johnath in blog form
For those who attended Turner Fenton, I just had a talk (via Skype) with David Cale. He sends his hellos from Vietnam, on his way to Egypt via Rome, after passing through Bali, Phuket, and Singapore, among others.
6 million scooters in one city, all of them flowing around and through each other like a flock of birds, is what he sees out his window.
People ask us how we roll, now that the Ferocus has died…
Continue reading “The King is dead. Long live the King.”
Now that Make: magazine volume 4 is hitting newsstands, I am free to link to my article from volume 3: DIY Security Bits.
Be merciful in your criticism for I was constrained to 700 words, and then edited on top of that.
Quick note to any of my Skypin’ peeps who might not have caught the word. Even if you don’t pay for SkypeOut and never plan to, you can now use skype to call (almost) any 1-800 style toll-free number. This has not only interesting implications on its own, but when combined with the fact that 1-800-FREE411 will look up, and connect you to, any US resident or company for free, it means that skype users can call anyone in the US, even if their target doesn’t have skype.
Share Skype – Free calls to toll-free phone numbers global beta
[PS – If you are in the “What’s Skype?” camp, go here: skype.com]
I tend to obsess. Not in the melodramatic sense of the word; I don’t obsess about my thighs or about my complexion or about whether Tommy Jenkins will ask me to the winter box social. What I mean to say is that when I decide to find a topic interesting, I
a) see it everywhere
b) feel compelled to purchase (and read) books about it
c) seek out communities of thoughtful and intelligent experts in the field, and read everything they have said to each other in the last year or so on the subject
d) read the new books I have discovered
e) think a great deal about it
f) Tell Amy all about it. ALL about it. Even when she’s sleeping, or eating, or hitting me. She usually just rolls her eyes.
This is a system which, at least as I apply it, is really quite adapted to developing my expertise to a relatively competent level in a relatively short time over a relatively broad expanse of possible interests. I have applied it with success in automotive mechanics, birds of eastern North America, understanding electricity for real, and poker, as examples. I have also applied it quite vigorously on the subject of finance. Budgeting, insurance, credit and debt management, mortgages, retirement planning, real estate investment, taxation, equity trading, mutual funds, options strategies, &c. &c. I do not offer for-profit counselling services nor would I without some kind of accreditation to back me up, but I am also relatively comfortable with what I know and what I don’t, enough that I can make judgements on the wisdom of various ideas or strategies and be confident in the decisions I make.
Enough that I can yell at my monitor when I read what passes for “financial strategies,” “money management” and <shudder> “budget tips” online. My monitor bears witness to the spittle encrustations of my vociferous discontent. By the holy and inspired laws of the Opinion Piece [ “Op. Ed.” being a less useful term when I am the only writer for this, uh, publication] I am now required to say something inflammatory and glib, so as rivet your attentions, to wit:
Budgets are useless or worse, and if you’re using one, you aren’t managing your money properly.
The 2001 Ford Focus is equipped with a range of security features including front and rear crumple zones.
This is rarely relevant in day to day affairs, but becomes just outrageously relevant when you get mowed into by one of these.
Amy and I are fine. Stiff, accidents tend to do that to you, and we may or may not end up with seatbelt bruises. Basically fine. The car, on the other hand, has been described variously as totalled, wrecked, and my favourite: write-off. Witness:
So much like when we bought the Focus, we are in “must buy a car immediately” mode, which is undesirable, but on the other hand, we have our limbs and skulls attached so really everything else is secondary. Because of the high kms, we’re not expecting much – probably in the $6-8k range but I guess we’ll see.
The focus was amazing – totalled, but the cabin was undisturbed, and we were safe. There was glass everywhere of course, but just the safe break-away crumble. Other than that though, it did exactly what it should do when a ton of bricks runs into your ass – it absorbed the impact, and gave its life for ours. Even my laptop in the trunk managed to survive (can’t kill a thinkpad). Check out our seats:
The cops and tow drivers were quite impressed. Apparently the seats are always supposed to do that — absorb the shock, and angle you away from the sides of the car by buckling inward, but they almost never see them like that. Someone said something about “must have been hit hard.” Yeah. Hard is a word for it.
The smell of it, as I remove the shipping wrap is sharp. The paper smells freshly cut and printed. It is heavier than I remember.
I glide my fingers across the gloss of the cover, down the spine.
Like any good piece of literature, it is more than the sum of its parts. There are individual pages, individual passages which are artful, beautiful. But taken as a whole it transforms, it blends and mixes and unifies. It breathes. And it speaks. It speaks about a world of possibility and the search for substance over style. Of a lost generation’s yearning to understand what is real and good and pure – maybe of every generation’s need for that sense of solidity; of gritty, healthy profundity.
Of course I devour it. The anachronism, the self-contradiction, it does not engage, it compels. Every page makes you want to live up to it, to be worthy of what it offers. It would be difficult, and expensive, but you think about who you would be if you could really master and harness those forces. You would need no other god. You could literally reach out and grab the world and form it to your will and set it back and say “There. It is done. I have created. And I have done it with love, and with precision, and it is beautiful and it is real.”
The Lee Valley annual catalog is better than porn.
If I were to comment on the state of things at work as they stand at this very moment, it would linger here and be perceived as “current” by those who care enough to read it, and it might well continue to be so perceived long after it was actually true. This would be an error, because things at work are in a state of heavy flux. Not insofar as my employment is concerned – I am still with IBM, I am still changing jobs (and doing so October 18th by the way, since I was reminded that I have neglected to mention that date) and my new job will still have something to do with user experience. The specifics, however broad and exciting they may be, are awash in the aforementioned flux and thus remain, by me and for the time being, undiscussed. In time, dear reader, in time. Suffice it to say that my role, as it is currently interpreted, seems to be… bigger… than I had anticipated. Huzzah.
In order to lend substance to this otherwise profoundly unsubstantial entry, and in the spirit of my cloak & dagger theatrics, I present this absolutely delicious article. For those who follow cryptography and espionage and all that, it is an engaging description of Tolkachev’s life and times as a CIA asset. For those who don’t but enjoy a good yarn it is, I think, a pretty accessible (and unclassified) story of a soviet double agent in the dying years of the cold war, and has some fun descriptions of CIA & KGB tradecraft in that era. I found out about it thanks to the inimitable Bruce Schneier, maybe the smartest guy in security today. (And I don’t hand out that “smartest” moniker lightly.)
You know this stuff, it’s everywhere now. It’s soap, only it comes out pre-foamed for your convenience. I’m supposed to make some wry comment now about how lazy our society has become when we can’t even rub our hands together to lather soap (to say nothing of actually washing our hands to begin with) but I can’t make that comment because I have a secret:
I really like the stuff.
We have the Dawn antibacterial foaming stuff in the Kitchen, it lasts forever and smells vaguely citrus-ish. They just replaced the soap dispensers at work with foaming versions, so I decided I had to know what the big fuss was all about. It’s not particularly mysterious. A refill lasts a lot longer since the perceived amount dispensed is higher. The dispensers take sealed 1L bags of the liquid, so there is less mess when refilling (just swap bags) and also less risk of contamination. This is a nice idea, since I have always secretly suspected that the nastiest part of any public bathroom is probably the inside of one of those pink-tar soap dispensers, which has probably been topped up for the last 5 years without an actual cleaning. And of course, in a corporate setting, anything that decreases absenteeism by encouraging people not to track their flu-infected feces all over the building is a good thing for the bottom line.
None of which is cause for a blog entry. My readers should understand that I thoroughly filter and inspect any candidate material for this blog before posting. That which makes the front page is really only the metaphorical orange that learned how to pole vault with a straw, in the (metaphorical) Tropicana Orange Juice that is my blog. My soap ravings, enthralling though they may be, would not have made the cut, were it not for the good people at Parish Maintenance Supply, a commercial/industrial janitorial company. If you feel that my own fervor on the subject has been somewhat, shall we say, zealous, then you really need to check out their page.
People are getting excited about foaming soaps. They find the smooth, creamy feel very appealing and enjoy the convenience and total luxury of having their soap pre-lathered before washing.
Total luxury. Of pre-lathered soap. I think they say it best,
Users will think “Awesome!”
… to keep rocking and rocking and rocking.
I refer, of course, to Google Talk. I haven’t gotten on board yet, but for those who are interested, you can download the official client or check here for deets on getting GAIM, Trillian, and possibly other clients up and running. All signs point to it basically being a jabber style implementation server-side, with support for text IM and voice. Seems that all you need (other than the aforementioned usefully-configured client) is a gmail address, email me if you need one of those (does anybody still need one of those?) I think I need to get this up and running RFSN[?].
On another note, I was rather displeased with the new google desktop client. People have been telling me for a while that GD is one of those indispensable-once-you-have-it technologies and I believe the desktop search capability might be. But their new client acts as a very-useful looking sidebar as well, with weather, news, todo lists, and a plugin architecture, I was ready to be quite excited. On inspection though, I find that auto-hide doesn’t work properly (it hides but won’t come back if you have maximized windows) and I couldn’t find an always-on-top switch. I think I’ll write them, they’ve been good about responding to email about search engine things in the past, so hopefully they have people paying attention. As I said, I’m ready to be very hyped about it, indeed to develop for it, but certain things need to work effortlessly or they aren’t worth using at all.
meandering wildly 