Alkahest

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 [...]

There’s something about the idea of global warming that seems to drive people of a certain mindset completely insane. You start seeing things like: “the planet’s not warming up!” “Okay, maybe it is warming, but humans couldn’t possibly be causing it.” “Fine. We are causing global warming, but we can’t [...]

An interesting conversation at work today. I was talking with the guy, L (no - a different one), who has been responsible for our IT for the past 3.5 years. L isn’t the guy that always does the work, although he can. His real job is as an engineer in the company [...]

Last week at work was pretty interesting. On Tuesday, L and I flew up to Dayton for the day to meet with our sponsors. That meant a 6am flight out and originally a 11pm return flight. Fortunately, we wrapped it up a bit early and landed home back around 8:30pm. The [...]

One of my projects at work involves information markets: tools to extract aggregate knowledge from groups of people.  For example, at Intrade, you can buy and sell contracts on questions like, “who will be the democratic nominee for president?” or “how likely is it that the US economy will slip into recession?”  The market price [...]

Right before Thanksgiving my iPod went to that great electronics superstore in the sky.  More specifically, the cute little 1.8″ hard drive died.  Having looked around, I figured the best (or at least most interesting) fix was to replace the drive with a compact flash card.  The connector part finally came in today and we [...]

Over the holiday (I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!) I spent some time figuring out what to do about my broken iPod hard drive. The simplest/cheapest thing is to replace the drive with another 30 GB 1.8″ drive. The problem is that this is boring. Okay, next thought - up the [...]