Ramblings & ephemera
This quotation is directly about politics, but it’s about anyone – or even anything – we emotionally attach ourselves to.
From Glenn Greenwald’s “My friend the president” (Salon: 8 December 2009):
Those who venerated Bush because he was a morally upright and strong evangelical-warrior-family man and revere Palin as a common-sense Christian hockey mom are similar [...]
Posted on December 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, politics, religion | No Comments »
From Sander Duivestein’s “Penny Thoughts on the Technium” (The Technium: 1 December 2009):
I‘m interested in how people personally decide to refuse a technology. I’m interested in that process, because I think that will happen more and more as the number of technologies keep increasing. The only way we can sort our identity is by not [...]
Posted on December 15th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: religion, science, social software, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
I just published a page on my website about a solution I’ve found to an important issue: how to keep task lists on my Mac & my iPhone that are synced. I used to use The Hit List, but the developer’s failure to come up with an iPhone solution has led me to abandon it. [...]
Posted on December 11th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: personal, tech help | No Comments »
From Patsy McGarry’s “Church ‘lied without lying’” (Irish Times: 26 November 2009):
One of the most fascinating discoveries in the Dublin Archdiocese report was that of the concept of “mental reservation” which allows clerics mislead people without believing they are lying.
According to the Commission of Investigation report, “mental reservation is a concept developed and much discussed [...]
Posted on December 1st, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, language & literature, law, religion, security, word of the day | No Comments »
From Jeff Bertolucci’s “Windows 7 Ads: Microsoft Tarts Up the Desktop” (PC World: 13 November 2009):
Microsoft has announced plans to peddle Windows 7 desktop space to advertisers, who’ll create Windows UI themes–customized backgrounds, audio clips, and other elements–that highlight their brand, Computerworld reports. In fact, some advertiser themes are already available in the Windows 7 [...]
Posted on December 1st, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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My book, Linux Phrasebook, which is still selling well & still just as useful today as when it came out in 2006 (& will be for another decade or two, given how consistent the Linux command line is), has been translated into Russian. You can find it at this Russian website, where I found out [...]
Posted on November 29th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, language & literature, personal, tech help, technology | No Comments »
From Help Net Security’s “Zero-day vulnerabilities in Firefox extensions discovered” (20 November 2009):
At the SecurityByte & OWASP AppSec Conference in India, Roberto Suggi Liverani and Nick Freeman, security consultants with security-assessment.com, offered insight into the substantial danger posed by Firefox extensions.
Mozilla doesn’t have a security model for extensions and Firefox fully trusts the code of [...]
Posted on November 29th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security | No Comments »
Tired of high SMS charges? Use these SMS gateways, which translate emails & IMs into SMS text messages … for free (well, to the sender, anyway – the recipient still has to pay). And when recipients reply, those replies come back to the sender in the same format; in other words, you email someone, they [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, cool stuff, tech help | No Comments »
From Gene Weingarten’s “The Peekaboo Paradox: The strange secrets of humor, fear and a guy who makes big money making little people laugh” (The Washington Post: 22 January 2006):
Even before they respond to a tickle, most babies will laugh at peekaboo. It’s their first “joke.” They are reacting to a sequence of events that begins [...]
Posted on November 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: language & literature, science | No Comments »
From Dwight Garner’s “We Are In a State of Three-Alarm Emergency” (The New York Times Paper Cuts Blog: 11 September 2007):
In his brooding and kaleidoscopic introduction to the new “Best American Essays 2007” – a 5,000-word chunk of it is online – David Foster Wallace doesn’t write so much as shred (in the Jerry Garcian [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, language & literature | No Comments »
From David Foster Wallace’s “Introduction” (The Best American Essays 2007):
Here is an overt premise. There is just no way that 2004’s reelection could have taken place—not to mention extraordinary renditions, legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the
passage of the Military Commissions Act—if we had been paying attention and handling information in a competent grown-up way. ‘We’ meaning [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, education, history, language & literature, law, politics | No Comments »
From Clive Thompson’s “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” (The New York Times Magazine: 5 September 2008):
In essence, Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?
Social scientists have a name for this [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, science, social software, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Kelly Jackson Higgins’s “New Massive Botnet Twice the Size of Storm” (DarkReading: 7 April 2008):
A new botnet twice the size of Storm has ballooned to an army of over 400,000 bots, including machines in the Fortune 500, according to botnet researchers at Damballa. (See The World’s Biggest Botnets and MayDay! Sneakier, More Powerful Botnet [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | No Comments »
From David Wiley’s interview of David Foster Wallace, “Transcript of the David Foster Wallace Interview” (The Minnesota Daily: 27 February 1997):
But Plato and John Stuart Mill both take books to talk about different types of pleasure. In my own personal life, I like really arty stuff a lot of the time. But there’s also times [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, language & literature, on writing | No Comments »
From Steve Paulson’s interview with Robert Wright, “God, He’s moody” (Salon: 24 June 2009):
Do you think religions share certain core principles?
Not many. People in the modern world, certainly in America, think of religion as being largely about prescribing moral behavior. But religion wasn’t originally about that at all. To judge by hunter-gatherer religions, religion was [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, language & literature, religion, science | No Comments »
From Diana B. Henrioques’s “Madoff Scheme Kept Rippling Outward, Across Borders” (The New York Times: 20 December 2008):
But whatever else Mr. Madoff’s game was, it was certainly this: The first worldwide Ponzi scheme — a fraud that lasted longer, reached wider and cut deeper than any similar scheme in history, entirely eclipsing the puny regional [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, law, tech in changing society | No Comments »
Q: How do you tell an introverted computer scientist from an extroverted computer scientist?
A: An extroverted computer scientist looks at your shoes when he talks to you.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
very long pause….
Java.
Saying that Java is nice because it works on every OS is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on every gender.
A [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: cool stuff, language & literature | No Comments »
From Munir Kotadia’s “NSW Police: Don’t use Windows for internet banking” (ITnews: 9 October 2009):
Consumers wanting to safely connect to their internet banking service should use Linux or the Apple iPhone, according to a detective inspector from the NSW Police, who was giving evidence on behalf of the NSW Government at the public hearing into [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Nicholas Carr’s “Cloud koan” (Rough Type: 1 October 2009):
Not everything will move into the cloud, but the cloud will move into everything.
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Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, tech in changing society, technology | No Comments »
From Kim Zetter’s “New Malware Re-Writes Online Bank Statements to Cover Fraud” (Wired: 30 September 2009):
New malware being used by cybercrooks does more than let hackers loot a bank account; it hides evidence of a victim’s dwindling balance by rewriting online bank statements on the fly, according to a new report.
The sophisticated hack uses a [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, science, security | No Comments »
