All my blog posts and articles
Thomas Geoghegan has a fantastic column in the New York Times explaining the mess we are in because of the perversion of the fillibuster rule. I don’t know how we are going to get out of it, but… come on! You sh...
Read more →Another great column from Frank Rich — Tiger Woods, Person of The Year. I recommend reading the whole thing. Here’s a telling quote: **“The most lethal example, of course, were the two illusions marketed to us on the way to...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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 ...
Read more →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. 
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 🙂
(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 ...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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.
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.
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:/...
Read more →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.
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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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.
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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
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