So I&8217;m writing this from a computer lab in Accra; it&8217;s nicely modern, with about 50 pentium 4-2000 machines, but it&8217;s about 1500ms to anything really interesting on the Internet backbone and the speed&8217;s not that fabulous. But it w...
Oh boy. I&8217;m two days away from hopping on a plane to Accra, Ghana to go teach kids about science, technology, and the Internet. Much of our planning is very last minute as we&8217;re trying to slap together a curriculum, local sponsorship, etc....
I would like to thank President Bush for his efforts to expand democracy around the world. He&8217;s done a really incredible job, but not in the way that he may have anticipated. In his efforts to found democracies on the other side of the globe, he...
The following is the poem &8220;Ithaca&8221; by the famous Greek poet Cavafy, in its translation by Rae Dalven, the original Greek, and also with my own horribly-bastardized pronunciation guide for the Greek. Note that the translation is not line-bas...
I wrote the following letter to my pastor Brian Emmet at Covenant Ministries1, in response to his latest newsletter2, which decried permitting homosexual marriages....
The middle east is pretty damn annoying. Specifically, the whole Israel / Palestine deal. I mean, it feels like there&8217;s good evidence that there are a very large number of totally reasonable people on both sides who are being totally ignored by...
I&8217;ve recently employed a very simple mechanism for spam control. So far, it&8217;s been quite effective and required the installation of NO new software, tunable Baysian filters, or anything. So I thought I&8217;d share it with you....
This message was posted on October 27, 2003 to a mailing list in response to a post that claimed that IPv6 would be widespread by 2005 due to an IPv4 address shortage. Given that 2005 has come without IPv6 having taken off, this post feels vindicated...
Unicode1 is just about the coolest thing since sliced bread. It&8217;s the kind of thing after which you wonder how things possibly worked previously. The idea is simple: one character set can represent any character in any language. There are a few...
I&8217;ve learned a lot in the last two years about what it means to be professional. Here are some of the things I&8217;ve learned; I hope you can learn them without having to be the fool I am! Please note that I&8217;m not smart enough to actually...
Over the last few days a subtle error on the part of our home&8217;s gateway to the Internet rendered Google1 inaccessible. I was in agony. I was unable to write reports and actually felt rather stupid without it. I then realized I had effectively un...
Just now, I did something horribly mean. I ignored a nice person on AIM that was having a delightful chat with me. And \BAM\, I ignored them, never to see a message from them again. I rebooted my computer and any and all traces of them were removed....
Looking at the great inventions and awesome creations of art that humankind has collectively produced, I can&8217;t help but notice a common theme: the need for leisure. Leisure here not meaning, sitting around and doing nothing at all, but the need...