brainwagon

Connecticut state senator Andrea Stillman thinks that you should pay a $250 fine for using your cell phone at a gas station because she heard their might be a chance that your cell phone could cause a fire. Of course, there is no evidence that even one fire has been caused by cellphones, and experimental […]

A couple of days ago I commented on the whole podcastalley hullaballo and the role that popularity plays in the actions of blogger/podcasters. You can go back to here if you missed it all, or just wanted to review. My point was really that pursuing popularity (or more specifically, superficial measures of popularity) was kind […]

Well, it’s one o’clock in the morning on Monday. If everything was right with the world, I probably would be at the Oakland Airport awaiting the arrival of my wife and son on their scheduled America West flight. After all, I checked the flight information before I left for the airport, and all seemed well. […]

One of my (admittedly many) pet peeves is when law enforcement overreacts to a situation. Today’s example comes fro Clark County Kentucky, where an 18 year old student has been arrested for writing a story about a zombie attack on a high school. He claims that he was merely writing a short story, and that […]

Damnit, when I was living in Oregon, I could put up with this crappy weather, but I live in California now. Can’t we just call it quits on the rain and have a couple of hundred days of consecutive sunshine? I’m tired of puddles damnit, I think my webbed toes are coming back. And what’s […]

The Register reports that major music labels are trying to get music retailers to increase prices. What a good idea! Let’s make it even more costly for individuals to acquire music, that’s sure to drive down the rates of copyright infringement! Seriously, what are they thinking? The problem appears to be related to Apple’s iTunes […]

Oddly enough, I find myself agreeing with Dave on this matter: Gorman doesn’t have much respect for blogs or Google. In my career, I’ve done a fair amount of library research. I’ve tried to find books related to esoteric topics by hunting through card catalogs, pouring over stacks and generally just browsing. It’s not a […]

Mark Hughes reacts in much the same way (but far more entertainingly) than I have to the cheerleading that Scoble is doing for his corporate puppet masters. The best part: Robert, you haven’t been fired for what you say because you’re not a “journalist”, you’re not any kind of respected voice, you’re just a dancing […]

I’ve been interested in codes and cryptography for quite some time. I find them at the fascinating intersection of history, mathematics and computer science: all topics that I like to read about and experiment with. Let me give you a basic crypto lesson, with a moral at the end. Let’s say that all your messages […]

Michael Malone has an article which has been going around the blog circuit, hypothesizing that there may be a whiff of decay about Microsoft, that the Redmond empire may have chinks in its armor. Hey, it’s a popular idea, at least among the Open Source beatniks that I normally hang with. But we all know […]

I’m not paranoid. Damn, I just realized that by saying it, I probably am, but holy-land-o-mercy. Have people gone completely insane? A high school in Sutter California has ordered all students to wear mandatory RFID tracking tags. The badges introduced at Brittan Elementary School on Jan. 18 rely on the same radio frequency and scanner […]

Today I was scanning my list of blogline feeds, and noticed an update to The QuotationsPage, which included this quote by Hansell B. Duckett: What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to. A nice quotation, and one that I agree with, but perhaps with a different spin that was intended. To illustrate, […]

Courtesy of I Love Radio.org, read this remarkable study: News Flash: Listeners Hate Commercials. How surprising, that people resent being pummelled by twenty or more minutes of advertising every hour. Whenever I listen to real radio, it isn’t boredom that kills me (I’m only wounded by boredom) but just the irritation of having any kind […]

Slashdot is running an article which suggests that the FreeBSD core team is running a contest to design a new logo to supplant the ubiquitous BSD daemon that has long symbolized Berkeley Unix and its derivatives. Some people don’t seem to understand it, and now the world must seemingly work to accomodate these knuckle-draggers. Sigh. […]

One thing I didn’t mention on today’s podcast was the Super Bowl. I understand it’s supposed to happen sometime today. While listening to some of the ramp up to it on the radio over the past few days, I’m beginning to realize just how pathetic a sporting event it has become. You might as well […]