Well, it looks like I’m going to Defcon this year…and on the company’s dime as well.

:)

Booyah. (emphasis mine)

So, Howard Dean is getting some flak over the fact that he characterized the Republicans as mostly, “white and Christian”.

This irks me.

The only way I’d get upset about this is (pay attention here) if the Republican party weren’t mostly white and Christian.

What’s next — the Chinese are good at Math? Blasphemy. A lot of young Indians in the United States are in IT? Racist.

What kind of idiotic society punishes people for stating the obvious? Uh-oh — rhetorical question. The answer is clearly, “ours”.

I came across an awesome blog today via Jason’s Delicious Page. It’s run by a guy named Steve Pavlina, and he’s highly adept at covering certain topics that are of interest to a lot of us — namely health, productivity, efficiency, motivation, etc.

The post that settled it for me was this post on how to become an early riser. It’s an absolutely amazing description of how to get the most out of life by optimizing your sleep schedule. It’s a very logical approach to the topic that I’m quite sure is every bit as effective as he describes. Hearing it described simply made sense, and it’s no wonder that it resonated with so many.

Anyway, he’s got a ton of other posts ranging from trust, to will-power, to “acceptance”. I highly suggest you add it to your list of content to digest; this guy’s got some interesting ideas and a gift for expressing them.

Steve Pavlina’s Blog

Anyone find it odd that they decided to use a Fedora for this picture?

Well, I’m thoroughly enthused. I was listening to a Podcast from the CEO of Audible.com, and he casually mentioned that many of the selections that are available on the site are available on the iTunes Music Store.

This is huge.

I have been having major issues interfacing with Audible.com and have gone so far as to cancel my subscription. This development with iTunes completely sucks the pain out of not being able to use Audible.com — which is an awesome resource.

So yeah, I’ve already purchased a decent amount of great content I was wanting to get from Audible — stuff like, “The World Is Flat”, by Thomas L. Friedman.

Good stuff.

Well, it seems my buddy Ken was right about Apple’s move to x86. I was equating this move with opening OS X to all PCs, and as such didn’t think it would happen. Turns out, it did happen, but they still didn’t open the OS.

Oh well; As Ken has pointed out, it’s a step in the right direction and the hacks are bound to be forthcoming.

Well, del.icio.us has updated their servers, and they’re responding much better now. I was curious as to what they went to in terms of platform choice and decided to take a harmless peek:

SSH — OpenSSH 3.9p1 Debian-1ubuntu2 (protocol 2.0) HTTP — Apache httpd 1.3.33 ((Debian GNU/Linux) modgzip/1.3.26.1a modperl/1.29)

Interesting; a cursory glance reveals that the front end for del.icio.us is running on Ubuntu Linux. Rock on, Debian.

I can’t believe Nadal beat Federer. The only possible explanation is that Federer must have been hungover on ambrosia. Either that, or those on Olympus ordered him to lose due to the rising suspicions of the mortals.

Oh well, now I want Nadal to win; it’d rock if he went all the way in his first appearance. I hope I can find an XM channel that’s playing the final.

I’ve always had a very uneasy feeling about Bluetooth security, and it seems my instincts have been validated. According to this article, a new technique exists that allows an attacker to force “secured” Bluetooth devices to re-pair with each other. During the pairing process the security can be compromised by allowing the attacker to pair with the victim’s system.

This is why I’ve always kept my Bluetooth disabled on my desktop system. I’ve had a bad feeling about this technology for some reason. I suppose a lot of the reason was a healthy distrust of security in new technology, but part of it felt more primal than that. I just knew there were major problems with this particular functionality; the notion of having my system sitting there with an unproven air daemon on my box was highly unsettling.

Oh, well, hopefully they’ll get the bugs worked out and Bluetooth will end up being halfway secure. It’s got a lot to offer, so I look forward to seeing it become more prolific.

Well, I finally joined the Electronic Freedom Foundation. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while and I’m happy to have finally made good on the commitment.

I’m of the opinion that one’s right to bitch is directly proportional to how much they are doing to help change things, i.e. those who don’t vote can’t complain about who’s in office. In flow with this idea, I’ve decided to start contributing to a few select organizations that are actively trying to tackle the issues that matter to me.

Make no mistake — I don’t consider this doing something, but I do consider it better than doing nothing. I see it as at least offering some help to those who are fighting since I cannot currently for whatever reason. I think letting these organizations know that people care (while simultaneously assisting financially) is important.

Perhaps one day I’ll be able to help in more direct, satisfying ways, but for now I’ll settle for this. At any rate, I do encourage you guys to find a cause you believe in and get behind it as well.