However you actually can’t reserve trucks via the web site.  You have to call the locations.

When you call the location it goes something like this.

• You: I would like to reserve a truck for next week.  I have a coupon from your site.
• Them: Next week is no problem.  However the coupon is only for online reservations.
• You: Oh, I couldn’t reserve online; it said there were no places available.
• Them: No you can’t reserve online, only via phone.
• You: So…
• Them: So next week is all set!

“…Real Estate Amnesia (REA) is the leading cause of real estate anxiety, next to homelessness and foreclosure…” – A Cure For Real Estate Amnesia

If you love Reggie and the Full Effect as much as I do you can grab his new album from  MySpace.com -Reggie and the Full Effect or Vagrant Records – Reggie and the Full Effect. Please don’t sue me reggie!!

A Great Invention

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ranks Poutine as #10 in The 50 Greatest Canadian Inventions, impressive.  And I intend to eat a lot of poutine while I’m up in Montreal this weekend.  In fact I hope to stop at Au Pied de Cochon for their famous varieties.

hopefully I’ll see this sweatshirt that I can’t seem to find anywhere

I did make my overnight trip and spent my first two days up in Copenhagen doing some touring around and checking out the nightlife.

Busy Canal in Copenhagen

While currently very expensive for me and it seems likely even more expensive for their residents. Copenhagen is definitely a place I could come back to visit again.

Christiana Entrance

From the NPR interview with Jean Nouvel there were a couple of things that touched on his philosophy of design; lessons I read into.

Survey the site (research is paramount):

• What was there?
• What is there?
• How was it was used?
• How will it be used?

The New York Times also has a small article on Nouvel winning the Pritzker but the NYTimes Magazine will be publishing an in depth article for this Sunday called The Contextualizer.

“Typically, architects begin the design process with a sketch pad or scale models, but Nouvel starts with an idea he can express in words.”

“He tries things, and not everything works. There’s a mixture of things that are extraordinary, things that are experiments, things that don’t come off aesthetically. But Jean is willing to jump in and take on things and try. That’s a great quality.” – Frank Gehry

Lazy Cow (…) by law_keven. License:

After I first posted my name on the Co-working Boston page I got a message from someone near Long Island looking to open up their own co-working facility.  The issue in setting a new place up seemed to be finding the price to set.  She wondered if I had a price in mind and since I’d been thinking about this already I sent her my formula for deciding what to spend.

I’m a bit of a details dork and this was formula to calculate my average commute costs when I used to drive to work everyday.

Distance: ~ 30 miles from Cambridge to Westford

Cost: ~ $0.505 per mile according to the Federal reimbursement numbers (which likely don’t take into account recent gas prices)

60 miles round trip / day * $0.505 = $30.30 / day

Working Time: 1777 average hours per year worked according to wikipedia which is 222 working (8 hour) days / year.  Really you want number of days driven, not number of days 8 hours were worked but the total usually comes out to be less than the real value and therefore we end up with a conservative estimate.

$30.30 / day * 222 avg working days per year = $6727 / year ( or $561 / month )

Even if I through in the monthly T pass of $59 / month I now get and the fact that I still own the car ( payment + insurance + tickets and taxes) there is a considerable amount of money left which could go towards sharing a nice office space.  However since I’m pretty cheap I’d probably opt for the $200 / month deal and be a part timer, after all the coffee shops do have their charm as well.

Title coming from the excellent cow-orker slang term.

Hello there planet mozilla

I’ve had a really great time working here, it’s an amazing place full of really smart people; and I will miss them all.

It was hard to say goodbye, but I’m excited about where I’m going.

FundRace makes it easy to search by name or address to see which presidential candidates your friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors are contributing to. Or you can see if your favorite celebrity is putting their money where their mouth is.

It gives you a google map showing the donors in the area you searched for. Originally created by EyeBeam here are the details:

All calculations are based on public records filed with the FEC of contributions by all individuals totaling more than $200 (and some totaling less than $200) to a single Republican or Democratic presidential campaign or national committee for the 2004 and 2008 election cycles.

FundRace is updated according to the reporting schedule set by the FEC. Public contribution data is geocoded using public U.S. Census Bureau data. Dynamic maps are powered by Google Maps.

Using Fund Race application I did a quick search of bloggers syndicated on Planet GNOME who I’ve seen write on American political topics somewhat actively. Here’s what I found from a small list of people I tried searching for.

Individuals

Nat Friedman

$2,300 to Barack Obama

$300 to Ron Paul

Miguel de Icaza

$1,525 to Barack Obama

Robert Love

$600 to John McCain

And here is an incomplete list of companies active on Planet GNOME.

Companies

Sun Microsystems

$57,620 was given by people who identified their employer as “sun microsystems*”.
$19,389 to Republicans $38,231 to Democrats

Red Hat

$19,940 was given by people who identified their employer as “red hat*”.
$5,074 to Republicans $14,866 to Democrats

Novell

$15,803 was given by people who identified their employer as “novell*”.
$4,710 to Republicans $11,093 to Democrats

VMWare

$14,340 was given by people who identified their employer as “VMWare*”.
$2,125 to Republicans $12,215 to Democrats

Canonical

$518 was given by people who identified their employer as “canonical*”.
$268 to Republicans $250 to Democrats

Caveats

Obviously this is U.S. centric and these numbers aren’t complete. They require accurate census data and the person had to have donated more than $200 to a single campaign, not just $200 in total to multiple campaigns.

Further

I found this tool really interesting precisely because it allowed me to create a report of my little world of who and how much people were putting towards different political agendas. Are we democratizing yet? Of course some people had already actively promoted how much and where it was going.

Now you should do your own searches, please drop the interesting ones in my comments.

I do find it a little weird that real addresses are shown for each person but I can see how you need that information to determine if you’re looking at the correct person, I’m sorry if anyone is upset about that.

So I’m up to Varanasi right now with still a lot to go.

• India
  • Delhi
  • Jodhpur
  • Ranakpur
  • Udaipur
    • Shashi Cooking Class
  • Agra
  • Varanasi
  • …

Here are some of my favorites so far

our boat approaching candles in the ganges

corner of the baby taj

The Taj Mahal at 6am in some heavy fog

In a difficult moment today I had to tell all my friends at Red Hat that I’m leaving after almost 4 years here. I’ve taken on a new position at a different company which should be announcing very soon… (tomorrow?). I’ll still be working at Red Hat until the end of the month, transitioning my responsibilities before I continue on. I’m really going to miss it here, especially all the people I’ve had the pleasure of working with.

I’ll be continuing to stay in the Boston area for a while longer, but the next stop is Vancouver, BC. That’s aboot all the news for now…

View Map

1. The range of bluetooth is short, only 30ft. Though it’s possible to connect at large distances, it’s difficult and I believe it hurts the nature of bluetooth; the limited range offers some advantages in terms of security.

2. This personal area network that Bluetooth creates is not adhoc, people create an intentional set of trusted systems that communicate because it’s personal. Let’s dig into that more below.

3. Personal, “Relating to an individual, his character, conduct, motives, or private affairs…” I wanted to define this term so we all know what kind of information bluetooth should be designed to handle. In your personal network information can be private or sensitive, therefore security is a concern.

Plee

Please fix bluetooth to not suck so much! AFAIK it’s mostly security concerns (of many varieties) mean that you can’t really have all your bluetooth devices always visible; power is another but it’s more minor than the security (see the above definition of personal). Security concerns are coming from getting bluejacked, to helping thieves know that you left your phone in your car.

“The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has told people to set eight-digit PINs when pairing two devices and to take other precautions”

“The Bluetooth SIG’s advice is don’t re-pair in a public place, where someone else might eavesdrop, and use a longer PIN.”

PIN security would make Bluetooth safer

“What we found was that we can take it one step further and bypass the pairing requirement and go straight for some of the contacts on the telephone,”

Pickpockets turn to technology

“Thieves are using new ‘blue-tooth’ phones to detect whether motorists have left mobiles or laptops in their cars. The ‘blue-tooth’ facility enables thieves to locate compatible electrical items – even if they are hidden away in a boot or glove compartment.”

Alert over hi-tech thieves who scan cars for laptops

My Fix

I have a simple fix, a request along with my above plee to alleviate what I feel are most security concerns as I see them.

Bluetooth should require an initializing physical connection for pairing devices.

I said require, but likely since the technology and standard are already out it’s more likely “recommend”. So the Bluetooth standard should recommend that bluetooth devices have a physical connection to one another before they can pair with each other. Use a standard like a USB cable (micro or mini) where power and possibly even secret keys can be exchanged between devices over a physical cable. It’s possible to extend this concept to other cable types besides USB.

Will all bluetooth connections require a physical connection?

No, obviously you might want to send a contact from one person’s phone to another and it would negate the wireless benefits if you had to get a cable out. Pairing with a device would prefer a wired connection to initialize, however it wouldn’t be required. You could still pair with devices as you do now, however the quick and easy way would be with a mini USB cable.

Could I still pair without a cable?

Again, yes. The current method of pairing would still work, however it would be the deprecated method.

Why a USB cable?

USB cables could be used for power as well as data transfer of some crypto information for the two devices to communicate. In most cases, a PDA, wireless headphones it would be simple to require a mini USB cable connection the first time you use the device. Future uses could power these devices and exchange new keys.

Should bluetooth devices still be discoverable?

Because of security concerns many devices aren’t discoverable now and more and more are becoming less discoverable. With the physical connection recommendation, there can be alternate designs around only making devices discoverable for short periods of time when you want to actively send or receive something.

Obviously some phones and other devices don’t have a USB cable connection, this is too bad, thus pairing in private with PIN codes would still be available. There may be other kinds of cables that could provide the same effect as a USB cable could.

Addendum

Is Bluetooth fixed with the addition of USB cables for pairing? Not really, there are other things that need attention, but I would like to use Bluetooth for a lot more things except that the current system has become so crippled due mostly to issues of security. A physical connection provides much more security, this is not security…

If someone has physically connected to your laptop via a USB cable it probably game over for lots of security problems since they are physically at your computer.  Getting this kind of PIN dialog for different wireless connects is problematic in every way possible.  Just my thoughts.

What you need to search for is “mainpage” on the mediawiki.org site; “mainpage” is variable key name that’s used to retrieve the value which is used for your wiki main or index page. Once you start searching for that instead of “custom Main Page” or something similar you’ll end up at the Media Wiki Help FAQ, perhaps you should just go there first every time…

Here’s the answer »

Going to your MediaWiki:Mainpage as a user with sysop privileges lets you change the index page your wiki will show. Now hopefully I’ll be able to search my own blog and find this answer next time, or more likely I will forget I even wrote this.

image from library of congress

I haven’t gone to the doctors yet since there’s no treatment other than taking pain killers and the pain isn’t getting worse than when it first happened. According to medical student friends and webmd‘s fractured rib article I need to breath in deeply every hour to reduce the risk of contracting pneumonia or a partial collapse my lung.

At work I’m using DrWright (now a part of the Control Center and known as “Typing Monitor”) again. Every hour it tells me to stop typing and I use the time to take a very deep and painful breath.

Now I’m off to Florida for the weekend to play in the Ruggerfest 2007 tournament, the weather down south has been great so far and I hope it continues for the weekend.

Damien Rice @ The Orpheum in Boston

Last.fm and Tourb.us are doing a pretty good job of letting me know what shows are in town. Plus they don’t spam me with emails I can’t opt out of. Tonight I might catch Cirkestra playing at the Middle East Upstairs, they were also featured on WBUR this morning.

Both last.fm and tourb.us give RSS feeds of your “Events I’m attending” list which I’m hoping Mugshot will hook into soon so friends can swarm around interest in going to a show they might not have know was happening. I clicked that I was a maybe for the Damien Rice show months ago but didn’t know who else would be interested in going to see him.

Those are students who don’t have money and you’re a working professional who does. You might like to try the Premium Movie Theater out in Framingham. Ticket prices are 13 and 18 for Matinee and regular respectively. You need to be 21+ to get in and they serve food and drinks you can take into the film with you. Plus it’s outside the city where no student would really travel for a movie.

I don’t go there very often because the overall cost is pretty expensive, but if I really want to enjoy a movie quietly (i.e. you’re not watching snakes on a plane) it’s a good place to go. Of course they do only have a limited selection of movies as well as often require reservations. Not worth quitting your spy job over, but it’s still good.

I got spam the other day with snips of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield in it which then prompted me to search to make sure those snips were really from David Copperfield. Once I actually found references for the quotes I received I started reading a bit of the book online.

After getting bored just like I was back in high school when I first read the book I started thinking about the economy of spam and how it may be changing. Or at least how it could possibly change to something a little more tricky than it is now. Since spam seems to be a kind of an evolutionary process of finding ways around spam filters it will keep changing from what it currently is until it finds a viable economic model and even then will probably continue changing.

I’m told the snips of Copperfield are in there so it doesn’t get caught by my spam filtering and the drug ad is done in an image to escape the filtering as well. But what if spammers actually delivered something interesting to me with their obnoxious ad placed in the middle? Like a real news story of the day or a weather update. It would be more like an email newspaper delivery, just one that I didn’t ask for, probably didn’t want, and can’t stop getting.

I don’t want any more spam than I already get, but I wonder… Would it be better if the spam I get was more interesting?

Weekend

My roommate did an excellent job with the Beer Can Chicken this weekend or as we called it, ‘Chicken on the Can’ because the chicken definitely looks like it’s squatting from a profile angle. It turned out moist and tasty and makes for an excellent center piece to any BBQ table.

Brian caught an sweet picture

The trip was about 85 miles total and we rode it in under 6 hours with an hour or so for a lunch stop. The google map link takes the wrong route and adds some miles for speed.

We went down through North Conway, over to Fryeburg, ME and into Hiram where I believe we had lunch. Then dropping down to Waterboro over to Biddeford and Saco. I blew two flats on the trip because of some bad rim tape on my front wheel but other than that my old bike seemed to hold it together, surprising as I have over 5500 miles on mostly original parts.

New Windsurfer

This weekend I should be picking up some new windsurfing toys. I’ve been looking at the Starboard F-Type, Aero, and Carve. Assuming I can find a good deal at one of the local shops or an ebayer I’ve been talking with I should have a whole new rig ready to go for this summer.