Archive for April, 2006
Next Entries »Very tired
Sunday, April 9th, 2006I just woke up from 5 hour nap. I normally don’t take big naps like that, but I’ve been under a lot of stress lately and I think the extra sleep helped. What with all my interviews and such next week I think it’s best that I’ll be all shiny and ready to go.
My dad passed back through town from visiting Grandpas today and I got to have brunch with him. It was good as always to see him again, and even better to hear that Grandpa is not doing as poorly as he might indicate over the phone.
Momentarily I’m off to Costco to get excessive amounts of toilet paper and food. Wish me luck fighting consumerism!
Christopher Walken IN SPACE
Wednesday, April 5th, 2006
Wow. This image speaks for itself. Found it on MAKE.
I know - it freaks me out too… That’s why I love it so!
Three cheers for Wired and crypto
Tuesday, April 4th, 2006I’m almost ashamed to admit that I still subscribe to some paper magazines. I realize that in this digital age it’s a waste of trees, and makes the information hard to consume, but for a few magazines I still dive right in. Most notable among these are National Geographic, and Wired Magazine.
National Geographic I get for obvious reasons: their online version is intended to supplement not replace their print edition. The beautiful photographs and explorations of far away places will always earn my yellow-spined friend a place on my bookshelf.
Wired on the other hand has a great offering online, and in fact provides more content online than in their print version. I subscribe to them simply to support the organization and ensure that they will be around to provide technical insight for years to come.
Of late I’ve been particularly impressed with Wired. They have been covering a lot of cryptography issues, and really exploring consumers rights concerning privacy, DRM, and fair use.
In the past week alone there have been two very interesting articles, one about Sun’s Open-Source DRM project, and the other about Zfone, a PGP-powered truly secure VOIP protocol. Obviously I’m against DRM in just about any form, but if it’s going to stick I hope that Sun’s DReaM is it, it seems friendly to consumers and to have all the right fair use provisions included.
Zfone on the other hand seems to be a ray of hope in an otherwise bleak big-brother view of the future. Hopefully secure cryptography will become an integrated part of our society and prevent tomorrows governments or terrorist organizations from spying on our day to day lives.
Flickr 365
Monday, April 3rd, 2006It was just drawn to my attention that my Flickr photostream has grown to more than 365 photos. The nature inspired treatment of an eye got the distinct honor of being my 365th photo. If this were one of those awesome photo a day sites I would be in the 2nd year of running. Here’s to hoping that I’ll be inspired to get another 365 photos in no time at all!
And I thought I was HxC…
Monday, April 3rd, 2006
I always thoght I was hardcore - then I meet people like Brien who do this to their heads. I’m not sure I understand in any capacity beyond the pure art that a heavy-duty mod like a transdermal mohawk can be.
Update: Don’t even think of worrying mom - I’ll never do this. Also: note to self; don’t ever do this.
MenuMeters where have you been all my life
Monday, April 3rd, 2006I just discovered a kick-ass little utility for OS X called MenuMeters. Up until now I had always been running Activity Monitor and iStat Pro. I used iStat for detailed information, and the “floating CPU utilization” feature of Activity Monitor tucked away in the corner to keep an eye on my processor.
I’m a big graphs geek and always like to feel like I have my finger “on the pulse” of whatever machine I’m currently using. MenuMeters manages to elegantly answer all of my at a glance wants, and does so with not only a small memory footprint, but also minimal processor utilization.
It’s quite configurable, and as you can see it gives all sorts of information about your CPU, disks, network utilization and more. I’m sold! MenuMeters is free, open source, OS X only.
V for Vendetta
Monday, April 3rd, 2006This weekend was the ultimate in low-key. I had a vendetta of my own and it was to do nothing on saturday short of laying on my couch eating fatty foods and watching mindless content dance across the minds eye and my television set.
Sunday however did bring a great experience: V for Vendetta. I have to say, I’m impressed with the film. It makes you think, paints a beautiful picture of a big-brother totalitarian society, and has some very well done action in it. I can’t wait for it to come out on DVD so I can watch it incessantly.
The depressing part was all the military and terrorist propaganda that the movie theater showed before the film. The national guard and other organizations bought all the pre-show advertisements in the hopes of counteracting the anti-totalanarianisim messages that V contains.
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