From the older sister comes an article from the Telegraph about giant crabs which are creating environmental havoc off the coasts of Norway. Transplanted to the Barents Sea from the Pacific in the time of Stalin, the crabs began to expand in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Concidence? [...]
Burt Cohen seems like a viable candidate for a Senate seat in New Hampshire. I have absolutely no idea what his position is on the issues, but I wish that if his campaign was going to send me unsolicited email (bet they got my address from the Clark campaign…), that the removal link would [...]
This is a long entry, involving all of the nine circles of Windows Hell (DLL hell, Activation Hell, Windows Update Hell, File Associations Hell, etc.), so bear with me.
I received the USB Cuecat that I bought on eBay in the mail last Friday afternoon. Even though the Cuecat uses USB, it still functions in [...]
In general, I do not read blogs without RSS (it's annoying to have to keep coming back to the site to see if the blog has been updated). Similarly, I prefer to comment on blogs with Trackback. But Margaret Cho is so funny, I just had to post this quote:
Why is there [...]
From the AP: Ohio Salad Arrives With Piece of a Thumb
If you have read some of the previous entries on the blog, you'll see that I regard Pravda as a reliable, if slightly biased news source. I have tried to excuse various strange things I have read as the results of differences in Russian culture and bad translations. But, nothing can excuse these [...]
Earlier this morning, I was ruminating on the effectiveness of coffee as a stimulant. When I was falling asleep as I was studying for a midterm exam on J. S. Mill's On Liberty (I love the book, but I have read it three times, for three different government classes), a cup of joe perked [...]
From the Guardian comes this article about Disney's production of C. S. Lewis' Narnia series. Apparently, the success of the secular Lord of the Rings series has made such the potential profit of such a venture extremely high.
From Pathetic Earthlings comes an SFGate article entitled, "California lawmakers propose lowering voting age to 14 for state elections." Unfortunately, those are not full votes. 16 year olds would get half of a vote, and 14 year olds could get a quarter.
After I went down to the laundry room and manually checked the status of my laundry (if any MacGrey representatives read this, Harvard could really do with some LaundryView), I went to the mailroom to while away three minutes. I felt somewhat apprensive to see that April's Atlantic had arrived (alas, I have not [...]
From the good people at F-Secure: News from the Lab comes a post with some interesting ideas about the spammers behind the recent rash of viruses:
The fact that both Bagle and Mydoom families are utilizing the Mitglieder trojan might indicate that in fact it's a single group behind both of them. It might be different [...]
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
I found this article from the International Herald Tribune about the voting rights of American citizens who live abroad interesting. The article specifically focuses on Americans who have never lived inside this country. Which leads to an interesting question: Should these people be allowed to vote? Citizens by parentage alone, they have [...]
As I noted in a previous entry, I was concerned about a file name "Soundman.exe" that I had found on my computer.
AVERT Labs - BeavertonCurrent Scan Engine Version:4.3.20
Current DAT Version:4336
Thank you for your submission.
Analysis ID: 467056
Name
Findings
Detection
Type
Extra
soundman.exe
new detection
w32/polybot.gen!irc
Virus
yes
On one hand, that's a relief. On the other, how the hell did it get there?
UPDATE: Ah, just [...]
This past weekend, I installed Gentoo (stage 1 installation) on the ext3 partition. It took a really long time (Celerons do not compile very fast), but I am almost satisified with my system. Currently running Gnome as my windowmanager, but I may try Xfce later. With some fiddling, I have been able [...]
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Andrew at Pathetic Earthlings has a intriguing post about a database of all of the statements on Iraq that were made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice. He claims that since searchs for "imminent" and "imminence" comes up empty, the criticism of the Administration is unfounded.
If I ever have to be shot, I hope it goes down like this. The idea that nobody in the crowd seemed to notice the shots or the President's bleeding seems utterly incomprehensible. Of course, here in America, we have had three successful assassinations, and a number of attempts (although none in recent [...]
Continuing on the topic of assassinations elucidated in my last post, I would not like to go like this:
The Israeli weapons punctured the pavement of the street where Sheik Yassin, a quadriplegic, was being escorted home. Blood spattered the walls of surrounding buildings. "I could not recognize the sheik, only his wheelchair," said one witness, [...]
I am going home for spring break, so there might not be any new entries next week.
This Associated Press article about the Chinese government's concerns about the government of Hong Kong struck me as interesting. This quote seemed especially ominous:
"In interpreting relevant clauses of the annexes of the Basic Law, the NPC Standing Committee aims to put an end to confusions and differences," Xinhua said.
Whenever I have arguments with my [...]
From Boing Boing comes a post about a website, futureme.org, which lets you send an email to yourself (or conceivably, someone else) in the future. Here is the email I sent:
Dear FutureMe,
Worried about the privacy implications of this website, but I guess you would know better. Are you still paranoid about privacy? [...]
Two parts "Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels." One part "Pulp Fiction." Mix well. The similarities are almost too strange to be true: armed robbery of a man growing marijuana at home, and a samurai sword saving the day. Of course, the prison sentence of eight years for manslaughter never appeared [...]
This New York Times Magazine article about a rash of deaths related to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in a group of people who ate at the now-defunct Garden State Park Race Track was an interesting read. However, the theory that the deaths were caused by mad cow disease does not seem to have any conclusive evidence. [...]
Thomas Friedman's latest New York Times column contains some ridiculous statements. For example, the first paragraph:
I have a confession to make: I am the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times and I didn't listen to one second of the 9/11 hearings and I didn't read one story in the paper about them. [...]
Traveling to New Jersey today. Check for new posts sometime this weekend.