Events

My dad's oldest cat died Tuesday night. He was 18 1/2. Here's Tommy in 1997: He was the sweetest cat ever. Not the brightest (we called him "Forrest") nor the slimmest ("Tommy Two-Cats"), but definitely the sweetest. Tom is survived by his best friend, Reggie.

Bruce Schneier reminds everyone how we can really defeat the terrorists: The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of...

I was going to have action shots of my new bike this morning, but I decided to take the bus to my office instead of riding for some reason: I'll have more on the bike later, including the results of my first real ride on it (whee!), but right now I have to crunch a few million data points. I'm also suffering from the after-effects of a midnight inspiration last night, which (a) led to two hours of coding starting at 1:00 am, and (b) got the total speed of the application up 40%.

First, I picked up my new bike yesterday. But that's not the subject of this post. No, the unfortunate real subject of this post is, "I am stupid." I had to import about 3.5 million data points recently, and now that I'm using the data, I discovered that this quick-and-dirty construct was dirtier than it was quick. See if you can spot the problem: const string sqlTemplate = "INSERT INTO data_points (foreign_key_id,year_num,payment,cost) VALUES ({0},{1},{2},{3})"; ... foreach (CustomStruct item in...

I picked out my new bicycle. I pick it up Wednesday. Photos and details to follow.

Today I pedaled my butt off, all the way up to Wisconsin: The total ride was 130 km (80.8 mi). I had intended only to go 120 km (74.5 mi) to prepare for the North Shore Century in four weeks. But, I took a wrong turn somewhere in North Chicago, and lost the Robert McClory Bike Path entirely. That added about 6 km (4 mi) to the trip. Another 4 km (2.5 mi) got added on when I popped a spoke in the middle of nowhere: Fortunately, Anne was home and directed me to the Zion Cyclery, and they had me back on...

As channeled through American Prospect columnist Julian Sanchez: August 11: My anger at The New York Times subsides somewhat as I skim Foucault and Sartre. Surveillance serves its disciplinary function only if the populace is conscious of it. And if Americans aren't wrenched from being-pour-soi to being-en-soi (at least in relation to an observer who is Other) by the objectifying gaze of the state—well, then the terrorists have won. Read more.

From the TSA's prohibited-items list: We encourage everyone to pack gel-filled bras in their checked baggage. I'll keep that in mind the next time I fly.

A Federal judge has ordered Dish Network to disable almost all of its customers' digital video recorders after parent company EchoStar Communications lost a patent-infringement suit brought by TiVo: Thursday's ruling from U.S. District Judge David Folsom in Marshall, Texas, demands that within 30 days, EchoStar must basically render useless all but 192,708 of the DVR units it has deployed. The decision comes four months after a jury ruled that EchoStar should pay TiVo $73.9 million because it willfully...

The FBI spent $170 million on broken software, which it has since scrapped. Now it's planning to spend $450 million on, one hopes, working software: Because of an open-ended contract with few safeguards, [San Diego-based Science Applications International Corp.] reaped more than $100 million as the project became bigger and more complicated, even though its software never worked properly. The company continued to meet the bureau's requests, accepting payments despite clear signs that the FBI's approach...