Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Month: July 2013

  • Trust in Info-Infrastructure

    James Fallows has an interesting piece in the Atlantic called Why NSA Surveillance Will Be More Damaging Than You Think discussing trust in the US for the info-infrastructure of the Internet is part of why we have Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. As that trust gets eroded by the behavior of the US government, users may […]

  • Image Search

    Google has a cool tool, Google Images, which can search images. Provide it text, and the images returned will have related metadata or page information to your search. Now, for the really cool part, you can search based on another image. Click the camera icon in the search bar and another box appear. Enter a […]

  • Book Review: Attila: King of the Huns: The Man and the Myth

    Attila: King of the Huns: The Man and the Myth by Patrick Howarth My rating: 3 of 5 stars A woman asked me about a quarter into this book, “What is the one thing about Attila that I should care?” Now that I have finished, I still do not know the answer. Go read about […]

  • Happy System Administrator Day!

    This deadtroll video has been around for quite a long time… Last week I heard how Youtube does automatic closed captioning. So I was curious and turned it on for this video. How terrible!

  • Missing Photos?

    Several (most) of the photos I have on this site are actually hosted on Flickr. If they are missing, today (July 25th, 2013 7pm to 1am), then the below is why. We wanted to give you a heads up that Flickr will be undergoing planned maintenance this coming Thursday, July 25, from 4pm to 10pm PDT. […]

  • The Heavy Denzel

    One of the early commercials for the movie Flight starring Denzel Washington featured the song What Makes a Good Man? by the Heavy. Fast forward a few months to today, I heard the same song during a commercial and looked up to see Denzel in another movie called 2 Guns. I am familiar with the […]

  • Review: The Souls of Black Folk

    The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois My rating: 4 of 5 stars I read this during the George Zimmerman trial for his shooting of Trayvon Martin. What disappoints me while reading this book is how the central problems of that time still somewhat exist. Sure, the overall is much better. But this […]

  • Review: Howl’s Moving Castle

    Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones My rating: 4 of 5 stars I enjoy Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli movies. I first saw the movie on video and again recently during a Studio Ghibli series by the local independent movie theater. So when my Kindle showed an advertisement to buy this book for $1.99, […]

  • Algorithmic Random

    If you are out on the Internet or around academics long enough, then you will run across the rant about random designed by humans not being really random. It might be the iTunes shuffle. It might be random sampling of an experiment. It might be a complaint of you using the word for how you […]

  • Bad Guesses

    Usually the best way to guess which technology product will be successful is to bet against the one I like. Betamax, Apple, Linux, Picasa. So it surprises me Barnes & Noble are giving up on the Nook since I went Kindle. I’m not usually in this position. Then again, I was on the brink of going […]