13 Jul 2009 MarkAtwood   » (Master)

Randoms

I am amused and glad to see that free public performances of the "Taming the Shrew" are being performed in Fremont, using the Troll as an ersatz stage.

I was sad to learn that Circus Contraption is closing up shop.

Why am I awake at 3 in the morning? The IM roster mocks me, as I look for someone to chat with. Away statuses are not to be trusted.

Amazon MP3 is a dangerous thing to have a few clicks away, to someone of a completionist bent. As I buy music from them, I mentally add features to the site that would encourage me to buy more. I wonder if I can make this skill generic. And would I want to? Thinking I might have a skill at commerce web site design with an eye towards optimizing it for increasing sales is a challenge to my identity...

Why are most online performances of electric string marred with an electronic percussion beat? The metronome is a teaching aid, not an instrument.

I've not posted much, recently. Not tech, nor personal musics, or even my journal. My life continues, likely to again become more public.

I just activated my eTrade RSA token. I now have 3 of the things to keep track of. That one, a Verisign PIP device that secures my paypal and ebay accounts, and a "Secure Computing Safeword(tm) Platinum" that secures the Sun VPN. They all basically do the same thing, generating a One Time Password based on a clock and a (presumably securely stored) key. Of the 3 designs, I approve the most of the PIP. It's exceptionally cheap to manufacture, the math of the resync trick allows it to not require a super-accurate local clock, and is very light. The Safeword is the worst, being big and heavy, and provably broken.

I went to Sierra's party on Saturday night. She was so anxious that it would turn out poorly or poorly attended. And yet it went great, and many interesting people came. I got more than a little overstimulated, and spent some time just sitting in the corner contemplating the flowery fractal artwork that she had painted on her ceiling.

Some of the people I know write the most amazingly introspective and philosophical articles. Finding a series of such articles is a joy, and will eat hours of time.

Syndicated 2009-07-13 10:06:06 from Mark Atwood

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!