Much more subdued, subtle, and tasteful (i.e., more in keeping with my current profession) than my previous Pile o’Stickers approach to laptop decoration.
Lasering courtesy Adafruit Industries, who are very cool people- highly recommend them if you’d like to do something fairly interesting and unique with your digital toys.
Seen above a urinal yesterday in a bar in Mountain View: ads for firewalls, security consulting, and used Cisco routers. This is not what you see in normal bars in the rest of the world.
So, I had a positive roomba review a few weeks ago. I humbly submit that that review was wrong. What should have happened was a totally raving, ‘this is the greatest thing since sliced bread’ review.
Here is what I know now that I didn’t know then: the old roomba ate things- shoelaces, power cords, rug fringes, etc. This meant that every time you ran the roomba, you had to make the room safe first.
This is no longer the case. The new roomba seems completely unwilling to eat anything. It detects that something is caught and spits it out. I’ve deliberately tried to force it to behave badly, and it refuses.
This might not sound like a big deal if you haven’t had a roomba, but it is actually huge. In the past, running the roomba was sort of a big deal- it was easier than vacuuming, to be sure, but it still took several minutes of scanning the apartment for obstacles and potential problems. Now every single time I leave the apartment I can trivially vacuum. I just hit the button and go, with no worries.
I’m actually now regretting not getting the more advanced model- in the past, the timer (where you can tell the robot to vacuum on specific days at specific times) seemed silly to me, since you’d still have to remember to clean the floor. Now that you don’t, the timer seems like a great idea- but my model won’t support it. Oops.
Overall, not eating things upgrades the new roomba, for me, from ‘pretty nice’ to ‘every apartment should have one.’ Go forth and bring on the robot revolution.
[Not my cat or my roomba, but cute anyway. Picture by Eirik Newth under CC-BY 2.0. Thanks, Eirik!]
“Why can’t I lease an engagement ring and use the savings to buy a much bigger wedding ring?”
– In discussion of a workshop version of this excellent and intriguing paper, on the leasing of antiquities as an alternative to the very broken bans on trade in antiquities, and the resulting black market (which is not only inefficient, but destroys irreplaceable art.)1
After an abysmal 9 week losing streak (covering two seasons) I’ve not only won a game in my fantasy football league but I appear to be on pace for the highest score of the weekend. Finally. Krissa was beginning to wonder why I subjected myself to this. Of course, she’ll probably still wonder why I subject myself to this, and with good reason. But hey, it was fun to watch unfold today while I worked on other projects.
Of course, Duke and the Dolphins both lost close games that they should have won, but the Hurricanes won a game they shouldn’t have. So I guess I was 2-4 on the weekend.
[Image: sock monkeys (after my team's name, the Fighting Sock Monkeys). Source picture by Mai Le, under CC-BY 2.0.]
Mark Radcliffe, of DLA Piper (I interview there on Monday, by coincidence) has a ‘view from a real lawyer’ on the case.
Mark seems to suggest that the answer to my question of ‘why now’ may be that this is a reaction to the Jacobsen case. While a number of open source lawyers believed that Jacobsen was poorly decided, there seemed to be nearly universal consensus that the facts (and the license) were not ideal, and that instead of appealing, a different case should be found in which to raise the issue. SFLC may well have decided that this is that different case- better facts, better license, and with a party actually interested in the litigation. But we’ll see, of course…
Following up on the last post after some quick discussions with friends:
Just read the complaint in the GPL violation lawsuit filed today on behalf of Busybox. Couple things jumped out at me:
(bleg, not lazyweb, because I’ve looked high and low and still can’t find what I need for this project.)
I’m looking for a high-res (ideally vector-AI/EPS/SVG) version of the old IBM penguin:
I promise it will be used for good and not for evil; I just want to print one copy, albeit in a fairly unusual way.
Thanks in advance…
(Yes, I’ve tried tracing this one, which was the best I could find (cropped out of a screenshot of a flash app), and no, it came out unacceptably poorly.)
the executive summary:
Nutshell: if you’re a law firm considering hiring me, and you stumble across this blog, please don’t get nervous. Instead, talk to me, and/or read the rest of this post. I’m eager to explain why I blog, and why I think it may make me a better lawyer and a good addition to your firm.
[Image by Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void fame; used with permission under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 1.0 license. For more on why Hugh licenses his images this way, see here.]
the full story: