12. March, 2003 - catchup

• So here’s the longer explanation of yesterday’s outage. Seems at the building that houses my ISP, they were plowing snow about 3am yesterday morning. Seems the snowplow hit a bundle of wires. Seems that bundle contained about 400 pairs of wire feeding the building’s phone system and my ISP’s DSL lines. It apparently took Qwest until about 3pm to get all the wires spliced back together. Oops.
• Shortfall may close 4 Minneapolis libraries, including the one in my neighborhood. But I don’t think it’s really that big of a loss. The current southeast library isn’t handicapped accesible and is pretty small. Only a few blocks away, there’s the University of MN, and while you can’t check books out without a student ID, that’s never stopped me from walking into a library on-campus and reading something there. [strib]
• The top five Bum Wines. Choose carefully. Your hangover depends on it.
• Heard about The Contiki Operating System and Desktop Environment yet? Runs on a C64, fits in 48k, including a TCP/IP stack and web-browser. [holy schmoly]
• The darkest side of ID theft. It was his word against a police database. Guess who lost. [boing boing]
• RFID tags: Big Brother in small packages. Just guess what products you’ve bought that may already have RFID tags in them. The privacy threat comes when RFID tags remain active once you leave a store. And that seems to be the default at the moment. [metafilter]
• Despite American efforts, world criminal court is born. The International Criminal Court will have jurisdiction to punish war crimes, including genocide, in any country that has ratified the statute–but only if that country has refused to prosecute suspects itself. So will we see Henry Kissinger hauled before the dock to answer for Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos? Probably not. But hey, The Pentagon Papers [requires flash] was a decent movie. [metafilter]
• Speaking of flash, Revamped Macromedia site irks customers because it uses too much flash (aren’t Macromedia’s customers the ones who are putting too much flash on other websites? Why does the phrase taste of their own medicine come to mind?) Oh, and it doesn’t work with Safari. The load time is so long I gave up trying to find anything. [metafilter]

Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek. Last updated on Wed, 12 Mar 2003 07:16:12.