This afternoon at a gather I had chance to speak with Tarah Wheeler at some length, and she noticed that I spent most of the discussion reading her lips. As part of the discussion it came out that I'm a synaesthete and was having great difficulty understanding her because I was unable to pick her voice out of all of the distracting visual phenomena due to all of the other discussions happening around me, but I was able to focus on her lipstick and pick her voice out of all of the static. The discussion turned to synaesthesia as I …

A couple of weeks back Project Byzantium was contacted by Jeffrey Young, a journalist with the Chronicle of Higher Education working the online beat. He'd heard about the project and wanted to interview the developers; after some discussion on the mailing list he and I set up a time and spoke on the phone for an hour or so. A couple of days ago the article went live on their website, and I must say that I'm very pleased with how well it turned out. All I can speak to are my bits, but the location aside (we meet at …

It seems as if Facebook is everywhere these days. Less involved than Livejournal or Blogger but packing a little more substance than Twitter, Facebook is a great way to goof off when you find yourself with a couple of minutes to spare. Games, quizzes, applications, and toys abound on the service, and it also makes it easy to stalk people you used to go to school with. It also made it easier to hose your social life without having to resort to off color jokes in front of the boss' wife. Their privacy settings (and ambiguity thereof) were infamously poor …

Sorry for another late post, everyone - between work, wedding stuff, and trying to keep from falling ill, I've had a lot on my plate lately.

On Tuesday night, after coming home and having dinner, I ran a couple of last-minute errands for Lyssa and then set course once again for Washington, DC proper for the weekly HacDC administrative meeting. While I'm technically not a member because I haven't started paying dues yet, I've been doing a lot of hands-on electronics work at the site, more specifically my steampunk sonic screwdriver. Most of what I've been doing lately has been repairing …

More from the front lines of the DVD content protection war - slyck.com has posted an interview with Muslix64, who cracked the copy protection of both HD DVD and Blu-Ray within a couple of weeks of work as an act of 'fair use enforcement'. When you consider the fact that you can't watch either of these kinds of DVD on anything but an HDCP High-Definition monitor (which very few people have), you have to wonder if you really have fair use of the DVDs you purchase anyway... the interview also goes on to explain how AACS works, and that by …