money talk

I read a good article on bankrate.com about what is appropriate and not appropriate to talk about money. the interview with Emily Post's great grand daughter in law was interesting but danced around the topic, as usual with ettiiquite, not giving anything substantial one way or the other. the most useful thing was a quote from Emily Post:

When in doubt, always remember the four cornerstones of etiquette: respect, kindness, consideration and honesty.

a comment!

I'm not one (usually) to link to my own stuff but check it out. I actually got a comment way back in the depths of the archive! thanks Eddie M.

some of you may be wondering how I found it. I'll clue you in on a little secret. you can setup blogger to email you when a comment is made so you don't miss any. I have it send it to a gmail account

open access point

I found this on slashdot in one of the comment sections, arguing that it should not be illegal to access open access points. I rather like it...

Imagine your neighbor has a TV going loudly - he has cable TV and you do not. You hear a show playing you've been meaning to see. You yell over the fence, "mind if I come over and watch that show?" The neighbor's butler yells back, "Sure, come around through the gate.". You go over, sit down and enjoy the show. After the show is over, the owner shows up, and is PISSED because you are there.

The neighbor has not lost any property, but has been denied payment for a service he has performed. (providing you with entertainment) Unfortunately for the neighbor, you were allowed free access to the entertainment indirectly by the neighbor. The neighbor has no legal grounds against you because you were acting with permission of an agent of the neighbor. (the butler)

This is very similar to the issue of open access points. The wireless router being the butler that's been told to allow anyone that asks to be given free internet access. Just because you get upset that the currentl policy of your own access point bothers you does not give you free license to sue someone that has taken advantage of your offerings.

TOR?

hmm.. whats this? tor.eff.org seems like distributed surfing model to help anonymize your connection. its like bittorrent meets proxy. interesting.

$4500 / code

Google is paying $4500 to summer interns that finish a coding project. it is intended to introduce new coders to the wonders of open source. read about it on code.google.com.

one interesting aspect is they may work on imbedding bittorrent in firefox. read it on summer.mozdev.org

VOIP adapter

build your own POTS (plane old telephone service) to VOIP (voice over IP) adapter cord. pretty trivial but fun. see it here thanks to slashdot.org.

Human Computers

from Slashdot.org it talks about how human computers (the first use of the term computer) were used to compute tables. they had a little rule:

Black plus black is black
Red plus red is red
Black plus red or red plus black, hand the sheets to team 2

UNR mba

its nice to see Daimler-Chrysler puts UNR MBA graduates on par with DUKE, or at least lets them work together. read it here

phishing

Ahh..... the beginning of the internet! I totally forgot about this. read all about the early years on wikipedia.org

more NE64

for me, more NE64
a good sd -> ethernet project done here

linux HDD

in my never fulfilled quest to persue embedded technology I ran across an ethernet hard disk drive with wireless acess, a USB port, and I presume a print server that is Linux based for $85. now that seems pretty reasonable to me.

see it on directron.com
referenced from linuxdevices.com

patents

I rather like this animated gif, probably the BEST use of an animated GIF I've seen to date, in the almost 10 year history of the animated GIF

google video

google video bassed in part on VLC should be VERY interesting. I can't wait.

*update
according to this the player was cracked by the author of deCSS

here is the so sue me page

hires wallpaper

its always nice to find something nice to look at

earth.google.com

it looks like google is getting its feet wet in yet an even more expanded map product. to bad its in beta and I can't get a copy of it to play with.

HUXGA

I'm all for the CGA, VGA, SVGA sayings, but i'm totally lost with the newer list of 'sizes' to convert back to pixels, consult this chart for
CGA
EGA
VGA
SVGA
XGA
SXGA
SXGA+
UXGA
QXGA*
QSXGA*
QUXGA*
HSXGA*
HUXGA*
WVGA
WXGA
WSXGA
WSXGA+
WUXGA
WQSXGA
WQUXGA
WHSXGA
WHUXGA

make

I need a subscription to this! a dead battery, the storm is setting, how do you get the car started. I love this!

credit score

here is a little info on the illusive credit score model. I for one had heard it said that it was not good to have credit cards with high limits. this I learned is FALSE, as a high limit with none of it used INCREASES your avalable credit to used credit ratio. I also learned that it IS good to have multiple sources of credit (at least 3) as this is required to come up with an average.

and.. to the young among is, did you know the credit score was not utilitzed in aquiring a home mortgage until the mid 90's? our forefathers and grandfathers didn't have to worry about this crap!

made in america

I saw a bumper sticker that said

If all our cars are imports, where will our kids work?

it was on a honda.

GIANTS flock to reno

this is a less than informative article on the housing boom in reno. kind of washed up numbers but at least it lists a few of the builders.