I’m sitting in my office, staring at my monitor, and my eyes hurt. I look up, blank white walls on three sides, nothing to focus on. To the left, past the desk and body of the office-mate, a floor-to-ceiling window looking into a hallway. Through that, another blank white wall, fronted by a printer and a copying machine. Florescent lights cast their florescent glow.

There are those who forsake 9 to 5, refuse the full-time grind. Those who travel the country and the world, couchsurfing and wandering and discovering. There are those who wake up and decide that today is a good day to climb a mountain, or bike to the sea, or kayak down a river. And so they do.

I keep asking myself if I could ever be one of those people. I keep coming up with reasons why not. As my new job ramps up and the work gets more interesting, I will push to the back of my mind the nagging voice that tells me I need to get out and see and do and experience. But it won’t go away. It will fester and taunt me. And maybe one day I’ll finally listen to it.

For April Fools, XKCD is displaying Questionable Content, Questionable Content is displaying Dinosaur Comics, and Dinosaur Comics is displaying XKCD.

The weird part? I didn’t notice, because I read all three, and they all open in tabs…

Says the New York Times:

The report, to published at www.secure-medicine.org, makes clear that the hundreds of thousands of people in this country with implanted defibrillators or pacemakers to regulate their damaged hearts — they include Vice President Dick Cheney — have no need yet to fear hackers. The experiment required more than $30,000 worth of lab equipment and a sustained effort by a team of specialists[…]

Really? So all it costs for bloodless and undetectable assassination of a sitting US Vice President (or mob boss, or former Russian spy) is thirty thousand bucks and some stolen or recreated research? Sounds like there is something to fear. Sure the attack is only “theoretical.” Until someone does it, then suddenly it is “actual.”

I “rented” a movie. I was waiting for the right sad, rainy day on which to watch it. A day like today. Today would be a great day to watch it. Unfortunately, today happens to be exactly 30 days after I rented the movie, and so it has “expired.” iTunes was kind enough to delete the movie for me, and then to tell me it did so. Good job iTunes, here’s a doggie treat.

Now the movie is downloading from BitTorrent. Some other sad, rainy day, I’ll watch it. Maybe tomorrow. I can’t imagine ever again having the inclination to rent a movie from iTunes.

Thanks to the kindness of a blogger who “broke the paywall” if you will, we now have *both* sets of published transcripts from this utterly hilarious and amazing trial.

Counsel: Now, Mr Chrysler, perhaps you will describe what reason you had to steal 40,000 coat hangers?

Chrysler: Is that a question?

Counsel: Yes.

Chrysler: It doesn’t sound like one. It sounds like a proposition which doesn’t believe in itself. You know – “Perhaps I will describe the reason I had to steal 40,000 coat hangers… Perhaps I won’t… Perhaps I’ll sing a little song instead…”

Judge: In fairness to Mr Lovelace, Mr Chrysler, I should remind you that barristers have an innate reluctance to frame a question as a question. Where you and I would say, “Where were you on Tuesday?”, they are more likely to say, “Perhaps you could now inform the court of your precise whereabouts on the day after that Monday?”. It isn’t, strictly, a question, and it is not graceful English but you must pretend that it is a question and then answer it, otherwise we will be here for ever. Do you understand?

Chrysler: Yes, m’lud.

Judge: Carry on, Mr Lovelace.

Counsel: Mr Chrysler, why did you steal 40,000 hotel coat hangers, knowing as you must have that hotel coat hangers are designed to be useless outside hotel wardrobes?

Chrysler: Because I build and sell wardrobes which are specially designed to take nothing but hotel coat hangers.

Read the whole thing

He seems like the kind of guy who could pull it off, assuming it is a *real* TV show of legitimate production values and length, the only difference being that it is distributed online (and perhaps on DVD) instead of on television. I’d pay for it sight-unseen, and I’ll bet another quarter-million people would as well. At iTunes prices, that is half a mil per episode right out of the gate, which doesn’t seem like a bad way to start…

From 1776 to present day, only five African Americans have ever served in the United States Senate. Hiram Revels (R – Mississippi) was appointed in 1870 to fill a vacant seat for one year. He was followed in 1874 by Blanche Bruce (R – Mississippi); no other black Senator has been elected to the Senate from the South to this day, over 100 years later. The first black Senator elected by popular vote was Edward Brooke (R – Massachusetts) in 1966, followed by Carol Moseley Braun (D – Illinois) in 1992. The fifth, of course, is Barack Obama (D – Illinois), elected in 2004 and currently running for the United States Presidency.

Oscar had a scratching problem. Everywhere, all the time. Furniture, cabinets, the rug, my head. Here’s Oscar, so you can think about his adorable face scratching up the house as I talk about how I solved the problem.

Now I should caveat and hedge a bit, and say “solved” is a relative term. As often happens with animals, you eventually reach a place of mutual understanding and self-sacrifice, and have to be content with that.

Continue reading “How I learned to stop worrying and love the cat”

I’ve tried, but after 150 pages I’m giving up — first I just tried skipping all of the parts that I found tedious, but then I discovered that if I skipped those parts (alcoholism sections, drug addiction sections, tennis sections) there wasn’t much book left. I found the first chapter incredibly captivating, was occasionally intrigued by the Quebecois separatists (and anything about US-Canada relations), and want to know more about Hal and the rest of the Incandenza family, not to mention the Entertainment, but I just can’t wade through another 850 pages to get there. If you’re going to give it a try, though, this Amazon review (spoiler free) is going to help you, along with the advice that you need three bookmarks (place in the novel, place in the endnotes, and page 223) and might want to take some notes as well. Also, Kottke has some good stuff about the book.

Sometime in early 2006 or so, Robin Chase came to a few Berkman talks. When we did our introductions, she claimed to be the founder of Zipcar and to be working on a new startup involving wireless mesh networks and transportation. I wondered at the time, wireless internet traveling from car to car? Am I sitting next to a crazy person, or a brilliant one? I think the answer is probably the latter. She doesn’t go into many details in her TED talk, but you can fill them in yourself.

Looking for suggestions on things to do and visit in the San Francisco area on my first solo trip anywhere ever. I’m thinking this and this to start, along with standard wandering on foot, and maybe renting a bike at some point. But frankly the whole thing makes me nervous.

Reading between the lines of the FAQ on the site of HomeAgain, the company that supplied the RFID microchip implanted between Oscar’s shoulders, I am led to believe that the US took a market approach, as is typical here, with two incompatible pet identification chip systems, and eventually developed “universal” scanners after several years of fighting. The *rest of the world*, in contrast, got a later start but standardized from the get-go on an International Standards Organization specification for all chips. And of course the universal ISO chip, used in a bunch of countries, is not compatible with the AVID and HomeAgain chips used in the US and Canada, and of course our scanners, even the newest ones, can’t reliably read the ISO chips.

It’s the same story over and over again. Electricity, TV broadcast, cell phone systems, and on and on.

Four months into my job at Berkman, with people still nagging me about what, exactly, my work entailed, I wrote about what I do all day, in abstract terms.

You can’t expect to find your dream job in your first try, and I really didn’t expect, by the end of the search, to find anything remotely close. That I ended up where I am in a job I enjoy is a gift. I don’t plan to be here for the rest of my life, but I do plan to be here for at least a few years, and I’m pretty darn happy with how everything has turned out so far.

The post also gives a good explanation of why I have chosen to move on from Berkman and dive into the next challenge.

Here. Ignore their ugly-ass logo. Excited and sad. No idea what their policy is on blogging, or really anything else. It’s a new adventure, to be sure. But one that I’m ready for at this point in my life.

Perhaps later, the whys and wherefores that got me here. Or perhaps never, as growing older means learning what sorts of things you should write about and what sorts of things you shouldn’t.

My last day at Berkman is the 20th of February, I’ll be in CA the 21st to the 26th, if there is anyone around who wants to say ‘ello, go to Disneyland, that sort of thing.

In other news, I finally got Hey Mr. Producer on DVD, and its awesome.

I was just looking back at some hilarious December 2001 – January 2002 posts here, and its lot of fun to see what I was doing and thinking back then. Sorta makes me want to start writing more of those diary-like posts, the sorts of thing I’ve done less frequently since entering the working world.

But hmm, what to write. It’s a little harder to do this sort of thing when you’re employed, when your friends are out of college and more cognizant of the lasting effects of internet notoriety, when your coworkers and others might read what you write, when people might misinterpret and misconstrue with actual consequences, and when you’re busy on a big project.

Aha! The project! I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say that my dreams for a new Berkman web site are finally coming to fruition. I have a deliverable scheduled for end of day Monday that is huge and looming. I’m pretty proud of the site in concept, although the execution is closer to 60% of what I want. However, in the last week or so I’ve learned a ton more about Drupal and how to harness it to do crazy things.

I’ve basically been re-implementing in a few days a site that took several weeks to build out the first time through. My way is cleaner and more flexible and easier to manage, but its still a big hassle to get everything working right. That said, doing it this way is *far* more fun, and thus I find that I can spend nearly every waking moment working on it and still be excited, vs before when I was unconsciously doing everything I could to avoid working on it, hating the ugly spaghetti code and silly architectural choices that I had to deal with.

This site is interesting because it is an attempt to organize 10 years of information using a relationship system I designed that lets you drop in content and relate it to various other bits of content (John Palfrey is the author of the paper, the paper was released at the Beyond Broadcast conference), and then various side blocks and bottom bits and list views are dynamically generated and updated bidirectionally. The disappointment and 60% functionality figure is because our contractor was not able to deliver the relationships functionality as specced, and in the interest of a timely launch the choice was made to give up a lot of that functionality and try to implement it later (which in truth I find unlikely to ever occur).

Despite this major setback, a lot of what I envisioned is going to be in there, at least in some form, and my design made it through the process relatively unscathed. And with several thousand pages of content, this is the largest site I’ve ever designed and implemented.

I promised to deliver by Tuesday because that was the third or fourth unrealistic deadline that had been set, but more so because I want this project finished, wrapped up, launched, and off my plate. When it is done and delivered, I will feel like I’ve fulfilled all of my big obligations to the Berkman Center and will be hitting a high note. A clean and comfortable place to set a break point and start thinking about what my next steps are, personally and professionally. In truth the thinking is already there, its just not concluded. I have a general direction, though, and every day that I come in to work at Berkman I get a little more sad that it is one day closer to my last.

One undersea cable cut by a wayward boat anchor? Coincidence. It happens from time to time, maybe once a year. Two? Surprising. But three? Let’s put on our conspiracy hats!

Assuming news reports are accurate, three cables were cut in quick succession, supposedly by boat anchors in stormy weather. These cables are geographically diverse but all serve the same region.

Now, for some time there has been a strong and persistent rumor that the United States has the ability to tap undersea fiber-optic cables. This is, itself, a remarkable feat, an incredibly complex and delicate job, especially to do it undetected. So let’s say someone else wanted to get into the game. Maybe a major regional player. And let’s say they were a bit over-ambitious, or some wires got crossed somewhere…knocking out three cables is a pretty bone-headed move. But it is certainly a lot easier to tap a cable while it is out of commission than while it is active.

On the other hand, maybe its not someone trying to *tap* the cable, but simply a group that wants to see what happens when a cable is maliciously *cut*. Much like satellites and radio spectrum, fiber communication infrastructure is pretty much impossible to protect against a determined attacker with a destructive aim. But unlike satellite and radio jamming, cutting a fiber is a lot easier to do undetected, since all you need is the undersea equivalent of a big pair of scissors (mounted on an ROV) and a map.

I’ve never seen this show before. I just watched the last episode of season 12 on the YouTubes. It was great. It looked like a really fun show, running around the world doing various strange tasks, being exhausted beyond measure, competing in actual challenges rather than sitting around on an island or in a house bickering all the time. There is some strategy involved, now that there have been 12 seasons and you have a fairly good idea of the sorts of stunts they are going to pull, and often you can figure things out by just taking a second to think before acting rather than rushing in screaming. I really want to get on this show!

Much of what made it seem so neat was the winners, Rachel and TK, who I knew within the first five minutes were the people I wanted to see come out on top. They were just so…happy. They were totally in the game as a game, loving every minute of it, be it climbing a glacier or flying in a helicopter or riding in a speedboat or even digging through crabs to find a clue. The other two teams were serious and angry and conflict-prone and making mistakes. Those two were just so exhilarated and happy to be there and in love, it was infectious.

For years now I’ve been signing my email messages (on and off) using the OpenPGP standard. That means that recipients can verify my identity and that the message was not altered in transit. In all that time, I know of only 3 or 4 people who ever did that. The sad reality is that you have to install an OpenPGP plugin for your mail client, and no one wants to do that.

Starting today I’ve switched to signing all of my emails using something called an S/MIME certificate. It is similar to PGP in that it allows the recipient to verify my identity and the validity of the message, but it works better in most circumstances because S/MIME support is built into almost all modern email clients.

There are several technical reasons why PGP is generally a better idea than S/MIME. I won’t list them here for the benefit of my non-technical audience. I will say that all of my emails now contain the following text:

I digitally sign my email messages for security and identity verification.
More information: /email-security.html

So if you want more info, that’s the place to go!

Domestication progress has been moving slowly. Oscar has figured out what “down” means, but he still sneaks up onto counters and tables when I’m not looking. He seems to have stopped scratching the kitchen cabinets, but is continuing to tear up my nice rug. He’s also learned how to open the kitchen trash (thus defeating magnetism!) and how to dislodge the liner in the cat box. Super.

On the scratching issue, I got him a nice scratching post in addition to the doorknob-mounted thing he had before. We’ve had mixed success with this aspect of training, but its sort of humorous, so I’ll elaborate a bit.
Continue reading “Catiness”

I’m home sick and I was sleeping and I just had the strangest and most awesome dream. Basically, I was encountering second chances and opportunities missed, all in a semi-waking state. It was incredibly meta. A bunch of stuff happened, and then near the end I was in a theater, watching a great movie I had always wanted to see, but then I began to get drowsy. I dozed off several times and then sort of jolted myself awake, but then I realized it was a dream and I was waking up in *real life*, so I dove back down — and realized that I had woken up — in the dream — because the movie was over, and I had missed the amazing ending.

I looked up and there were tons of people in the theater in strange costumes, dressed like robots and people at the xkcd meetup and LARPers, and I wanted to investigate who they were and what they were doing and whether I knew any of them and if they were affiliated with BSCF…but then I got tired again, and woke myself up again, and realized it was a dream, and dove back in.

I found interesting and curious belongings scattered around my seat that may or may not have been mine, and I wanted to investigate them, see what wonders the strange bag and backpack contained, but first I had to put on a pair of shoes that were either my running shoes or my hiking shoes, depending on when I looked at them and from what angle. As I leaned over to put them on, still not quite sure what was wrong with them, I had trouble tying the laces due to drowsiness, so I forced myself to wake up…only to see the light of day and realize once again that I was in bed, and so I stopped myself, went back under.

I looked over and realized that beside me in the theater were a group of three people I had known freshman year but soon after lost touch with. We all marveled at the amazing coincident of meeting at the (conveniently clean and spacious) theater, and I tried to wake up a bit so that I could talk to them, but I realized I wasn’t really talking to them (even though I could vividly make out their faces, something that never happens to me in a dream, with my visual memory, especially for faces, generally so bad) when I woke up for real, again. This time I heard pounding, so I decided to really snap myself out of the dream, thinking maybe the cat was destroying more of the house, but it was just the cleaning crew vacuuming the hallways.

And so then I was here, and not there, and I don’t know how to find my way back. I really wish I could locate the path to semi-awake-land, but it seems to be nowhere that a waking mind can comprehend. I could try going back to sleep, but, even with a direction in my head, I don’t imagine I’d find the way. I sure hope one day I return there. And maybe have a bit more of my wits about me, and a bit more time to explore a vast subconscious brimming full with wonder and mystery.