The silliness of security alerts – Well, occasionally Chris Hitchens is right.
Author Archives: Danny Silverman
Figures
I went and did something really stupid, and then, almost effortlessly, wrote the introduction to my paper. I guess I kinda expected that.
Prozac found in drinking water – Wasn’t there already a study about this a little while back that found the same thing?
Any sufficiently nice person is indistinguishable from someone who likes you – Such a true sentiment for geeks.
That whole bedroom thing wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t tried to explain Quantum Physics – Yes, yes, 63% of Everything2 nodes talk about relationships. I love the title of this one.
Massive security vulnerabilities in Bluetooth phones – Look, you know something is wrong when companies start marketing devices to turn off people’s ringers. A device that can modify a phone’s settings without getting permission from the user first? Imagine what else it can do…
Monotonously incessant self debasement is spiritually malignant – Yes dear, I am on an Everything2 kick. When you are lost, Everything2 can help you find your way.
How Martha Stewart eats a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup – A classic, and I’ve posted it before.
Hard work and no play make Homer something something – Long article about the virtues of idleness. I’m too lazy to read it all, though.
Gameroom progress
In addition to working, hanging out, getting some exercise, and having some fun this summer I’ve also been working on the Usdan Gameroom, which has been my project ever since students voted to allocate the money last year.
While I feel I’ve done a lot of things for Brandeis, the gameroom is something really tangible and apparent, and I want to make sure its done right. Plus, I’m finding it very fun to have control over a $122,000 budget.
Computer upgrades
The Shuttle PC I bought sophomore year has had persistant heat problems. While it is nice to have a very small PC case, the ventilation is not great and has led to the failure of one hard drive and the almost-lost of all my data. I went and purchase a big fan and stuck it directly under the new hard drive, but it still overheats and crashes every week or two.
So last week I decided to finally deal with the problem. I bought a (supposedly) very quiet minitower case and an extra fan for it to keep it cool. The new case necessitated a new motherboard, so I got one of those as well, one with built-in RAID. RAID is a method of linking together multiple hard drives to either make one big, fast storage system or to create redundancy by “mirroring” data on multiple drives. My original thought was to do mirroring, so that if one drive failed I’d still have my data, but then it occured to me that it would probably make more sense for my purposes to just have an ultra-fast non-redundant RAID setup and then backup everything to my old (i.e. current) hard drive every night. Then my backup would be a day old, which is actually better, because if I delete something accidentally I will be able to recover it from the backup.
The new case, new motherboard, fan, and two new hard drives ended up costing about $400, which I think is a fair exchange for more storage space and, more importantly, more reliability. Now I’ll have the ability to backup my laptop onto my desktop as well, and the risk of massive loss of data is much reduced. Plus, hopefully it’ll be quieter.
Review
The Bourne Supremacy
In the first of many sequels to The Bourne Identity, Jason Bourne gets back into the killing swing of things and leaves trails of bad-guy carnage across several European countries. And possibly some non-European countries. Its hard to tell.
Slivers of explanation and tons of extreme close-ups make this film almost incomprehensible, especially if you are unfortunate enough to be sitting in the front row of a packed theater. Bourne is running from place to place, beating up various people, but we’re never quite sure why. Once everything is resolved, the film goes on for another 30 minutes or so, culminating in a massive and useless car chase followed by some time set aside for repentance.
Some have suggested that Jason Bourne might be the new 007. Yeah, I’d buy that. While I thought Identity was intriguing, mysterious, and fun, Supremacy was just boring and gaudy, and the camera work made me seasick.
Wearing embarrassing underwear is the best way to get laid – In a similar vein.
Some observations on getting a girlfriend – Funny, probably true.
Julian likes Garden State – Thanks Kevin
A Young Afghan’s Illustrated Primer – Man I love that title.
Craigslist: 18-Ring Circus of Supply and Demand – “We’re trying to figure out how to run the site as a commons, yet avoid the tragedy of the commons,” Mr. Newmark said.