After a lot of procrastination, I've finally upgraded The Daily Parker to dasBlog 2.3.
Nothing outwardly has changed, but apparently the developer community has fixed a ton of bugs and, more helpfully, upgraded to .NET 2.0. I don't have time at the moment to go through the entire feature list, but I'm sure there are a couple in there I'll use.
Mainly I was tired of having an item on my to-do list since October 2008. (I said "a lot of procrastination.")
Ahem. No, RoboCop isn't pointing a gun at me. However, Avanade's personal blog policy strongly recommends that I post the following, and I happen to agree:
Avanade does not control or endorse the content, messages or information found in any public Weblog, and therefore specifically disclaims any liability with regard to this Weblog and any actions resulting from my participation in any Weblog.
Also, I am not authorized in any way to speak on Avanade's behalf.
This applies not only to The Daily Parker but also to re-posts, as for example the automatic content pull from The Daily Parker into my Facebook profile.
We will now resume your regularly-scheduled program, already in progress.
Or: How I learned to stop being irrational and give up a piece of history.
I'm about to mail (yes, use postal mail) a termination order to Earthlink, with whom I have had an account since they acquired Mindspring, with whom I had an account since they acquired Pipeline. That means I've had my Mindspring email address since 1998 (I got the Pipeline address in 1997, but Mindspring converted everyone over), and I've kept it as my spam account since I set up my own email server in 2000.
So, I'm feeling a little twinge. It's a piece of history, a connection to the days of dial-up and modems, of Outlook 1997 and Pine. It's also $7 a month, and every last scrap of email it receives with the exception of Earthlink payment receipts is junk. I've kept it because it seemed like a trivial expense to remain connected with the early days of the Internet. But you know what? The Wayback Machine does that too, and it's free.
Sed fugit interea fugit irreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore. Literally: Time flees while we hold on to insignificant details.
I had hoped, as I hoped about Post #1,000, to write something lengthy and truly self-indulgent.
This will disappoint many readers, but I don't have time to do that. Instead, just a quick update: even though Inner Drive Technology still exists (as does all of its software and ongoing maintenance), I'm now working for Avanade, a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture.
And, in the spirit of the season, on my way to Avanade's Chicago office yesterday, I noticed something...odd...about the Daley Center:
Gotta love Chicago. And tomorrow they dye the river green. Thursday they show up to work late.
I mentioned that the traffic and chaos in Delhi just seems to work most of the time. Sometimes, however—as when 60 bicycle rickshaws try to make a right turn through traffic at the same time—it doesn't:
I'm curious what everyone is saying...though I can guess.
Also as promised, I've finally gotten around to converting and uploading video from Delhi. I'll have more later this week; here's the first:
If this story is true, someone needs time in jail to think about civic responsibility:
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court, [a Pennsylvania] family said the school's assistant principal had confronted their son, told him he had "engaged in improper behavior in [his] home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in [his] personal laptop issued by the school district."
The suit contends the Lower Merion School District, one of the most prosperous and highest-achieving in the state, had the ability to turn on students' webcams and illegally invade their privacy.
The suit says that in November, assistant principal Lynn Matsko called in sophomore Blake Robbins and told him that he had "engaged in improper behavior in his home," and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam in his school-issued laptop.
Matsko later told Robbins' father, Michael, that the district "could remotely activate the webcam contained in a student's personal laptop . . . at any time it chose and to view and capture whatever images were in front of the webcam" without the knowledge or approval of the laptop's users, the suit says.
A security professional in New York has investigated the technical claims and found them convincing. He also expanded on the original news story with some circumstantial evidence:
The truly amazing part of this story is what's coming out from comments from the students themselves. Some of the interesting points:
- Possession of a monitored Macbook was required for classes
- Possession of an unmonitored personal computer was forbidden and would be confiscated
- Disabling the camera was impossible
- Jailbreaking a school laptop in order to secure it or monitor it against intrusion was an offense which merited expulsion
When I spoke at MIT about the wealth of electronic evidence I came across regarding Chinese gymnasts, I used the phrase "compulsory transparency". I never thought I would be using the phrase to describe America, especially so soon, but that appears to be exactly the case.
I can't wait to see how this turns out.
I am pooped.
The third residency is over, and I've got a 7am flight out of Delhi tomorrow. This being Delhi, that means I have to get up around 3:45am to meet one of my classmates at 4:30—and that might be cutting it close. That means I'll leave the hotel around 10pm London time and arrive there around 9am, and somehow I'll have to stay awake for the rest of the day. I don't usually sleep on airplanes, but tomorrow morning I think I'll make an exception, whether I want to or not.
I almost forgot: Nandan Nilekani spoke to us Wednesday evening. Once I get all of India sorted out in my head I may write a bit more about him:
For the moment, I'll just wander aimlessly for a few hours until I fall asleep. I think that's the limit of what my brain can handle right now.