Fiat Lux

Heading out with Scott to check out the show. Should be fun! I’ll post pix if I get any good ones.

UPDATED: We’re back. Had a great time, here’s a few highlights:

Adam Savage from Mythbusters, taking about his life of making things. I like the show but hearing Adam speak in person and show some of the many non-Mythbusters things he’s done increased my respect for him significantly.

What a cool guy! A true creative geek in the best possible sense of the word.

Those guys from YouTube did a live … performance(?) …. of their demented yet oh so cool pairings of Mentos & Diet Coke.

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Gas prices continue their journey upwards, but fortunately for me, my 60+ mile a day car commute will shortly be no more.

I’ve accepted a new job at a different company, and will be able to do my commute via CalTrain most days.

More details after I start on May 12th.

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I’m not sure if I have gone over to the Dark Side or to the light, but as of last night I’m the owner of a Blackberry Curve 8310.

Setting the BlackBerry up is kind of a pain, especially since my old Cingular SIM card needed to be replaced by a new AT&T card. I had to call to activate the phone, then go through three different setup procedures to get my BIS account and associated email activated. It’s not a very user-friendly process and had me seriously wondering what I’d gotten myself into.

Once that was all done, though, things got easier. I love the over-the-air install, and already have three 3rd party applications running on my Curve: Twitterberry, the Gmail client, and a multi-IM client called WebMessenger. I still don’t really know how to use all the features of the Curve, but I’ll learn.

On a side note — switching SIM cards, while not a Blackberry-specific issue, brought to light exactly how unorganized and messy my personal address book management has become over the past few years. I run Thunderbird on my desktop and my laptop, and neither of those address books is complete or up-to-date, with some more key data living only on the SIM that I can no longer use.

No matter what I do for a PIM solution next, it’s going to involve a bunch of tedious manual data entry to bring all the bits and pieces of contact info I’ve accumulated together. I’ve got to figure out how to minimize that. I’ve even found myself wondering if this might be a good job for Plaxo (I’ve heard that they are not a grubby spamhaus anymore).

Thoughts?

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I was puttering around on Facebook this morning, and it occurred to me that I might want to set up a Fan page for one of my favorite food writers, Michael Ruhlman. So I did (you may need to be on Facebook to see that link).

There’s not much content there yet other than a brief blurb, photo, and link to his site, but I’ll work on it as I have time. Please feel free to join and add stuff if you’re so inclined!

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The AP reports today that despite Microsoft’s repeated insistence that it really, truly is going to stop selling Windows XP in June, Steve Ballmer did not slam the door on the possibility of yet another life extension for the OS.

I can’t help thinking that as far as Microsoft is concerned, XP is the evil zombie that won’t die. They can shoot as many Windows Vista bullets as they like at it, but popular demand keeps driving XP relentlessly forward.

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We’re heading out early tomorrow AM for a quick Passover visit to NYC.

In the meantime, check out this recipe and video for Matzoh Lasagna.

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High gas prices are bad, but as the Wall Street Journal reminds us, it could be a lot worse. At least I have a kitchen full of groceries and the ability to keep it that way.

For the world’s poor, the situation is getting worse.

Surging commodity prices have pushed up global food prices 83% in the past three years, according to the World Bank — putting huge stress on some of the world’s poorest nations. Even as the ministers met, Haiti’s Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was resigning after a week in which that tiny country’s capital was racked by rioting over higher prices for staples like rice and beans.

Rioting in response to soaring food prices recently has broken out in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to deter food theft from fields and warehouses. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned in a recent speech that 33 countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices. Those could include Indonesia, Yemen, Ghana, Uzbekistan and the Philippines. In countries where buying food requires half to three-quarters of a poor person’s income, “there is no margin for survival,” he said.

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One month ago, gas was $3.73 a gallon at the midprice gas station that I pass by pretty much every single day. Here’s what prices were like earlier today:

That’s right … $3.91 a gallon on the low end. *sigh*

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Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests has made some very interesting discoveries this Sunday night.

Here’s the high-level issue:

Some enterprising hackers have put together a scheme whereby they hack a number of blogs, so that they can create their own network pages and links back to a few select blogs, to pages that are not easily visible. It takes advantage of the organic and real page rank of all of the sites in question, and probably makes some bucks for the hacker involved.

Why is this bad for *you*?

Other than the knowledge that someone is profiting off of your back, what can happen is that if you’re running Adsense, Google might notice all the hidden text and penalize you and pull you right out of the Index.

It’s unclear right now what exactly is going on — for example, whether this is a possible WordPress exploit, or something at the webhost level — but if you have a WordPress blog, please click through to Tony’s article and do a little checking to make sure your blog is not one of the affected.

UPDATE April 8: More on this. Upgrade now!

…if you are running any version of WordPress older than 2.3.3, you need to upgrade now. Seriously. WordPress 2.3.2 and older have security holes that are being actively exploited by hackers to inject spam links into blogs which are not maintained.

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Late last night, my food blog got Stumbled.

Holy crap. I thought the traffic I was getting from Alltop (the orange band) was nice. I had no idea.

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