Quick update: Either Classmates.com was hacked, or nobody over there is paying the least attention to user activity. Textual obscenities and dirty pitchers abound; those with strong stomachs may see it for the time being here. I’m divided as to whether I should alert them to it. There are 17,000 Lane alumni in the system [...]
Posts from ‘July, 2010’
Was Classmates.com Hacked?
Something very weird is going on here: I’ve gotten a scattering of emails in the last 18 hours from Classmates.com. Nothing new in that, except that these are obviously fakes, albeit very convincing fakes. The subject line for the first is: “You are invited to the Naked Fest with Lane Technical High School.” The From: [...]
What Dogs Gave Us
We domesticated dogs. And dogs, in return, made human civilization possible. Work with me here. A lot of my recent reading has been about human origins, stemming from my fascination with Homo Neanderthalis and what became of him. Two books of note: The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond (1993) and Before the Dawn by Nicholas [...]
Odd Lots
Everyone’s talking about a recent Copyright Office ruling that jailbreaking of smartphones is no longer illegal, but few have mentioned that several other significant exceptions to the DMCA’s anticircumvention provisions have been issued in the same ruling. Most interesting to me are limitations on ebook DRM where they prevent audio interpretation of texts from working. [...]
Loren Heiny 1961-2010
Lora Heiny sent me a note this morning to tell me that her brother Loren had died during the night, after a four-year struggle with cancer. He was 49. Loren was an early expert on Tablet PC technology, and most of what I learned about it after I got my X41 in 2005 came from [...]
Review: Despicable Me
One reason I let my subscription to National Catholic Reporter lapse in 2001 was that they reviewed Shrek. C’mon: Space I would prefer to see covering Catholic issues like Papal authority and women’s ordination was spent reviewing cartoon movies of no religious significance. Worse yet, the reviewer just didn’t get it. He was furious that [...]
There Goes My Banner
I know that my custom banner’s gone; I upgraded to the latest PrimePress theme here a few minutes ago, and the damned thing is too stupid to check if custom graphics exist before overwriting everything. Alas, I don’t have time to fix it right now, as I’ll be out the door in a couple of [...]
“Click the Word That Describes Them…”
How about… “imaginary”? As I’ve said before with respect to fraudulent pitches like this, there were no girls in Lane’s Class of 1970. And I’ve heard from others who have paid up for the service in response to Classmates’ endless emails, only to find that no one had signed their guestbooks, and no one was [...]
App Inventor for Android
Whoa. Yesterday morning Google took the wraps off App Inventor, a visual development environment for the Android mobile OS. I’m still trying to slurp from the firehose, even though I’m finding that all the hoses have basically the same information, and in truth not a great deal of that. But I’ll tell you right now: [...]
Millard Fillmore in the Rivervalley
I finally got a Millard Fillmore dollar at the bank today. I’ve been meaning to ask for one for a long time, but I hate to bother the poor tellers for silly things like that when there’s a line. Today, for whatever reason, the Wells Fargo branch at Safeway was empty and staffers were standing [...]