Posted by Christopher Smith
Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:45:00 GMT
As long as we’re looking at house resolutions, you should probably look at this one (am I the only one a little disturbed to know that our congress is building its drafts on the “O” drive and appears to still be conforming to DOS 8.3 style filenames?!). I mean it just involves more of your money than you’ve probably spent on your mortgage/rent lately, and it may be the only hope you have of keeping said roof over your head… or it could just be an unmitigated disaster.
Posted in Politics | Tags act, crisis, depression, economic, economics, emergency, finance, HR, mortgage, recession, stabilization | no comments
Posted by Christopher Smith
Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:33:00 GMT
For those of you who don’t know, Pandora is a nice little Internet radio business that is on the brink of going out of business, effectively by federal law. They’re asking us to call our Senator’s to get support for H.R. 7084 (yes, apparently the Senate is actually voting on a House bill).
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Posted in Politics, Pop Culture | Tags HR7084, internet, music, radio, RIAA | 2 comments
Posted by Christopher Smith
Sun, 28 Sep 2008 06:28:00 GMT
So, after much theatrics, our little co-op managed to get it together and install new hardware. We ended up going with Silicon Mechanics Rackform nServe A266. It’s drool worthy hardware, so I thought I’d detail what a wonderful little box this is for our needs.
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Posted in Computers | Tags 3ware, A266, cache, DDR2, Mechanics, Opteron, raid, Silicon | no comments
Posted by Christopher Smith
Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:22:00 GMT
In case you missed the debate, I found the transcript here. I’m not sure if I would call it hugely substantive -a lot of it was filled with lines from stump speeches, but nobody made me bury my head and think “…and this one could be President…”. Anyway, I’d be remiss if I didn’t throw in a few observations:
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Posted in Politics | Tags debate, factcheck.org, mccain, obama, president | no comments
Posted by Christopher Smith
Sat, 27 Sep 2008 03:15:00 GMT
A few weeks ago I participated in a one-day training course taught by Edward Tufte. The presentation is a great deal, because you get all four of his books, and the price is only $380/person (groups of 10 or more get a 25% discount and students pay only $200) while the collective list price of the books is like $200. So, even if he was a pretty poor lecturer, so long as you value his books (and these books a great in terms of aesthetics and content, as you’d expect from an expert on presenting data and information), it wouldn’t be too hard to get your money’s worth. Of course, Mr. Tufte is actually a pretty good lecturer.
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Posted in Science | Tags design, presentations, Tufte | no comments
Posted by Christopher Smith
Sat, 20 Sep 2008 11:16:00 GMT
Boing Boing finally got an interview with the “Boston Airport suicide bomber”. You know, I can almost forgive what happened at the airport (mistakes happen, people are stupid and twitchy, and sometimes this means people’s lives are put at risk for no good reason). What I frankly cannot accept is what happened afterwards. I’m sorry, but I cannot believe an honest and rational person would conclude that Star Simpson did anything worthy of being charged with a crime. Between Star Simpson going to the airport wearing her funky sweater and me speeding in my car, I am the greater threat to people’s safety, and I won’t get charged with a crime even if I’m caught.
Posted in Security, Journalism | Tags airport, boston, profound, simpson, star, stupidity, terrorism, TSA | no comments
Posted by Christopher Smith
Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:32:00 GMT
[Blogger’s note: I apologize for not posting more regularly to my blog. I’ve had a lot of time pressures of late, but also I’ve gotten in to a habit of posting on my Google Reader feed which is a bad idea on several levels, not the least of which being I get zero ad revenue for it and Google Reader appears to periodically misplace my comments and shared articles. I kind friend suggested that this commentary was far too good to leave in Google Reader, so I’ve reproduced it here on my blog.]
Last night, as I was stuck in LA’s glorious traffic, I heard Larry Mantle interview the author of this excellent piece of analysis in the Sacramento Bee and he seemed 100% completely on the money (and interestingly, the governor seems to agree with him as well, having gone much further than a simple veto of the budget). I have to admit that when first coming to California, the system seemed so odd. I was overwhelmed enough I felt like I didn’t grok it, but it is increasingly clear to me that in fact I did grok it and my initial observation was correct: it is just a mess.
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Posted in Politics | Tags budget, california, veto | no comments