Wizzywig: Portrait of a Serial Hacker by Ed Piskor

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is a commentary on the sad state our country has been in since the 70s and 80s when it comes to computer crime. Although there should always be consequences for skirting the law we have often taken it a bit too far. This graphic novel was sad to read in the wake of Aaron Schwartz’ suicide when threatened by law enforcement.

Back in August I finally had some time to do some things I’d been wanting to do with my Snap-in-Time btrfs program for a while now. First of all, I finally added the weekly code. So now my snapshots are cleaned up every three days and then every other week. Next on the docket is quarterly cleanups followed up yearly cleanups. Second, the big thing I’d wanted to do for a while now: come up with unit tests! Much more robust than my debug code and testing scripts, it helped me find corner cases. If you look at my git logs you can see that it helped me little-by-little figure out just what I needed to do as well as when my “fixes” broke other things. Yay! My first personal project with regression testing!

How did we get to the point where certain singing voices are racialized? Everyone I’ve spoken to (and me too) was surprised to discover (a few years ago) that Adelle was not black. Now it’s happening all over again with Meghan Trainor and “All about that Bass”. I’d heard the song at the gym and looked for the music video, when Ms Trainor appeared I was shocked. As was my wife when she walked into the living room. I’ve polled a bunch of others in the office and they were all shocked as well.

I don’t know if this is above average, normal, or below average for a 2.5 year old, but the following exchange left me impressed yesterday:

Me: I am married to your mom. So, your maternal grandmother is my mother-in-law. Who is my father-in-law?

Scarlett: Maternal grandfather!

I also heard that while she was in NYC she correctly surmised that my wife’s grandfather was my mother-in-law’s father.

A guy in a wheelchair with a hook for a hand is in a bad spot.

-D.D. from work (who is wheelchair bound, but does not have hooks for hands)

Interviewed for MyLinuxRig.com about my desktop setup and Linux history. Press Coverage of Baltimore Comic-Con 2014

And working on my graduate degree.

April:

Civilization V (7 hrs): Met Dan in Mesa Bros; Waiting in Lefties Game

May:

Civilization V (11 hrs): More of the multiplayer games.

June:

Civ V (3 hrs): More multiplayer games.

Super Meat Boy (30 min): I played a few levels until it began to get too hard for me. It is a very well-designed game, but I was never that good at platformers. Really, I just stuck to Mario and Sonic growing up. The others were often too hard for me; at times even Mario and Sonic were too much. I don’t think I ever beat a Sonic game although with one of them (3 or S&K) I used to always get to the final Robotnick.

It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

More Scarlett at the beach! This time in NYC!

It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post. For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

Scarlett at the Beach in Florida and my dinner at Universal Studios.

Strip Tease by Carl Hiaasen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve listened to somewhere between four and five dozen audiobooks (used to be an Audible subscriber) and the voice acting/narration on this book is definitely in my top three, if not in the top spot itself. Although the narrator slipped a bit in the last chapter with Garcia sounding a bit like Chad, it was otherwise an amazing performance. The narrator did something like 15 different, distinct voices. It’s not always necessary and it’s distracting if done poorly, but for this book it really brought something special. I’ve been a huge opponent of those who have used ebook DRM to prevent book readers from autoreading books to the sight-impaired. This book is a perfect example of why they shouldn’t prevent sight-impaired people from having a machine read a book. That’s just someone reading a book. It’s nothing special. But a performance, like in this recording of Striptease, that’s something worth paying for and something MANY years away when it comes to machine reading.