Isle of Thadk
Quotelog Excerpt: "Work without a vision is slavery, Vision without work is a pipe dream, But vision with work is the hope of the world."

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Semi-arid Seasons -
10/2008     1/2009
Abr. Serious Glass: Part 3, A hint of rain -
So, in my final episode of abbreviated glass I review my last few weeks with my camera. Also I am pleased to report that a friend from my training group managed to return with a new camera to me on her trip back from America. Thanks! October was probably one of ...
Abr. Serious Glass: Part 2, A Dry Hike -
In the second week of my shooting I arranged a visit to one of my neighbor "site mates" in his small village. We hiked perhaps 10 kilometers to his water source, a mountain stream overlooking his valley. The village kids haven't noticed me yet, they're throwing rocks into the tree to ...
Abbreviated flirtation with Serious Glass: part 1 Zanzibar -
So, last night I came to terms with the fact that my camera which I received only since my last blog entry, is away. Despite this intrusion of reality, I had one month of oh-so-nice photographic release (after release, after *shudder* release :) in the weeks leading out of the ...
Components of a Tanzanian Christian wedding -
Once in a while I wish I had a fold to put pictures under. Sorry for bloat in your feedreaders. Kipande ya Harusi ya Watanzania (ya Wachristo) 9am: Hair Salon 10am: Ceremony (Kanisani) 12am: Women's Ceremony "Kitchen Party" (Lunch served) Random photos Rest until evening 7pm: Reception Total: 12 hrs.   Bride's ride     Church Service Energetic Choir Videography I Do (Nakubali) Car Parade Tanzanian Dry September Discjockey Bride ...

Linkblog:

retroLink:Ban Foam Cups!
hazardous Dihydrogen Monoxide is used in thier production!!17 Mar 2004 at 12:00am UTC
800,000 stolen social security numbers: a 22-year-old scapegoat? - TECH.BLORGE.com
via Slashdot.
A backup tape was stolen from his car last month containing at least 770,000 social security numbers (with the corresponding names) for Ohio taxpayers. It also contained the social security numbers for another 64,000 state employees. Today the intern issued a statement with his side of the story.

God, Ohio, come on, read Schneier's blog or something. Storing backup off-site tapes at intern's houses? Is this real? I know three people that got SSN-theft notifications this past month, even before this. It is ridiculous.

It is real: "Although OAKS is a $158 million IT project and the State of Ohio is a $52 billion business enterprise, OAKS administrators had not encrypted the data on the stolen backup tape and had authorized a succession of interns to take the tapes home for the previous two years with only an admonition to store the tapes in a safe place." from http://watchdog.ohio.gov/investigations/2007190.pdf30 Jul 2007 at 4:47am UTC
Crossword Cheaters
NYT: "possessed girl in the exorcist"27 May 2007 at 10:41pm UTC
Summer of Code ideas: God, yes, please, somebody, anybody!
Add OpenID support to Mailman accounts.
* This would allow one account to be used for all Mailman installations
* It would also get rid of the monthly email reminders Mailman often produces
16 Mar 2007 at 9:04am UTC
World from Books
A google engineer uses a bit of code floating around to generate a sort of map of the world using books written up to that point. Truly amazing, really shows the value of plentiful data.15 Mar 2007 at 11:26am UTC
Powers of 10
but on a quite large plotter's print strip.30 Jan 2007 at 5:27pm UTC
Howard Rhiengold and the Whole Earth Catalog crew speak.

Originally spoken on 11/9/2006, just posted online this week. After exploring a bit of these guys work for my undergraduate research I heard about this panel. Quite topical. It ranges from the early non-Luddite commune culture that the WELL grew out of, the making-to-test nerd environment that silicon valley embodies, through our current ire at the phone companies un-silicon-valley-like world (premonitions of The Steve's iPhone announcement), the Libertarian ethic, its ups and downs, and even a bit of discussion about Google's growing power and "what if the Government took it over".

The last reminded me of the note from Cringely this week that Google has leased huge quantities of fiber across the nation. He suggests they have plans to offer peering agreements to ISPs. This would make super-high-bandwidth internet usage by the masses sustainable for these companies who for years have been over-booking and over-selling their real capacity.

21 Jan 2007 at 7:47am UTC
Swivel: Flickr for Data

Inspired by NerdTV show with Dan Bricklin, there is now a website where visitors can upload data and assemble graphs from it to find interesting things.

Relatedly, I came up with a funny technique that I performed over a couple hours to generate a user growth curve of Kuro5hin.org with 35 (fairly solid) samples and posted the data. I took first posting date of two to five userid-sequential users until I was fairly certain that was the day that that region of users had joined. I didn't really expect the sampling to work but after I got a reasonable number of data points down I couldn't break it.

On a side note, I'm not sure why this particular graph (out of the twenty or so autogenerated ones), the most valuable on in the set, despite being rated well by me, is not on the front page for the dataset.

7 Dec 2006 at 9:32pm UTC
Video: Euclidean Crisis
Amazing game that is controlled by a stylus. Home page Wow. Now I'm depressed that I lost my Tablet PC stylus last week.7 Dec 2006 at 8:40am UTC
ISS docking with shuttle in front of sun.
19 Sep 2006 at 9:19pm UTC
Kicking and Screaming
Props.16 Sep 2006 at 6:29am UTC

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