Category: General

When Bruce Schneier weighs in on the secu­ri­ty impli­ca­tions of gov­ern­ment actions, we should all pay attention:

We can­not build a back­door that only works for a par­tic­u­lar type of gov­ern­ment, or only in the pres­ence of a par­tic­u­lar court order.

This is the per­son that coined the phrase “secu­ri­ty the­ater” and he isn’t in the habit of mak­ing up unlike­ly sto­ries to scare us. He is, how­ev­er, very good at under­stand­ing real risks to secu­ri­ty for peo­ple, busi­ness­es, and countries.

Mediterranean Vacation

I post­ed some high­light pho­tos from our once-in-a-life­­time fam­i­ly trip to the Mediter­ranean. We took a cruise from Barcelona to sev­er­al stops in Italy and one in France before return­ing to Spain to spend a cou­ple of extra days around Barcelona. It was exhaust­ing and won­der­ful. Click below to see the entire set at Flickr.

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Bike Riding

It seems like a small thing, but of all the things I’m most proud of this year, it’s get­ting both kids rid­ing bikes (with­out train­ing wheels, etc.). For Father’s Day this year, we went on an hour-long ride on one of the green­ways in Brent­wood, TN.

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Coke Life

I hap­pened to see a six pack of Coca-Cola Life1 at the gro­cery store the oth­er day. I don’t recall ever even hear­ing about the bev­er­age before, but it’s sort of a ‘nat­u­ral’2 ver­sion of the dis­con­tin­ued C2, which was a half-calo­rie soda. Life uses both cane sug­ar and Ste­via as sweet­en­ers. I per­son­al­ly liked… Con­tin­ue read­ing Coke Life

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When I Met Scotty

The Time I Met Scotty

Over Memo­r­i­al Day week­end in 1999, Angela, her cousin, Jonathan, and I went to the Star Trek Con­ven­tion at the Cum­ber­land Sci­ence Muse­um to see James Doohan, who played engi­neer Mont­gomery Scott on Star Trek. Jonathan brought along cards for us all to get signed. Almost 15 years lat­er, I man­aged to find mine.

Star Ratings

After doing the Jaw­grind pod­cast with some friends for the past cou­ple of years, I’ve real­ized just how much a five star rat­ing sys­tem can vary among dif­fer­ent peo­ple — and even myself at dif­fer­ent times. As I’ve been rat­ing enter­tain­ment (and even goods, as in the case of Ama­zon) for years, I’ve always had… Con­tin­ue read­ing Star Rat­ings

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After three years with­out a sin­gle report­ed case of polio, India was declared free of polio. It’s been so long since polio was a epi­dem­ic in the Unit­ed States &emdash;which goes a long to way to explain­ing our cur­rent anti-vac­ci­na­tion and anti-sci­ence culture&emdash; that is hard to grasp how mon­u­men­tal this news is for so many peo­ple. The BBC reports that there are only three coun­tries left where polio is endem­ic: Pak­istan, Afghanistan and Nige­ria. Wired recent­ly had an excel­lent long-form piece on the effort to erad­i­cate polio from the planet.

Starting Out 2014 Right

My goals from year-to-year don’t change that much. How­ev­er, that’s not entire­ly a bad thing. Some have set goal lines but most of them are open end­ed. Strive-to-do-more-of-this or less-of-that sort of things. How­ev­er, this year, I’ve decid­ed to nar­row some of my goals to the dai­ly lev­el. More accu­rate­ly, at the end of each… Con­tin­ue read­ing Start­ing Out 2014 Right

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