• Biz,  Quotes

    Tuesday rapid fire

    December 12, 2006 /
    • Art of Innovation
    • A very good analysis of the ISG report, specifically

      The risk of surging any troops is summed up in the Sixth and Seventh Books of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. I refer to the story of the Sicilian Expedition, in which the Athenians invade Sicily in support of allies there. But as problems mount with the operation, more and more reinforcements are sent, so that the consequences of failure rise from the merely serious to the monumental.

      Which is something to bear in mind.

    • Ouch
    • RentGlass.com – Lenses in this case
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  • Environmentalism,  Quotes,  Religion

    It’s been a little while

    December 7, 2006 /

    Sorry for the light blogging.

    Periodically my mind wonders back to the Mathew Paris essay “Nature Does Not Exist“, where he states that there are few meaningful differences in application or effect between religion and science. Then my thoughts turned to Alan Paulk’s line “Religion is first century technology” and how that tracks with Robert Kaplan’s assertion that Islam is an excellent religion for hard times (paraphrase).

    Then I think the original (to me) thought that technology does not replace spirituality, or compete with it either, but merely pushes it back to another level of abstraction. This leads me to think that the modern conception of a distinction between the religious and the secular is probably new and not meaningful.

    And that’s what has been in the back of my head for the past few days.

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  • Quotes

    Lines of the moment

    December 5, 2006 /

    From Freakwater’s song “One Big Union”

    Don’t the truth look bad up next to a pretty lie?

    and

    False hope is the seed in the field of greed that we must plow.

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  • Crime,  Tech

    We all knew cell phones could spy on you…

    December 5, 2006 /

    Now it seems to be confirmed

    The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone’s microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

    And if the FBI can do it, talented hackers can do it too. One can be tracked (more or less) by a cell phone too.

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  • Photography

    Rambling on an Autumn night

    December 2, 2006 /

    I just posted the pictures I took on Thursday night, I dubbed it Rambling on an Autumn Night. The first few are from the Lenox Borders parking lot, and the others are from a bridge overlooking the 75-85 connector. There is a slight shake to all of them due to the slow shutter speed needed and motion of the bridge as cars passed (albeit not many at midnight on a Thursday. For some reason slightly blurry photos look better in my harsh black and white scheme.

    Click on the above link or any of the photos below to see more.

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  • Photography

    Does anyone want to buy my camera

    December 1, 2006 /

    It’s a lovely Olympus C8080, I bought it about 16 months ago and took very good care of it. A detailed review of it is here http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympusc8080wz/

    It’s got a five time optical zoom, and comes with

    • a tripod
    • a charger
    • wireless remote
    • two and a half gigs of memory (two 1-gig cards and one half gig card)
    • camera bag
    • lens polarizer
    • instructions/manual (I still have the original packaging)
    • Conversion lens adapter (CLA-8)
    • 1.4x Tele Conversion Lens (TCon-14D)

    All that can be yours for the reasonable price of $450. I thought I would offer it here before I put it on Ebay. FYI – the reason it’s for sale is because I got a digital SLR. The Olympus still works wonderfully.

    Let me know.

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