I finally finished the second book of Edmund Morris's Theodore Roosevelt trilogy. So far it has been an excellent series, and I look forward to finishing the life and career of the most interesting president in American history (some might argue this, but hey, the man was shot point blank and went on to finish the speech).
The movie Apollo 13 tells the story of the third manned mission to the moon. After an oxygen tank explosion crippled the ship, the mission turned from one of exploration, to survival. Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong--but they made it back alive. It was NASA's "finest hour,"
I won't catalog the events of today or the last year, but it is fair to say that I have been knocked off my feet more times in the last year than in the last 24 combined. Thank you to my friends and family for everything. I believe this will be my finest hour.
Today is the last day of my self-imposed exile from Facebook. I knew it would be difficult to stay away from everyone's life stream, but I didn't realize the social cost of not participating in Facebook. "The Social Network" tells a fictionalized version of Facebook's founding:
The movie properly portrays why Facebook is successful. Within seven years of its founding it became part of the social infrastructure. I have a few observations on how it has moved past helping college students hook up:
The president of Oregon State University just informed us that the Corvallis campus will shortly ban smoking on school property. I am not a smoker, and like the idea of never walking behind a smoker again, but this edict seems a bit hypocritical to me. President Ray gives two reasons for the ban, 1. smoking is polluting the campus air, and 2. people should not smoke anyway.
In part one of a two part series on premium video streaming services, I review the quality of the movie offerings from NetFlix and Hulu Plus. I checked each of the top 100 movies of all time (from the Internet Movie Database) for streaming access. The clear winner is NetFlix, with just 20 percent of the top 100 to Hulu's 0(!) percent. It is clear that Hulu is not trying to get any of the premiere movie properties, even though Hulu is owned by content companies.
I just migrated my site to Drupal 7 (Drupal is a Content Management System)! It was relatively painless even though D7 is not in its final version. In the coming months I will restore the lost features, then start experimenting. Less than three weeks until the Worldwide Party: http://www.drupal7releaseparty.org/
Part of my research responsibilities is building and maintaining a fire simulation program for an area of Eastern Oregon. The idea is to simulate fire and growth under different suppression and fire treatment policies so we can generate an optimal policy. Everything was proceeding smoothly until the closed-source fire spread model refused to simulate any landscape past 40 years. To make things worse, any of 1 million pixels could cause the error, and each pixel could reach its error state via any combination of annual growth and fire transitions.
Most people know that reusing passwords for multiple services is a major security hole. If you don't know, XKCD can explain it to you:
Now, assuming you aren't going to memorize a unique password for every service requiring one, there are a few ways you can protect yourself from programmatic identity theft.
Every time I drive into Oregon I get accosted by some guy wearing a safety bib asking for money. To residents of the 48 states without a self-serve prohibition, OR/NJ's gas law makes about as much sense as a pitcher named "Tomorrow":
I have watched in horror as Comic-Con, a beloved San Diego institution, has taken a serious look at bids from Los Angeles and Anaheim. Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons is on my side. Check out the video after the jump.
