Jul

30

Rain Drops on Cement

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Rain Drops on Cement, originally uploaded by sneezypb.

I like this one. :)

Jul

28

Racism

Filed Under Personal / Relationships, The World | Leave a Comment

Lacey’s story about her first brush with racism in Houston reminds me that they were well intentioned. I am not very hard on such people because my so very white grandmother has made similar comments. Hers was that the neighborhood was suffering from all the crime, the specific example was that my bike was stolen out of our yard. Actually it was stolen by a white kid on the street.

Despite that my father is black and my mother (her daughter) is white, to my grandmother I wasn’t black. I pointed out that to most people who make similar comments who don’t know me consider me black and part of the crime problem because I am black. She never made such a comment again (at least in my presence). I was 13 or 14 at the time.

A couple years later, a guy who was part of my “crew” told me he believed it was morally wrong for blacks and whites to interbreed. However, he didn’t consider me a bad person. I was highly offended at the time. It took a while for me to understand people have lines they consider good or bad, but the line can be easily moved at whim.

Being a mixed kid, race is something I have to deal with almost every day. For the most part, I have come to have blinders to many things that upset those who are still sensitive. There are plenty of opportunities to get upset:

  • Slow service at a restaurant.
  • Sales people following me in a store.
  • Police officers stopping the path to shadow me.

Why get upset over other people’s ignorance when it doesn’t have an impact on me? The police officer who arrests me just because I am “black” would, of course, have a lawsuit coming.

Jul

25

Great Job?

Filed Under Computers | Leave a Comment

BSA collects over $2M in settlements from U.S. companies:

The Business Software Alliance (BSA), a watchdog group representing the nation’s leading software manufacturers, today announced it has collected over $2 million in settlements from 19 U.S. companies that were running illegal software.

Compare that to this article from the BSA web site earlier this year:
Study Finds PC Software Piracy Declining in Emerging Markets while Worldwide Piracy Rate Remains Stable:

Thirty-five percent of the packaged software installed on personal computers (PC) worldwide in 2005 was illegal, amounting to $34 billion in global losses due to software piracy.

So the BSA just has $33.998 billion left to catch!

Jul

25

Xeyes

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Xeyes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

xeyes is a graphical program showing two eyes which follow the cursor movements on the screen as if they were watching it.

Computer nerds are weird….

Okay, I admit it… I am weird.

Jul

24

Size Matters?

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Heh…

Character-for-character, password length is more important for security than complexity. Requiring complexity but allowing passwords to remain short makes passwords more vulnerable to attack than simply requiring easier-to-remember, longer passwords. Password size does matter

I am not sure I understand the debate here. Why can’t it be a little of both? Roger is arguing that complexity doesn’t really matter if the length is suffient. Others counter that using the characters Roger says most people don’t use is suffient. What seems to be missing is that people don’t use long passwords or complex passwords. Plus people give out their passwords all the time to anyone.

So what is the point of this argument if no one is going to follow this advice in the real world? If you say it has to be a minimum of 8 characters, then 90% will meet that minimum and have no more. I would love to hear the ire policy makers face when they require passwords with a minimum of 32 characters.

Jul

21

Cooking Eggs on a Macbook

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TechEBlog ยป Cooking Breakfast on a MacBook:

Sagags shows us how to put your overheating MacBook to good use by cooking some eggs and warming a cup of coffee. Video clip and instructions after the jump.

Jul

19

absolute

Filed Under Philosophy | Leave a Comment

absolute: Philosophically, it may be considered as the unknowable, the thing-in-itself; as that ultimate nonrelative that is the basis of all relation; as the ultimate, all-comprehensive principle in which all differences and distinctions are merged.

Um, I found a bookmark from when I was reading this encyclopedia. This is where I am stopping.

Jul

7

Sigma 18-200mm f3.5-6.3

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Sigma 18-200mm f3.5-6.3, originally uploaded by sneezypb.

My new all-around lens for the Rebel. Of course, I’ll end up getting a macro eventually.

As G says, now I am Paparazzi!

Jul

7

Terror Attack

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Yay! A terrorist plot was foiled. I guess the fighting over in Iraq hasn’t exactly kept the terrorists from attacking the USA?

FBI disrupts New York City tunnel plot - Yahoo! News:

Authorities have disrupted planning by foreign terrorists for an attack on New York City tunnels, two law enforcement officials said Friday.

FBI agents monitoring Internet chat rooms used by extremists learned in recent months of the plot to strike a blow at the city’s economy by destroying vital transportation networks, one official said.

Jul

6

Email Receipts

Filed Under Work | Leave a Comment

I know as a sales person the idea is that by keeping you in my head, I am going to be more likely to buy from you. It might help to think of me less as a “sale” and more as a person. The constant emails with Return Receipts and phone calls can get annoying.

Now I am hesitant to push your product as it means it would just encourage more of the same. In the past sales people didn’t go away just because we caved and purchase the product. They kept hammering me to “see how things are going” to suggest additional things for us to buy. :(

At least my boss doesn’t have to get all this stuff too. It makes it easier to sit down and ask questions.

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