01/10 Great production of “All My Sons” in Boston — I’ve been a subscriber at the Huntington Theater for years and years now and this new play is the best one by far this season and one of the best in the last few years. “All My Sons” by Arthur Miller, at the Huntington Theater in Boston, MA, USA I ha...

01/07 Zappos Rule — I don’t own or buy many shoes. Recently I needed to replace a shoe and visited my previously favorite shoe store, twice (they had to get the right size from the other store, or something…) but left not satisfied. This is a really good store, but they  didn’t have what I needed Also, I found that, li...

01/05 The Boston node of OSDV — I’ve been working quite a bit on the Open Source Digital Voting foundation project over the last 9 months or so. It’s really weird but I’ve turned myself into a mini-expert on how elections are organized and run here in the USA. It’s fascinating and way complicated. OSDV is a ...

01/04 TrustTheVote project — I’ve been part of the core tech team of the TrustTheVote project and recently have been blogging over there too. You can find today’s post about Open Source e-Voting here.

01/04 New words: COTS and GOTS — In my work with the Open Source Digital Voting foundation, and TrustTheVote, I just learned two new words, for your educational pleasure: “COTS” – Commercial off the shelf “COTS” – Government off the shelf Ok, not all the posts here are gems, but it is also my personal memory bank 🙂

12/31 Two movies: “Precious” and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” — (Note: Spoilers for both movies, but nothing that everyone probably has already been exposed to) I saw both these movies this weekend. One I thought was very good but disturbing, the other I thought was [so so, kind of sick, but I did watch it ...

12/17 I’ll be teaching a course at Brandeis University — Follow along as I develop the course: Brandeis University Web App Dev, Mobile App Dev and Incubator I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to co-teach 3 courses next year at Brandeis University. It’s something th...

12/14 Facebook and Twitter Hacking — I guess it’s not surprising that people’s Facebook and twitter accounts are getting compromised. From the New York Times: **“Malicious programs are rampaging through Web sites like [Facebook](http://topics.nyt...

12/13 A good scratchboard/clayboard tutorial — In my graphic design work I’ve gotten to know scratchboard (aka clayboard.) It’s a very cool material that I’ve had a lot of success with. Here’s an early example. Here’s a pretty good rundown of many of the tools, materials and techniques for working with clayboard. I found it very informative.

12/07 e-Readers: First review I’ve seen of the Barnes and Nobel ‘Nook’ — Here’s a nice detailed review of the Kindle competitor, “Nook“. If you are thinking of giving or getting one for Christmas or Channukah you might find the review useful.

12/07 First useful info from Twitter for me :) — After sending an email to Terroir Coffee asking them to explain the roastiness terminology that they use for all their coffee. It’s obscure and not mentioned on the web site. No response. I happened to note that [George Howell, who is their CEO and visionary](http:/...

12/07 An interesting video about design of Windows 7’s default desktop colors — If you’re interested in design and illustration, you might like this video of how Microsoft went about designing the default desktop for Windows 7. Also some interesting commentary about the challenge of designing an Operating System for an astronomical number of different PC configurations.

12/02 Dan Lewis, on what it means to ‘own’ something — This post talks about the difference between owning, possessing and accessing a book or anything tangible: **“If I buy (”own”) a book, I expect to be able to do things such as re-sell, loan, rent, gift it. If I rent or borrow (”poss...

12/01 Stewart Alsop, Droid Doesn’t, Google UI — This is an insider’s three-fer. In this article, Stewart describes his horrible personal experience with the Verizon Droid. It’s a fun read. Three...

11/30 Shopping Tip: if you need to find a gift for a GEEK — I’ve occasionally shopped here. I got another bit of mail from them for so-called Cyber Monday. Looking at the stuff they had (much of which I wanted for myself), I thought to send out a tip to non-geek friends of geeks who might be struggling to find a Christmas or Channukah gift for a geek. Check out ThinkGeek.

11/27 An interesting paper about compassion and action — Ethan Zuckerman’s blog is more like a magazine of insightful, well written papers. I liked From compassion to action, from action to knowledge. Here’s a key bit: **“If the inability to act makes us b...

11/23 Another real-world ‘Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ story — Did you read the book “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly”? Or see the movie? It’s quite an amazing story of a man with so-called “Locked-In Syndrome”. It’s an absolutely rivet...

11/21 Waste, Fraud and Abuse: does that turn you off to health reform? — An article from Canadian Healthcare Technology notes that US Healthcare wastes up to $800 billion a year. I don’t disbelieve this article but it doesn’t make me not want to start with healthreform now that it seems possible that it might happen this year, wa...

11/15 On the importance of confidence in voting systems — I was following a series of articles about the Brazilian e-voting system, which apparently underwent a white-hat hack test and survived. It started with this Slashdot article, “[Hackers Fail to Crack Brazillian Voting Machines”](http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/11/14/1936200/Hackers-Fail-To-Crack-Br...

11/12 News about BlogBridge for iPhone — I just posted an update on our work on BlogBridge for the iPhone. In summary, we got many many responses to our survey and the prevailing feedback was that like most iPhone apps, people wanted it to be free (those very people also are using BlogBridge for free, very likely.) Read the whole post for the rest of the story.