Older blog entries for gregorrothfuss (starting at number 27)

about a decade ago, i set up a yahoo email account as a spam catcher, and have used it for all sorts of registrations over the years. the time had come to finally ditch that account, between the pathetic spam filtering and the annoying user interface, but how to get all the emails i still cared about out without having to pay ransom? freepops to the rescue.

i find it remarkable that yahoo is so insecure about their product that they feel the need to lock-in users. in contrast, the superior gmail offers free pop access, so there is no lock-in. it is about time the industry holds yahoo to task over this nonsense.

in celebration of the new annotated google maps, i have created two maps that show your taxes at work:

• Top 10 USDA farm subsidy recipients in the US
• Top 20 EU CAP farm subsidy recipients in the UK

the top recipient of EU CAP farm subsidies in the UK got $700 million, the top recipient of USDA farm subsidies in the US got $541 million.

starting today, i am a software engineer at google as a result of this acquisition. obviously, this is exciting news. more later. i won't be working on google flat, although we totally need this :)

you may have noticed that this blog is far less active than it used to be. i blame del.icio.us. the opportunity to write pithy one-liners instead of rambling posts is just too attractive. if you want to enjoy those, either join my network (preferred, i like to know who enjoys my stuff) or subscribe to my del.icio.us feed, or both.

i also went ahead and added tags on here. you can now read all posts tagged with future, or even combinations like events with photos. i also blend in the appropriate del.icio.us results at the bottom.

if you are feed-challenged, you can also follow the latest del.icio.us links on the side bar on my blog. otherwise, i recommend google reader.

sarah gave me these:

• economist subscription
• beer fest tickets
• all of tufte's work
• frakkin toasters tshirt

today, my feed reader died. it only showed me an empty window where my feeds should be:

so i tried google reader again. amazingly, it felt more responsive than RSS Bandit. my archive of read posts is in the thousands. i like having access to them, and often use them in searches. this puts a heavy toll on memory usage:

what hope is there for .net if an application written by a microsoft employee is such a memory hog, and gets its clock cleaned by an online application? none.

go read this article on elephant violence. it has the qualities of a seminal piece on cross-species relations. consider this statement from a ugandan researcher who grew up in a war zone:

I started looking again at what has happened among the Acholi and the elephants. I saw that it is an absolute coincidence between the two. All these kids who have grown up with their parents killed - no fathers, no mothers, only children looking after them. They form these roaming, violent, destructive bands. It's the same thing that happens with the elephants. Just like the male war orphans, they are wild, completely lost. Most people are scared of showing that kind of anthropomorphism. But coming from me it doesn't sound like I'm inventing something. It's there. People know it's there. Some might think that the way I describe the elephant attacks makes the animals look like people. But people are animals.

now we can either discuss the semantics of sentience as we recognize our peer species, hopefully before it is too late, or we can adopt a new term that is not laden with meaning that needs to be repurposed first. sophonts works for me: why look at far away stars when we can find peers right under our nose?

update: another hurdle cleared

sitting in Rapid City Airport, using their complementary wifi, i am wondering whether there will be a renaissance of the regional airport. hassle-free checkin, short lines, an absence of constant "security announcements" and the quiet of a place that does not want to be a mall make you feel as close to flying a private jet as reasonably possible. a new generation of planes and a departure from the hub concept might make this a reality in the next few years.

wired is back. after years of being lost in the dotcom woods, i had written them off, but their nextfest taught me better today. i will be thinking about the exhibits for a long time: a wonderful departure from the daily stream of bad news out of the religio-political corner. watch my linkstream for more in the coming days. in the meantime, here are some of my favorite exhibits:

a trip to the FIT museum with its thousands of fashion pieces from 500 years made me wonder why we can't have it all? where is the startup that lets me pick whatever i like from a catalog that spans the centuries, takes my measurements and then produces the garments in a fully automated factory? failing that, how about leveraging that same labor that now brings us crappy jeans? a catalog so vast my require some recommendation technology to help me make picks, too. update: seefeld points to coco myles. wired reports on a 3D scanner for taking body measurements.