My shopping isn't done yet. I have the first cold of the year, which is manifesting as a near-constant sneezing fit and feels like I've been awake for four days straight (when, in point of fact, I've been sleeping 10-14 hours a day).
'this the season.
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Among the many stops that Jason and I made as we drove cross-country was at the continental divide of the Americas, which is where the waterways that drain into the Pacific Ocean are physically separated from those that drain into the Atlantic Ocean. Here are the pictures we took when we stopped to sightsee.
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In the past day or two an interesting piece of news has been making the rounds. Earlier this year the police department of the city of Seattle, Washington set up its own wireless mesh network for what many people are saying is for the purpose of keeping people under surveillance. The hardware was purchased from Aruba Networks; it is unknown whether or not the company set up the gear, or if another outfit was contracted for installation and maintenance. Each of the nodes is apparently broadcasting frames containing ESSIDs that reflect its location (such as 4th Avenue and Union Street …
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On our way out west, Jason and I visited Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. We weren't able to tour the entire park because we were on a fairly strict schedule (we had to get through Arizona in one shot because our route took us near precisely zero hotels or rest stops) but we did stop off at the visitor's center for a short time to browse the exhibits in the plaza. Here are the pictures we took.
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In August of 2013 the wonderful folks at Geeks Without Bounds held an unconference at the MIT Media Lab called Catalytic Converter. I was invited to both attend and present, and when I wasn't in session I wandered around Cambridge as well as the Media Lab. Cutting to the chase, here are the photographs I took during my visit. I saw some very impressive things there, and I wanted to share them with all of you in the hope that you'd partake of some of the wonder I felt.
Oh, there was also an active Byzantium mesh at MIT for …
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Very busy at the new job. Still settling in at the new doss. Putting in long hours. Feels like good, productive days, though.
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Obligatory warning: If you are fandom-averse, you might want to skip right to the photographs.
Some months ago, a good friend of mine dragged me kicking and screaming into the Homestuck fandom by way of a novel length fanfic she and a friend are writing.
I won't tell you about Homestuck. That's not what this post is about. I will, however, tell you about the latest project to come off of my workbench, which was building as functional a replica of Jade's lunchtop computer as possible.
Cutting to the chase, after being infected with the Homestuck meme and searching for …
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I haven't seen this get a whole lot of love recently, so I thought I'd boost the signal in some small way.
On Sunday, 29 September 2013 between 1200 and 1700 EST5EDT there will be a Mini Maker Faire in Silver Spring, Maryland. If you've never heard of Maker Faire, it's a series of events organized and thrown by Make Magazine that are collectively billed as the Greatest Show-and-Tell on Earth. At a Maker Faire you can see everything from 3d printing demonstrations to singing Tesla coils, combat robots to kite photography, and everything in between. Mini-Maker Faires are, as …
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I find it increasingly difficult these days to shake the feeling that the cyberpunk dystopia our world is becoming is shaping up to be more and more like Shadowrun. Ever since 2012 (which turned out to be a slightly less tumultous year than Terrence McKenna had always preached) things have become more and more surreal and disturbing (in a David Cronenberg and not a David Lynch kind of way). The Snowden/NSA scandal continues to bring truly frightening information to light, and the first thing that comes to mind is that ECHO MIRAGE exists as a real thing which is …
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In the wake of Chelsea (nee Bradley) Manning's sentence of 35 years in military prison for leaking the massive volume of documents now known as Cablegate to the media organization Wikileaks, there is now a hard as diamond legal precedent that criminalizes whistleblowing, the act of making evidence of misconduct, fraud, unethical, or illegal activity known. It is widely believed (often correctly so) that disclosing such activities to what are considered the proper channels will result in serious repercussions. It is also widely believed that such disclosures will have little to no positive effect because those reported on are often …
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