Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Posts Tagged Uncategorized

Slacking

I’ve fall­en off the blog wag­on. Job fairs have tak­en a lot of my free time late­ly. This blog (and the pho­to­blog) occu­py a weird space in my brain: they only get posts when I’m: Inspired Have a few free min­utes Am at a com­put­er Unfor­tu­nate­ly, job fairs have eat­en #2, while gen­er­al busi­ness has killed […]


Doctors and Ears

I had an ear infec­tion back in Decem­ber, around New Year’s. It hurt, but I did­n’t ever see any­one about it (not many places are open on Dec. 31st). A few weeks lat­er, I had some issues with pres­sure in that ear. Long sto­ry short, three doc­tors, five vis­its, one ear clean­ing, one hear­ing test, two […]


McCain, and Neoconservatism

Again, inspired by The Econ­o­mist. John McCain (R‑Arizona) is an often-named front-run­n­er for the Repub­li­can Par­ty in 2008. He is called out as a “mav­er­ick” by most hard­line Repub­li­cans, but in what I can only call an amus­ing twist of real­i­ty, he is clos­er to the orig­i­nal par­ty line than any­one has been in the […]


A look back, and a look forward

In his belief that Amer­i­ca need­ed to respond res­olute­ly to the dan­gers of ter­ror­ism, tyran­ny and pro­lif­er­a­tion, Mr Bush was main­ly right. His chief fail­ures stem from incom­pe­tent exe­cu­tion. From The Econ­o­mist. The Econ­o­mist took a look back at the Bush and Blair rela­tion­ship and impact on the world over the past six years, and […]


People and Intimacy

Jade cut open my wrist last Thurs­day. I real­ized that the only peo­ple who asked me what hap­pened are those who know me real­ly well. The acquain­tances just sit and stare, not sure if they should ask: “Do I know him well enough? What if he real­ly is that depressed? What do I say?” My good […]


A link or two

From Jeff Har­rell at The Shape of Days, on secret pris­ons. …it comes down to trust. Do we trust that there are enough checks and bal­ances? Do we trust that there’s enough over­sight? Do we trust, fun­da­men­tal­ly, that these excess­es we jus­ti­fy in the name of the pub­lic good will nev­er be turned against us? That’s […]


Measuring Success: Height, or Happiness?

Isn’t it about time we quit mea­sur­ing pro­fes­sion­al suc­cess in one dimen­sion, ver­ti­cal­ly, and start con­sid­er­ing how much your actu­al work match­es your desired work? From Cre­at­ing Pas­sion­ate Users comes the ques­tion, “Why is our suc­cess met­ric our height on the cor­po­rate lad­der? Should­n’t we be mea­sur­ing how close­ly what we want to do matches […]


Scorecard for the War on Terrorism

Com­ing from Bruce Schneier and TRAC: … time­ly data show that five years lat­er, in the lat­est avail­able peri­od, the total num­ber of these pros­e­cu­tions has returned to rough­ly what they were just before the attacks. How is it that, dur­ing the War on Ter­ror­ism, our gov­ern­ment is doing such a piss-poor job of catching […]


Monday Mornings

I woke up this morn­ing to the sound of rain. I did­n’t quite expect things to be that damp when I woke up. But a rainy Mon­day? Can the week get any worse? Wednes­day, Thurs­day, and Fri­day last week were mis­er­ably wet, as rem­nants from Trop­i­cal Storm Ernesto swept through the area. Sat­ur­day, thank god, the […]


Business Basics

My email provider, Fast­mail, had a cat­a­stroph­ic serv­er fail­ure on Thurs­day morn­ing (Wednes­day night?) The hard dri­ves on server3 became cor­rupt­ed as a result of a filesys­tem bug. They were able to quick­ly remount most par­ti­tions, but the largest (2 Ter­abytes) took much longer to check. It is cur­rent­ly still being ver­i­fied. Many users, including […]


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