means a truly novel idea that I would like to learn more about, other times, it’s a novel idea of which I’m more than a little skeptical.  In both cases, I stand by the description, to me, both […]

We’ve got voice over IP phones at the office.  For the most part, they are a very smart way to handle our communications.  We’re too large to want to use individual analog lines through the local telephone company - their rates would be prohibitively expensive.  We’re too small to make a private branch exchange (PBX) […]

Few people have been on top of the extension of FISA like Glenn Greenwald. As a quick overview for folks that haven’t been paying attention to the issue:

Late last year a real potential problem with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (as written in the 70s and amended after Sept 11) was recognized. […]

One of the things I dislike about blogs (and actually most webpages) is that the static content is formatted very nicely using different fonts, etc., but the dynamic content is all pure text.  And since there are only a few fonts you will find on every computer, the text all looks pretty much the same: […]

The ISP move went reasonably well.  There were a couple of minor glitches.  One was a character set problem when I tried to take the most recent database snapshot from Linksky.  I’m not entirely certain what happened, but I wound up with extra characters after some punctuation marks.  Rather than spend too much time with […]

Saturday is moving day. Nope, we haven’t bought a new house. We hope not to have to do that for a long time. It’s time to change ISPs. After only 10 months with Linksky, I’ve had enough. In the past year, between working on the non-profit’s website and […]