alex chiang: web 6.0

 

Month: March, 2006

reap what ye sow (or the BSD license is a dual-edged sword)

Interesting interview today in the Jem Report, where you hear some whining about not getting money for developing OpenSSH. Now don’t get me wrong — I think that the OpenBSD/SSH folks have done some fine work, and I enjoy using ssh on a daily basis. However, this article struck me as a bit naive.

Some of [...]

beating back the Man

While shooting the shit with my good friend “Touchdown” Brown, he alerted me to the existence of a beautiful way to take advantage of all the free credit card offers floating around out there. Or rather, how to take advantage of one specific credit card offer, that being the “0% APR for life on balance [...]

fidelity data loss

I got an alarming email in my work inbox this morning regarding the fact that Fidelity allowed my personal information, such as social security number, address, and salary, to be stolen. Schneier has a few things to say on this issue… First, from Public Disclosure of Personal Data Loss:

This data loss has set a new [...]

things to do on a sick day

Other than recovering, of course, are there certain job-related activities that you could do while home on a sick day? Sure, the key is to find medium to high visibility, but low to medium brain power tasks. This will maximize your efforts to continually project a “star employee” image to your manager.
Examples:

reading old manager email
reading [...]

suck it, mariott

So Matt and I are in California on a business trip. Because we’re such nice guys, we decide to share a hotel room and save the company some money. The Courtyard Mariott has free internet in the room. Cool!
Upon further inspection, maybe not.
First off, they have this weirdo modem type thingy that has [...]

san fran snippets

If I had to live in a city, San Francisco would be one of my top two choices (the other being Las Vegas). It’s been a while since I’ve been back, and Jenny and I walked around a bit today just playing tourons.
As is always the case, multiple city-life scenes tickled my funny [...]

fire thighs

Another year, another fantastic ski trip by the 10% crew. We spent four days in Lake Tahoe and had glorious powder every day. We spent one day at Squaw and the remaining three at Heavenly shredding the slopes (or crashing down them as the case may be). In-between time was spent gambling, [...]

bye bye movable type, hello wordpress

I’m trying to get ready for a big trip, so logically instead of packing, I decided to transition from Movable Type to Word Press (thanks to Chiang’s LOOP).
The actual export/import procedure was pretty easy. Unfortunately, I lost all my MT permalinks, so there are going to be a bunch of broken pages in Google’s search [...]

sunnis, shias, and HDTV

eclectic: Selecting or employing individual elements from a variety of sources, systems, or styles: an eclectic taste in music; an eclectic approach to managing the economy.
Low content, but high utility post today, since I’m busy on multiple fronts (upcoming root canal, Lake Tahoe ski trip, California business trip, my country’s 500th anniversary to plan for, [...]

the Vonnegut philosophy of IT procurement

As someone who happens to be somewhat knowledgeable about the computer industry (and technology in general), I am often asked for advice by my friends and family as to which of the shiny new whizbang doodads they are considering purchasing is the best choice. I ask the only important question, that being, “how do you [...]