Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Cos' LiveJournal:

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Thursday, January 1st, 2037
12:00 am	Other Places I Post I have two other LJs: cosmusic, coslinks See what links I've been reading on del.icio.us (coslinks),  and what links I've been posting on reddit (cos) Photos: Some from the 90s on my old web site, newer ones on Flickr (cospics) and most recent (pretty much anything since 2006) on Facebook Videos: YouTube (youcos) Where are you? Fill out my LJ poll. All Livejournals cos (20 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 13th, 2012
11:05 pm	An MIT wedding The mother of the bride read a selection from Neil Gaiman during the ceremony. Later, when the sound system misbehaved during dinner, guess what got yelled out? (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
1:50 pm	The Year 2038 Problem [ Context for noncomputergeeks: A lot of computer systems based on Unix or Unix-derived software store times as number of seconds since the beginning of 1970. Midnight on Dec 31 1969 / Jan 1 1970, is "0" time. If you use a signed 32 bit number to store time, the highest possible value is in 2038; over the past decade, the computer world has been shifting from 32 bit to 64 bit systems, but there are still lots of data formats based on storing 32 bit values. ] I used to think we have plenty of time to convert all of our computing and data formats to 64 bit times before the year 2038. But an email discussion at work made me look at it in a new light: "Back when I worked at a bank, we started seeing bugs in 2008 for 30 year mortgages." (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 17th, 2012
10:12 am	End Word In Death to Word: It's time to give up on Microsoft's word processor [Slate magazine], the author writes, "Like the fax machine, Word was designed to put things on paper. It was a tool of the desktop-publishing revolution [...] For most people now, though, publishing means putting things on the Web. Desktop publishing has given way to laptop or smartphone publishing. And Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing." In 2005, 2006, 2007, I used to make a little bit of money on the side by making web sites for political campaigns. Which meant they'd email me the text they wanted for some of the pages. Asking them not to send me Word had a low success rate. Eventually, I raised my rates by about 10%, and offered a discount of the exact same amount I'd raised my rates by, if they agreed to never send me any Microsoft Word files. That worked, and made my work so much more pleasant! If only I could've rid the net of Internet Explorer 6 back then, too. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 11th, 2012
4:45 pm	no meetings Looking at my work calendar for today and seeing ... nothing ... felt surreal. I scanned back on the calendar until I came across the last day I had no meetings, January 4th. Well, there were two, but they were marked "no" so I thought they'd been cancelled - until my coworker said "weren't you traveling then?" Oh yeah, that's the day Daisy and I drove back from New York. I'd worked from the NY Google office while we were in NY and then I took a day off for the drive back. So I scanned further back in my calendar... aha. My most recent work day with no meetings was Wednesday, November 30th. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012
10:13 am	East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg Daisy's dad, Gordon Ball, was a friend of Allen Ginsburg's, and recently wrote this book about him. The title refers to the farm he lived at with Ginsburg and a few others in the late 60s. He's on a book tour, doing readings, and will be here in Boston on Thursday. The reading will be Thursday, 7pm, at the Harvard Coop. If this sounds interesting to you, come! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 22nd, 2012
10:43 am	Republicans, gas prices, and Iran Republican candidates are harping about high gas prices on one hand, and calling for war with Iran on the other. Maybe these Republican presidential candidates now what they're doing, and are pushing war talk to raise gas prices to give them a campaign issue. Maybe they're too stupid to figure it out. Maybe they actually believe what they're saying about drilling being the solution (though that's false). Maybe they just don't care, as long as they have an excuse to push for more profits for oil companies while criticizing Obama. But regardless of their beliefs or motivations, the fact is that these Republicans are more responsible for the high gas prices they're criticizing, than Obama's administration is. And they're the ones who can actually do something about it: If they all agreed to calm down about Iran, and made a joint public statement about it, gas prices probably would drop a little. I find it frustrating that this contradiction isn't being pointed out in the press or public debate about the presidential campaign. So I posted this on reddit. Please upvote. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 9th, 2012
7:20 pm	Cape Air Here's that NPR news piece from last week: Google And Cape Air Launch New Reservation System (click "Listen Now") ... and a few other articles about it: Cape Air simplifies reservations system [Cape Cod Times]: HYANNIS - At Cape Air's call center Wednesday, some new agents were in their first week on the job, and they'd already mastered the reservations system. Last week, that probably wouldn't have been possible. Cape Air has launched a new system company officials laud as more efficient and easier to use - for both staff and passengers. Cape Air taps ITA for reservation system [Boston Globe]: The days of airline agents typing and typing to get their computers to spit out reservation information could be numbered if ITA Software's new airline reservation system takes off. Cape Air's Reservation System Transition to ITA Was So Good, You Didn't Know It Even Happened [the Cranky Flier]: All the talk this week has been about United's massive reservation system transition, but that wasn't the only move of this type in the last couple weeks. Cape Air made the switch recently to a brand new airline reservation system made by none other than Google's ITA Software. While United's transition was bigger in scale, Cape Air's transition is potentially the most important of the two. Some of the comments on the Cranky Flier post are worth reading, too. [ Well, I did also spend about a week and a half of 12+ hour days on the United Continental cutover too, but that was as part of anaffected partner airline (Cape Air does a lot of Continental codeshares - now United - in the Caribbean) rather than directly. ] (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
8:23 pm	WBUR tomorrow morning If you want to know what I've been working on so much for the past 8 months, or why hardly anyone has seen me since Arisia except my coworkers and the people who frequent my house, tune in to WBUR 90.9FM tomorrow morning (on the air or online) at 6:45am US/Eastern, or the rebroadcast at 8:45am US/Eastern. If it's available for relistening later in the day on their web site, I'll update this post with a link at some point. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 14th, 2012
8:54 pm	arora's confessional Although work-crazy this month means my participation will be much more limited than in past years, aroraborealis's annual anonymous confessional post is up. I'll at least catch up later on the threads I miss now. Anyway, I think these are more fun the wider the sets of social circles participating, so people can't assume they know the people behind the anonymous comments. So pass on the link to people you know who arora doesn't know. Or even people you know who I don't know! :) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
7:04 pm	The former Soviet Onion Someone made a typo in their question on AskReddit a couple of weeks ago. A pun thread ensued. What are your opinions on the former Soviet Onion? "There are layers upon layers of issues regarding this. Every time you peel one layer back, you find another underneath. It's enough to make me cry, most times." "Perhaps you should consult wiki leeks." Click the link for more, so much more... [ If you want to see serious answers to the intended question, click here instead. ] (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 29th, 2012
11:34 pm	Working Weekends Working on the weekend from home is very different when a significant proportion of my coworkers are doing the same thing. In the past, home weekend work was usually a quiet opportunity to spend a few hours focused on some project I'd neglected, or catching up on backlog. But with all these other people also online, it turns into context-switchy collaborative work almost as fast-paced as on a weekday. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 17th, 2012
10:23 am	Beat the rush! Call Congress today. Tomorrow, a lot of web sites will either black out or change their front page to protest new Internet censorship legislation, SOPA in the US House and PIPA in the US Senate. Wikipedia's entire English language section will be replaced, for the day, with a page urging people to call Congress. SOPA and PIPA are a pair of bills pushed by the entertainment industry (MPAA, RIAA, and so on) to combat copyright infringement by throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Basically it takes the stance that having a free and open Internet is a bad thing because people use it to copy movies and things without paying for them, so let's not have a free and open Internet and maybe people will do less of that stuff. In November, Facebook, Google, eBay, Zynga, AOL, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Mozilla (Firefox), and twitter jointly placed a full page add in the NY Times opposing SOPA and PIPA. Sadly, the media content industry has a lot of money and lobbying power, and most members of Congress don't understand the net.* Some people who understand the net very well wrote this Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress in December. Signatories to that letter include almost everyone I can think of who played a prominent early role in creating the Internet and developing its key technical standards, including a lot of leaders of the Internet Engineering Task Force which oversees those technical standards today. And last week, the MIT Media Lab published their statement of opposition to SOPA & PIPA where they highlight censorship and human rights concerns. So get in ahead of the rush. With Wikipedia (along with reddit, boingboing, craigslist, and others) protesting, Congressional phone lines will be swamped tomorrow. If you're in the US, call your Representative and both Senators today. You can look up their contact information by plugging your ZIP code into Congress.org. You can learn a lot about the bills from the links above, but what you say on the phone call can be as simple as this: When calling your Representative: "Please oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act if it comes out of committee." When calling each Senator: "I hear that a vote on the Protect IP act is scheduled for later this month. Please vote against it." * BTW, wanna help someone awesome who does understand the net get elected to Congress? Darcy Burner, Computer Science degree from Harvard '96, worked at several software companies. I've met her. She's both nerdy and awesome. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
11:26 pm	DevOps Jesus Sysadmin/hacker/geek-ish people: You may want to follow devops_jesus on twitter. Some of my favorites so far: I never ascended bodily to Heaven - 1st century Judeans didn't understand what "migrating to the Cloud" meant. The founder of Christianity abruptly quit the project so the documentation had to be written by a community of volunteers. For those who don't know, #php is the technology that the Sodom and Gomorrah Tourist Board's website was built in. Keep your teams small. I know from experience that even adding a twelfth member can destroy the dynamic. The best thing about being born of a virgin is not having to deal with your parents having had sex. The best thing about being a #devop is not having to deal with your colleagues having had sex. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 31st, 2011
6:36 pm	[NYC] Chinatown Sunday afternoon, Original Cyn Monday night. We're gonna meet ladymondegreen and another friend or two at Vegetarian Dim Sum House in Chinatown tomorrow afternoon (Sunday, January 1st). Wanna join us? If you have my number you could text me. Or comment here on LJ. Monday night we're going to Original Cyn Burlesque [mildly nsfw link, unsurprisingly] at Lucky 13 Saloon, 213 13th St @ 5th Ave, Park Slope, Brooklyn. 10pm, no cover. Wanna come? (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 29th, 2011
10:31 am	New Years, New York Daisy and I are going to spend a few days in New York, Friday - Tuesday. Recommend interesting restaurants for us to try (and describe them)? Know of any parties or events we may go to? Suggest something to see or do? (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 24th, 2011
11:01 am	OccuPaia Occupy flyer in Makawao, about 6 miles from Paia, on Maui. Nov 5, 2011. (Comment on this)
Friday, December 23rd, 2011
11:29 am	"If you were put in charge of stopping online piracy, what would you do?" Someone asked that question on reddit. This was my hasty off the cuff reply: I'd stop calling it piracy, and make it clear that copyright violation is different from "theft" and does not respond to the same treatment. I'd get people to focus on the fact that copyright's purpose is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" - it's a means to an end, not an inherent right we are morally bound to honor. When we've structured our laws such that copyright is not designed to meet the ends it was intended for, that causes the system to fail. If we want copyright to be a success, we need to re-frame how we look at it, with the real ends in mind. One especially glaring problem with today's copyright system in the US is that it is designed to protect the profits of those who have already succeeded, against the opportunity of those who are creating new work now and will do so in the future. In other words, today's copyright law serves more to retard the progress of the arts, than to promote it. This also promotes a general lack of respect for copyright among the people, and no enforcement mechanism can compensate for that. We need to restore respect for copyright by doing things like severely cutting back how long it applies back to a "limited time" (Mickey Mouse needs to finally fall into the public domain!) and aggressively defending and expanding fair use. Then we could focus on cutting down copyright infringement that really is bad, the sort of stuff most people would support fighting. Social support for copyright infringement today is immense, and there's good reason for that, but it makes enforcement impractical. Once there's greater respect for copyright, and a greater public sphere of fair use and public domain, I'd try to get industry and government and nonprofits and other groups together to tackle the problem of how to make it easy for people to pay for stuff and how to make stuff they pay for easy to use and own and manage in the ways they want to, including making backups, copying to other devices, and giving away to their friends. We need another re-framing, a shift from reliance on restriction to reliance on opportunity. One of the biggest reasons people copy stuff illegally today is that the free illegal copies are both easier to get and better than the legal copies, which are restricted both in their distribution and functionality. We need to flip that around. P.S. What I wouldn't do is propose Internet blocklists and censorship of links, but that's what Congress is considering currently. If you're in the US, have you called your US Representative and both US Senators recently to ask them to oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA)? Poll #1805350 sopapipacalls Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 19 Called them to oppose SOPA/PIPA? View Answers I made at least one such call 7 (36.8%) I called my Representative and both Senators 4 (21.1%) Although I haven't called yet, I intend to 2 (10.5%) Making phone calls is intimidating! 3 (15.8%) Actually, I think SOPA and PIPA are okay 0 (0.0%) Don't know enough about SOPA/PIPA / hadn't heard about them yet 0 (0.0%) Not in the US 3 (15.8%) (23 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 9th, 2011
8:42 am	Republican Presidential Candidates I've been saying it all year, so before the number dwindles too much more, I'll post it: All of the Republican candidates are unelectable in the primary. Not a single one of them has a chance of winning the nomination. And yet, if they're the ones running, one of them will. This was true back when Herman Cain, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Sarah Palin, were part of the set. Still true now. None of them can win it, but apparently one of them will anyway. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, December 5th, 2011
8:26 am	Rubbing Permit Required [Old Burial Hill, Marblehead] (8 Comments |Comment on this)