Narrative Paralysis
Yesterday on the subway I watched a man write “KEY INSIGHTS” at the top of a page in his Moleskine, and then just stare at the page unmoving for the next six stops. He hadn’t budged when I stepped off...
View ArticleIt’s Not Just For Lolcats
So, this is pretty awesome. How does Wells Fargo secure your communications channel? With animated gifs. Ladies and gentlemen, Wells Fargo’s security. And, not to put to fine a point on it, their...
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No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service
If you own a public establishment, consider putting one of these near the door. The keynote file it comes from is right here, under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license, and you’re welcome to use it as often as you...
View ArticleRaising A Revolution
I had a long conversation with the very excellent people of Samantha Blackmon’s “Not Your Mama’s Gamer” podcast the other day; I get rolling at around the half-hour mark. They’re quite flattering about...
View ArticleAll Scrollbars Are Fleeting
“For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph – a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the...
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Lightweight Notepad In A Bookmark
So, this is a cute trick that’s been making the rounds: In Firefox, right-click your bookmarks bar and pick “new bookmark”. Call it “Quick Notepad”, and in the Location box, put:...
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How Does Anyone Work In These Conditions
A little while ago, the espresso machine in our office broke down. This doomsday scenario is, and I say this without the least bit of hyperbole, the most catastrophically dire situation that can exist...
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Crypto Is Not A Panacea
I was going to write this to an internal mailing list, following this week’s PRISM excitement, but I’ve decided to put it here instead. It was written (and cribbed from other stuff I’ve written...
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Algorithmically Marginalized
I wouldn’t have thought that mathematics or signal processing would have a cultural bent, but I just sat through a conference call where everyone was reasonably clear except for one guy, with a...
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Stand In The Place Where You Work
Before they were called cubicles, the prefabricated office furniture we all now take despondently for granted was part of an idea called an “Action Office”. Though they’ve apparently lost their way at...
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Citation Needed
I may revisit this later. Consider this a late draft. I’m calling this done. “Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan...
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A Glass Half Broken
A friend of mine has called me a glass-half-broken kind of guy. My increasingly venerable Nokia N9 has been getting squirrelly for a few months, and since it finally decided its battery was getting on...
View ArticleSaying Goodbye
My father, David Hoye, died on Sunday at about 5:30 in the morning. He was seventy years old; he’d been married to my mom for the last forty-five. He had his own ideas about what was right and how...
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Optics
Well, we have to get back to making jokes at some point. I bought some glasses from the internet. It didn’t go exactly as I’d hoped.
View ArticleWhat Better Place Than Here, What Better Time Than Now
I was in an Ikea last weekend, when their background music system started playing Rage Against The Machine. I was actually paralyzed for a moment. I found myself looking around, thinking “Am… Am I just...
View ArticleThis Is My Bag
I bought a new bag. I’ve come to the conclusion that I shouldn’t buy anything in the wintertime; I spend too much time indoors and it’s bad for my head. After a while I start believing that I should...
View ArticleVocoder Duet
You can think of them as the Fry and Laurie of malevolent synthetic intelligences that are going to murder you. In a fortuitous coincidence, this video – a collection of communications from SHODAN,...
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