1. Belated LayerOne entry number two.

    09 May 2007

    1048 PST8PDT - Burbank Airport.

    What a dump. I finally got to see more of it because I'll be stuck here for a few hours. When I originally arrived we were ushered out of the terminal to the curbside baggage pickup without ceremony, only security guards, so I wasn't able to take the fifty cent tour of the terminal.

    It's small. There's noplace to eat, save for a really, really crappy cafe' that serves hideously bad wraps and lousy smoothies. By 'noplace' I mean just that - there are no other places to go in terminal B for food unless you want …

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  2. Belated LayerOne entry number one.

    07 May 2007

    I made it to the LayerOne conference safe, sound, and on a shuttle bus that runs from the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, California to the Hilton in Pasadena. Travel tip: If you can avoid it, don't catch a cab, they cost an arm and a leg. If you can charter a shuttlebus you'll pay much less for the trip. A cab ride would probably have cost me about $70us, while I paid all of $23us for a leisurely ride to the hotel, in air conditioning (not that we needed it) and comfort. Of course, I hadn't been there for …

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  3. Well, I made it to California...

    04 May 2007

    0814 EST5EDT - Writing offline on Windbringer, high above the state of Virginia, I believe.

    Somehow I managed to get to bed at a decent time last night in preparation for my trip to the LayerOne conference in Pasadena, California this weekend. However, that should not be construed to mean in any way that I had an easy time of falling asleep... being naturally inclined to life as a night owl (professionally and otherwise), retiring before midnight is often problematic, unless I've run myself into the ground and really need the rest anyway. Still, somehow I caught a few hours of …

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  4. Google's service might not be evil, but their NDAs sure are.

    03 May 2007

    One C. Scott Ananian will be interviewing at Google in a couple of days, and posted in his Livejournal about the non-disclosure agreement that he has to sign before he can even be interviewed. This is unusual in and of itself, because usually you sign an NDA after you sign on with a company which tells you what you can and can't talk about and the length of time that these restrictions would be in effect. Google's pre-interview NDA has no time limit on it, and covers not only what they discuss during the interview but the compensation and benefits …

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  5. I am in radio contact!

    01 May 2007

    For the past couple of days, the Linksys 802.11b wireless access point that I've been using since my days in Pittsburgh has steadily been going downhill, much to my chagrin. I got about four years out of it, which isn't bad for an access point, but now it's making work difficult and so it's become a liability. Seeing as how I just got my paycheque I decided that while I was out and about I'd run down to the geek's equivelent of Wal-Mart and pick myself up a new access point, a Linksys WRT54G v6, to be precise.

    Right …

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  6. Quantum encryption partially cracked?

    01 May 2007

    A team of researchers at MIT have figured out how to partially compromise quantum cryptography systems through a creative interpretation of the entanglement principle. In a system protected with quantum cryptographic principles, bits of information are encoded by assigning meaning to the polarisation of individual photons of light (up-down could mean a one, left-right could mean a zero) and thus exchange keying material. The very act of observing quantum particles changes their properties and thus destroys the data encoded in the particles, so in theory an eavesdropper Somewhere Out There listening in would corrupt the stream of data by damaging …

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  7. Gildowan update.

    01 May 2007

    Ashran now has skin on his foot - the third degree burns are completely gone, and he's able to wear shoes once more. Granted, he's only got one layer of skin now and it's looking pretty bad (from a cosmetic perspective) but the wounds are closed over and tissue regeneration continues apace.

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