evil

By anders pearson 13 May 2001

cool. apparently there’s a professor at columbia who studies evil:

say it ain't so

By anders pearson 06 May 2001

actor Robert Blake appears to be under investigation for the murder of his wife.

normally i’d give him the benefit of the doubt. but anyone who’s seen Lost Highway knows that Blake is the creepiest human being in the world. is this the face of an innocent man?

XinT

By anders pearson 01 May 2001

Q: what do you get when you mix together the following?

• one Z-80 microprocessor (state of the art… in 1976. 3.7MHz. 8 registers. 2K of RAM)
• about 20 bucks worth of misc. electronic parts
• 2 antennae
• a few hundred hours of time that really ought to be spent on more important things, but…
• 4 engineering students with just enough knowledge to be dangerous
• a love of obscure musical instruments
• and a unhealthy desire to produce lots of loud, fucked up noises that will annoy the hell out of anyone in a ten block radius.

guard your identity

By anders pearson 29 Apr 2001

i always thought it was silly that most schools use students’ social security numbers as keys for all their databases. i know that at columbia at least, you have to give your SSN to register for or drop classes, pay your tuition, get financial aid, get a transcript, and just about everything else that you might want to do. it always bothered me. what disturbed me even more was that no one else ever seemed at all bothered by it. “what’s the big deal? it’s just a number.” is the unspoken logic.

well, here’s one reason you might want to think twice before handing over your SSN to the next person who asks for it.

what’s really bad though is how common that the SSN is used for identification. it was never intended for that. early versions of SSN cards explicitly stated on back that they were “not to be used for identification purposes.” the desire for a unique id for every person in the country is understandable from the standpoint of the organizations that need to track large numbers of users but there have got to be better ways. there is just no reason that SSN’s should be considered adequate for identification. they’re no longer safe; literally hundreds of organizations from the government to credit card companies to schools know any given person’s SSN. it’s relatively easy to find out someone’s SSN (dumpster diving, anyone?). yet it’s still treated like some kind of secret key.

also, from a privacy standpoint, unique identification numbers for citizens are a somewhat frightening concept. it creeps me out anyway.

fix

By anders pearson 29 Apr 2001

heather spotted and fixed a little bug in my markov code that was probably responsible for some of its tendency to get stuck in little loops. nice evidence that open-source is good for everyone involved. thanks heather.

(and, because i pay attention to my HTTP_REFERER’s, i know why she was going through markov’s internals with a fine-tooth comb. but i’ll let her keep it a secret until she’s ready to share. ;)

life without <table>'s

By anders pearson 29 Apr 2001

little redesign. this time, i have completely removed thraxil’s reliance on <table> tags for layout. it’s all CSS now. still a little buggy since i don’t have IE around to test with, but that should all be cleaned up pretty soon.

literacy

By anders pearson 27 Apr 2001

i’m almost entirely done with my undergraduate education now. pretty much all i have left is one homework assignment, one term paper, and one final. for the last month or so i haven’t really had time to catch my breath with all the projects i was working on for my classes. a few weeks ago i was suffering from a particularly bad bout of insomnia and found myself up really late too tired to really do any work but knowing that i wouldn’t be able to fall asleep for a few more hours. about then, i realized that i had almost no fiction at all on my bookshelf here at school. i had about two novels, neither of which i felt like reading for the 20th time or so right at the moment, amongst 30 or so computer, math, and electronics textbooks (which aren’t terribly appealing bedtime reading either).

so i went online and ordered a bunch of paperbacks. i grabbed a couple collections of HP Lovecraft stories (tuck had recently reminded me how intricate and immersive his writing is), willian s. burroughs’ Junky (because i hadn’t read it yet), Blood Sugar by nicole blackman (because she rocks), and the Pit Dragon trilogy (Dragon’s Blood, Heart’s Blood, and A Sending of Dragons) by jane yolen.

the pit dragon trilogy is worth an extra mention. they’re children’s books. or “young adult” level i guess would be more accurate. i read them for the first time when i was in 4th grade or so and absolutely loved them. re-reading them now, i’m happy to see that they really are just good books.

over the course of my book-buying binge, i realized how infrequently i’d been able to actually read for pleasure over the last few years. when you’re in school and having to read hundreds of pages of dense engineering textbooks every week, the last thing you want to do with your spare time is read more. so now i’m really looking forward to my soon to be “graduated” state. the first thing i’m going to do is start reading everything that i missed out on in the last few years.

synchronicity

By anders pearson 25 Apr 2001

this morning i was awoken from a dream about riding on top of a train through germany by mimi calling from berlin. neat how that works.

heat sinks

By anders pearson 19 Apr 2001

ok, here’s my idea for a product that will surely make me millions: personal heat sinks. the ultimate warm weather accessory. functionality is identical to heatsinks used in computers but applied to people. you just get some chunks of aluminum that are flat on one side with various fins sticking out on the other and sew them into garments so that the flat sides are pressed against skin with as much contact as possible. this maximizes surface area, allowing for as much heat as possible to be transferred away from the body.

venture capital, anyone?

want

By anders pearson 17 Apr 2001

heather and i were chatting the other night and she kept asking me what i was looking for, what i wanted. i couldn’t really come up with a satisfactory answer at the time. the question’s been rolling around in my head for the last few days this is the best answer i can come up with for now.