Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Web Development

IE6/Win, this one is for you.

We love you; real­ly, we do. You’re every­where, all the time, most every­one knows you, and although you’re not per­fect, you’re much bet­ter than your old­er broth­er IE5/Win. Thanks for not fol­low­ing in his footsteps.

But you know the say­ing, “Sweat the lit­tle stuff”? You’re not break­ing a sweat much these days, are you?

Like your measly CSS 2 sup­port. I mean, pseu­do-class­es have been around for a while now. Do you have any plans to work on that, or will we keep hav­ing to cor­rect you like a mis­be­hav­ing child that enjoys pun­ish­ment? Here’s hop­ing your heir appar­ent, IE7/Win one-ups you in that department.

And what about you and PNG? I mean, I know alpha chan­nels are not the most triv­ial of fea­tures, but ignor­ing an entire sec­tion of image data is worse than not show­ing it at all! IE7/Win has all ready one-upped you there, thank god.

Those dou­ble-joined limbs that only bend back­wards, the bone defor­mi­ties (you know what I’m talk­ing about: the 3 px text jog bug, that wacky-ass “has-lay­out” prop­er­ty that you just invent­ed); they don’t make you any eas­i­er to hold, hug, or love. Get thee to a sur­geon, and do so quickly.

IE6/Win, your days were won­der­ful, but when the cham­pagne buzz wore off, we real­ized that you were just a new skin on the old, too-famil­iar face of IE5/Win. I hate to say this, but we can’t wait for you to leave.

Today’s weather

From Flickr

Today, it’ll be 59 and rainy, with a chance of depres­sion, and scat­tered rained-out­foot­ball games sweep­ing in from the north­east some­time tomor­row afternoon.

Economics

Why Eco­nom­ics?

It’s a study of peo­ple, busi­ness­es, and how they make the econ­o­my tick.

I have tak­en few class­es that have changed my entire view on news, the world, and my per­son­al life. Micro- and macro-eco­nom­ics are two of them.

Instead of see­ing two seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed news arti­cles in The Econ­o­mist, you see two unsep­a­ra­bly inter­twined eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tions: one direct­ly respon­si­ble for the other.

Eco­nom­ics ties the world togeth­er in new and strange ways for me. And I love it.

Sleep Schedules

The biggest sin­gle regret I’ve read from old­er people:

I wish I had got­ten up ear­li­er when I was young. I learned to get by on less sleep, and I gained so much time for myself. I could exer­cise, med­i­tate, or just read to get myself pre­pared for the day ahead. How many days of my life did I waste snooz­ing an alarm?

I’ve been wak­ing up at 5:45 most of the sum­mer, to car­pool to work at GE. This fall, the sched­ule car­ried over. I’m usu­al­ly out of bed between 6:30 and 7 AM, and either head­ing for a run, or over to the gym to lift weights.

I know there’s no oth­er time in my day for either activ­i­ty, so wak­ing up a bit ear­li­er is my best chance to stick to a sched­ule of exercise.

What time do you get up? Is it depend­able, or does it vary from day to day? If you get up ear­ly, what do you do with your time?

Leave it in the comments.

Aside: RSS and ATOM feeds have been linked to in the right side­bar. They exist­ed before, but you had to view the page source to get them. Enjoy in your favorite feed read­er (I pre­fer Net­NewsWire on the Mac).

On Security, Terrorism, and Risk

I’m tak­ing a post by Bruce Schneier and run­ning with it.

None of the secu­ri­ty pre­cau­tions in place in air­ports have pre­vent­ed or thwart­ed a sin­gle ter­ror­ist attack since 9/11. Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”, got through secu­ri­ty, and was only tak­en down by strong-willed pas­sen­gers and doc­tors with seda­tion medicine.

The “secu­ri­ty” put into place in air­ports is risk shift­ing, not risk reduc­ing. What’s the difference?

Risk shift­ing is hard­en­ing one spe­cif­ic tar­get, in hopes that attacks or secu­ri­ty breach­es will instead be focused on some­thing else. When air­port secu­ri­ty improves, we’ve sim­ply made oth­er tar­gets more attrac­tive. This is what secu­ri­ty experts, such as Schneier, mean when they say, “If they tar­get shop­ping malls, we’ve wast­ed our money.”

A tac­tic is risk reduc­ing if it reduces over­all risk for all tar­gets. LoJack is a per­fect exam­ple of risk reduc­tion: if my car has LoJack, the crim­i­nals are very like­ly to be caught, arrest­ed, and pros­e­cut­ed, low­er­ing risk for all car own­ers. (LoJack is also risk shift­ing: crim­i­nals know that any giv­en car may have LoJack, and so they may choose to rob hous­es, or mug peo­ple instead.)

Many peo­ple will naive­ly say, “Why not just pro­tect every­thing,”, ask­ing if we could shift risk out of the coun­try entire­ly. We could put met­al detec­tors at the entrance to every air­port, shop­ping mall, and restau­rant. This would cost more than the Unit­ed States GDP, and ter­ror­ists would then car­ry ceram­ic knives instead of met­al ones, or blow up cars in the unscreened park­ing lot. The risk would been shift­ed from the crowds of peo­ple to the crowds of peo­ple and prop­er­ty nearby.

There is no fea­si­ble way to hard­en every tar­get in the Unit­ed States. There are too many bridges, nuclear reac­tors, tall build­ings, parks, down­town mar­kets, too many any­thing to pos­si­bly pro­tect them all.

This is why Schneier harps, over and over, on why we should reduce risk, instead of shift­ing it. Real secu­ri­ty, like intel­li­gence ser­vices and pub­lic aware­ness, reduce risk. Evac­u­a­tion plan­ning, emer­gency ser­vices, things designed to min­i­mize impact reduce risk.

Ter­ror­ists pose two basic risks to the Unit­ed States: eco­nom­ic dam­age through pub­lic fear, and loss of life through high-pro­file attacks. Telling the pub­lic that the lat­ter is “immi­nent” with­out giv­ing details only caus­es the for­mer. We are our own worst ene­my, at the end of the day.

One last remark, from the com­ments:

… against an ene­my deter­mined to kill you at any cost, even killing them­selves in the process, all the secu­ri­ty in the world won’t pro­tect you forever.

A Dearth of Inspiration

I’ve stared at this emp­ty box for more than twen­ty min­utes, just look­ing at it. I’ve exam­ined all these drafts I have float­ing around, but I feel they’re stale and old and use­less. Every but­ton above this text, where I can make all sorts of HTML mag­ic hap­pen: they’ve all been clicked and previewed.

I’ve been read­ing Jeff Har­rell’s excel­lent “Unti­tled” series. I’ve been wait­ing, refresh­ing, hop­ing every morn­ing that there’s anoth­er install­ment in the incred­i­bly dystopi­an sto­ry he’s writ­ten. It’s not dystopi­an, it’s worse. It’s ter­ror and pain and fear, raw emo­tions; dystopi­an to me means “soma” (a la Brave New World) and con­stant his­to­ry rewrit­ing by Big Broth­er’s min­ions. There’s noth­ing clean and san­i­tized about this.

By the way: his colophon alone makes my entire blog look like trash.

I’ve been work­ing on my home­page a good bit late­ly (read: star­ing at, refresh­ing, hop­ing bits will mag­i­cal­ly evolve into some­thing pret­ty). No, real­ly. Can’t you see it? I’ve put up three or four incred­i­ble designs. They just dis­ap­pear when any­one looks at them…

I thought, maybe, my lack of progress on the blog was my inabil­i­ty to write. I then real­ized, “Wait, I can form most­ly com­plete, gra­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect sen­tences. That’s more than 90% of Live­Jour­nal and Xan­ga can man­age…” Then I start­ed to blame it on my time man­age­ment: “I nev­er have time to write!” But I’ve stared at the Word­Press tool­bar for 20 min­utes. I’ve got all the time in the world.

I’m a bit chal­lenged in the Depart­ment of Men­tal Focus. I bounce from idea to idea, one respon­si­bil­i­ty to anoth­er, just wan­der­ing in search of some­thing easy to do. In the time it took me to write that sen­tence, I had four dis­tinct thoughts:

1. I need to sign up for intra­mur­al ten­nis for the fall semester.
2. I’m glad I got my car inspect­ed today.
3. Hm. When will I get an oil change and my tires rotat­ed and balanced?
4. Jade’s not due into the vet until…November?

I have a ter­ri­ble time pay­ing atten­tion to any­thing. But this is noth­ing new: I’ve been cop­ing (enjoy­ing, real­ly) with it since I was young.

In a nut­shell, my lack of abil­i­ty in design, writ­ing, or any­thing cre­ative (bar­ring per­haps pho­tog­ra­phy) stems from a lack of inspi­ra­tion. When I see an emp­ty Pho­to­shop win­dow, a blank desk­top, a prop­er­ly marked-up HTML doc­u­ment with no CSS, I don’t dream of fan­cy text over­lays and beau­ti­ful typog­ra­phy with ban­ners and image back­grounds and nice margins.

I think, “Wow, that’s dull,” and I move on.

How do you make any­thing beau­ti­ful if noth­ing inspires you to a high­er form? I’m spin­ning my wheels in a rut of mediocre appear­ances and lack­ing ideas.

The Wisdom of Crowds: Wikipedia, Vandalism, and Free Information

Wikipedia has a sin­gle, over­ar­ch­ing goal: to cre­ate a free ency­clo­pe­dia.

Wikipedia depends on vol­un­teer con­tri­bu­tions of knowl­edge for its con­tent. To make this easy for any­one to do, Wikipedia is very accept­ing of new mate­r­i­al: com­plete strangers, such as myself, can log onto Wikipedia at any time, from any inter­net con­nec­tion in the world, and write about some­thing we think is wor­thy of ency­clo­pe­dic inclu­sion. [Read more →]

Job Opportunities

In the world of a col­lege stu­dent, jobs are either in abun­dance, or are more rare than three-winged butterflies.

I’d like to flat­ter myself and say that I had a few chances for intern­ships for this sum­mer. There was GE Ener­gy, which I took; Van­guard Invest­ments, who I had to turn down before start­ing the final round of inter­views; a cou­ple of pos­si­bles in the Leesburg/Sterling/NoVA area; and a whole slew of pan­icked emails in late April of com­pa­nies who did­n’t get enough bod­ies in the first pass to con­sume their budget.

For next sum­mer, I have goals. I want to work for Van­guard in Char­lotte. I regret not hav­ing gone to Char­lotte for the on-site inter­view: it would have been great prac­tice for this spring. How­ev­er, I did­n’t have it in me to go: I had all ready accept­ed GE, and fur­ther “lead­ing on” Van­guard struck me as wrong. Hope­ful­ly, some­one else was extend­ed an offer to come down for on-site inter­views in my place.

My pipe dream for post-col­lege runs the spec­trum. GE has the IMLP pro­gram, where you get four six month rota­tions between dif­fer­ent IT/IM (Infor­ma­tion Man­age­ment) posi­tions and sites through­out the GE busi­ness. Van­guard has their own take on IMLP, with three eight month rota­tions between dif­fer­ent con­cen­tra­tions. Impor­tant dif­fer­ence: Van­guard keeps you in one phys­i­cal loca­tion, while you usu­al­ly move for GE.

Then there’s Apple and Google. Com­put­er sci­ence majors dream of work­ing for Google, and Apple fanat­ics would love to be assim­i­lat­ed into the moth­er­ship. Google has amaz­ing career oppor­tu­ni­ties, but they’re all but impos­si­ble to even secure an inter­view with. Apple is a com­pa­ny so secre­tive, they may not even have an offi­cial hir­ing process for col­lege grad­u­ates, and they’re at the point where they don’t both­er recruit­ing: peo­ple come to them; why go out and look for bod­ies when they line up like sheep?

We’ll see where the winds of col­lege degrees and job expe­ri­ence take me.

Updates are coming!

I’ve picked out a new theme for the site. It’s not bad, but I may tweak things (col­ors, place­ment, etc.) and find a new image for up top.

Also, I have three posts in the pipeline that are being edit­ed and worked on when I get time. I’ll try to get one up tonight if I can; if not, at least vis­it my pho­to­blog. It’s far eas­i­er to pick a pho­to and write a wit­ty one-lin­er than to write a whole blog post.

[Update: 10:50 AM, August 9th] See, told you I’d have some­thing post­ed.

A Fresh Start

I’m start­ing this blog­ging thing anew. I’m now on a Word­Press-based blog, and I’m in the process of import­ing old posts from Blog­ger and Live­Jour­nal, most­ly to have them all backed up.

When they’ve been archived, I’ll update with links.

[Update, 10:04 PM] Live­Jour­nal and Blog­ger archive is now up and run­ning. Note: Blog­ger’s com­ments came over, while Live­Jour­nal’s did not (you’re not miss­ing much).

[Update, 11:20 PM] The archive has been locked (SQL state­ments are good at doing what a web inter­face can’t pro­vide, name­ly, lock­ing of 900 entries). Sor­ry, I don’t feel com­fort­able hav­ing Live­Jour­nal friend-only or pri­vate posts sud­den­ly open.