Year: 2007

10/01/2007

“There are two very clear options: Get everybody out by midnight tonight, or get everybody out by midnight tomorrow. The fuel that keeps the war going is us.”

— Seymour Hersh, a journalist for the New York Times, when asked what to do about Iraq

09/30/2007

Kyra, Zack, and I played a game of Monopoly this morning. It’s so funny to watch Zack snap up properties– he’s particularly interested in the railroads, and for this picture he wanted to show off the fact that he owned three of them.

The really cool thing about our Monopoly set is that it came from my grandma’s house, and I’m pretty sure it dates back to the early 1940’s. (The game itself was first published around 1935.) So all of the pieces are wood, and the money is so old that it doesn’t even feel like paper any more– it’s has the feel of a soft (but somewhat brittle) piece of cloth. It’s pretty interesting to think that these playing pieces are almost seventy years old, and that they were used by my dad and his friends when they were kids.

09/28/2007

“As yesterday’s positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured.”

— President George W. Bush, in a speech yesterday

Not only is this a vapid and meaningless statement, he really said “childrens”. Bonehead.

09/28/2007

Welcome to the surveillance society.

Chicago just made news by hiring IBM to manage thousands of video cameras posted throughout the city with a sophisticated computer system which can automatically process the feeds and identify… well, evil stuff, I guess.

Quoting from an article in The Register:

Officials from Chicago and IBM announced the initial phase of Operation Virtual Shield, which they’re trumpeting as one of the most advanced security networks in any U.S. city. It will use IBM software to analyze in real time thousands of hours of video being recorded on more than 1,000 cameras that run continuously.

“Cities are faced with ever-increasing threats such as routine crime or terrorist activity and the only way to protect citizens is through a truly sophisticated security surveillance system,” IBM vice president Mike Daniels said.

That’s scary. The People in Charge really, truly believe that the “only way to protect citizens” is by using cameras to spy on them. And of course they bring up the specter of terrorists, as if Chicago is facing grave threats from roving gangs of them. It’s a great catch-all, though, and I’ve grown infinitely tired of hearing it pulled out to justify the latest Big Brother technology. I’m also tired of names like Operation Virtual Shield, which I suppose come as a result of a multi-million-dollar study to find a name that makes it sound like it’s just a friendly protective blanket to keep all of us safer.

Interestingly, the article also had this to say:

The project, which has the ability to read license plates and zoom in on items as small as a backpack, comes three weeks after statistics suggested that video surveillance cameras installed in London did little to solve crime in that city. Many professors also say there are no studies that show cameras reduce crime.

Hmm. If it’s unlikely (statistically, anyway) that cameras don’t help reduce crime, then it’s hard to justify this sort of intrusion into privacy.

09/25/2007

News in the tech world yesterday said that EMC bought a small Utah company called Mozy for $76 million. Mozy is owned by a guy named Josh Coates, and although I’ve never met him personally, I feel a certain kinship with him because both of us hang out in the same Linux user’s group and occasionally post messages there.

His company provides a simple data backup solution so you can take files from your Windows computer and store them online somewhere, then pull them back if something ever goes horribly wrong on your system. It’s not a complicated concept, but one that’s surprisingly hard to do well.

When I heard the news of the buyout, I thought to myself, “Hey, I could’ve done something like that!”

Then I thought, “Hey, wait a minute– I already did something like that!”

About five years ago I wrote a little software package that did exactly what Mozy does. It ran on a Windows system and you could tell it what parts of your hard drive you wanted to back up to the remote server (which happened to be my server, over at BitRelay). It wasn’t pretty, and it didn’t have some of the features I’m sure Mozy has, but in the end it did basically the same thing.

Clearly I was ahead of my time. Online data storage only got “big” in the last few years, so when I wrote my little program I had a hard time convincing anyone to use it. Moreover, I wanted to charge a few bucks a month for the backups (because I’m paying for the disk space and bandwidth) and most people will only use the internet if it’s free.

In the end, this whole situation made me think. I’m not the world’s greatest entrepreneur, and most of the ideas I have for web applications or whatever aren’t earth-shatteringly original. But now I’m thinking about what I might do that could land me in the same spot as Josh.

Hmm.

09/25/2007

Now that I’ve gone “all digital” with my calendar and to-do list, I feel busier somehow. Maybe it’s because in the “old days” I just had a couple of items scribbled in my planner, and now I get the Big Picture that shows all kinds of stuff I’ve done, plan to do, should be doing, want to do, etc.

I guess it beats being bored…