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Another reason to keep my degree from the University of Colorado a secret
It’s not so much that people at CU smoked pot, skied and climbed rocks, or that I have a problem with any of these activities in and of themselves, it’s just that from what I could tell, that’s pretty much ALL many of them ever did, professors included. While the grad students were, in some […]
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The Great Hudson Arc: A 250-mile-wide mystery
(Click for a larger view.) It’s nice to find out that there are still mysteries left in this world, let alone ones that are visible from space. On the southeast corner of Hudson Bay, the coast line traces a near perfect arc, roughly concentric on another ring of islands in the bay. So, what caused […]
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Problems with video resolution resetting after wake in Vista?
Ah, the fun with Vista continues. For the longest, most infuriating time, my screen settings would completely reset after my Dell Latitude D620 laptop would come out of sleep. It appears that the problem was with the Intel integrated graphics drivers. Is that Microsoft’s fault for doing something dumb in Vista, or Intel’s fault? I […]
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Dammit Campbells, what am I missing?
“Mmm, mmm, Campbell’s Soup–Possibilities.” That infernal commercials jingo has infected my mind and torments my soul. There is nowhere I can hide from its taunting refrain, nothing I can do to stop it from springing forth into my consciousness, uninvited, mocking me. Soup. Possibilities. What the bloody hell am I missing? For years I’ve just […]
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In defense of Google’s Street View, and thoughts on Internet privacy
Quick Summary. Google’s street view is simply a representation of reality on a specific day, and they have not highlighted any aspect of the dataset, and furthermore the dataset is comprehensive. Given the mapping between reality and the dataset that is inherent in something like Street View, one’s privacy on the day your photo was […]
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USB driver software for Motorola RAZR
If you want to connect your RAZR to your windows computer with a USB cable, at the very least you will need the following drivers. They will let you connect to the phone as a modem, and will allow the phone to be charged by the computer. It’s the first thing you should install should […]
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“Why I let my 9-year-old ride the subway alone”
One of the things I admire about my friends Ken, Scott and Dom is that they all seem to be the kind of balanced people who will raise kids who will be sensitive and thoughful, yet also not neurotic or afraid of taking risks. I don’t know if that’s as rare as I fear it is, […]
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A tax tip for people with online investments
If you use E*TRADE or Ameritrade, be warned that they don’t provide correct cost basis information to online tax software such as TurboTax. I tell you this after I just spent four hours fixing the useless data they provided. However, despite being completely useless, they are listed in TurboTax as providing investment tax information, so […]
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A father and son talk politics
From a recent instant message chat with my father. I don’t know why I find this amusing. I think it’s how it ends. The only background you need to know, to protect the innocent, is that my father is a life long Democrat. He tried to raise me right, so don’t hold him accountable for […]
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Interesting story on high-stakes ship salvage
Photo courtesy of the US Coast Guard. In the absence of anything interesting I can think of to write about the few things I understand, and an inability to write intelligently about the interesting things that are actually happening (e.g. the present collapse of our financial system), I am not above just jangling a shiny […]