Posted on August 6, 2008 at 12:45 am
I stumbled across HuffPo’s FundRace, a searchable database of public campaign contributions. (I don’t recall the threshold, but campaign donations above a certain amount must be reported. I’ve given less than $50 to Obama, and thus am not listed, but donations for a few hundred dollars and more do show up.)
You can search by ZIP [...]
Posted on May 2, 2008 at 1:22 am
Periodically I come across deals for computers that are very tempting. I’m not necessarily in the market right away: I’m going to keep my laptop until I’ve been working long enough that I can afford something stellar. It’s silly to “upgrade” a little bit. But every time I see these deals, I think of the [...]
Posted on March 3, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Inspired in a roundabout way by a recent Ask MetaFilter question, and fueled my desire to procrastinate a little longer, here’s my take–in no particular order–on the top songs ever. I started off as a blanket list of songs were good, but kept whittling it down until only the best songs ever remained.
Pink Floyd - [...]
Posted on January 19, 2008 at 9:48 pm
The real geeks in the room already know what the root zone file is, but for those of you with lives… DNS (Domain Name Service) is the service that transforms names (blogs.n1zyy.com) into IPs (72.36.178.234). DNS is hierarchical: as a good analogy, think of there being a folder called “.com,” with entries for things like [...]
Posted on January 19, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Culled from recent news, here are some things that have occurred that I can find absolutely no excuse for having happened:
Hackers infiltrated computer systems, turning off power to several (foreign) cities. I guess it makes sense that the power grid would now be controlled by computers, but it’s sheer idiocy to have such a system, [...]
Posted on December 23, 2007 at 9:32 pm
A few years ago Andy and I ran a hosting company. It never got that far, but it was fun, and also a learning experience. Today I’m finding that I can’t get the idea of starting it again out of my head. The problem is that, this time, I’d want to start it big.
There are [...]
Posted on December 22, 2007 at 6:54 pm
The Diocese of Manchester passed out a voters’ guide. As previously mentioned, this immediately worried me.
It begins with a disclaimer that they don’t endorse any candidate, party, or PAC, but outlines seven issues. (Bold captions are their headings, the rest of the text is my commentary on it, unless quoted, in which case it’s quoted [...]
Posted on December 21, 2007 at 8:57 pm
So I’m a huge fan of Ask Metafilter. The basic premise is simple: you ask a question and lots of people answer. But Ask MeFi rocks because they maintain high standards. So you actually get really good answers. It costs $5 to join, which is done to pay for the servers but, frankly, seems like [...]
Posted on December 15, 2007 at 12:05 am
There are a lot of issues that I really understand both sides of. Most anything with money will benefit some at the expense of others. I don’t think gun control or drug policy have “clean” answers: I’m not at all comfortable banning guns, but I’m not at all comfortable allowing felons to own automatic weapons; [...]
Posted on December 10, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Andrew’s biased me. I’m a Canon fan. I own a Canon body, and now, two Canon-mount lenses. And this brings in switching costs: the lenses would be useless to me if I had a Canon. And, while I think it’s mostly irrational, I’ve come to love everything about Canon cameras and see any difference as [...]
