I mentioned earlier that I wanted to learn to surf. I'm also interested in learning to sail, and I've been putting a lot more effort into that recently. The reason, I think, is that there are certain basic pleasures of the ancient world that one has to work very hard to come by today. We've cut ourselves off from things that even our grandfathers took for granted.

One of the pleasures of sailing is the ability to return to darkness. Sitting in a quiet cove, with the horizon marked by the scissored black cut-outs of pine or palm trees, is to know pure relaxation. The stars may be reflected, if you’re lucky, in the smooth water, or you might see the anchor lights of other boats moving in gentle arcs against the constellations.

One of the strangest experiences I’ve had at sea was being becalmed in the middle of the Pacific at night on a mirror-smooth sea. The stars, and even the moon, were so perfectly reflected that you couldn’t find the horizon, so it seemed as if our boat was a satellite in space, surrounded above, below and on all sides by stars.

Why I want to learn to sail...

Russ Housley is the first chair of the IETF with a particular expertise in network security. Housley, who runs consulting firm Vigil Security, has been active in the IETF for nearly 20 years and helped write early e-mail security and public key infrastructure standards. Three months into his job as chair of the leading Internet standards body, Housley talked with Network World National Correspondent Carolyn Duffy Marsan about his strategy for bolting better security onto the freewheeling Internet.

Q&A: Security top concern for new IETF chair - Network World

Gibson: Something that started with Pattern Recognition was that I discovered I could Google the world of the novel. I began to regard it as a sort of extended text — hypertext pages hovering just outside the printed page.

Q&A: William Gibson Discusses Spook Country and Interactive Fiction

SummerCon 2007: August 24-26, 2007 Atlanta

Where: Wyndham Garden Hotel
125 10th Street NE
Atlanta, GA 30309
1 404-873-4800
(corner of Peachtree St & 10th)

SummerCon

Highslide JS is a piece of JavaScript that streamlines the use of thumbnail images on web pages. The library offers these features and advantages:

* No plugins like Flash or Java required.
* Popup blockers are no problem. The images expand within the active browser window.
* Single click. After expanding the image, the user can scroll further down or leave the page without restoring the image.
* The approach uses two separate images. No heavy full-size image packed into thumbnail display size! The full-size image is loaded in the background either on page load or when the user clicks the thumb. You specify this option in the script's settings.
* Compatibility and safe fallback. If the user has disabled JavaScript or the JavaScript fails in any way, the browser redirects directly to the image itself. This fallback is able to cope with most exceptions and incompatibilities.

This is actually quite slick....

Highslide JS - JavaScript thumbnail viewer

You've always knew it, I've always speculated on it, now I can finally provide a decent screenshot of cyber jihadist's howto recommending and taking the average reader step by step through the process of obtaining and using TOR.

This blog has a large number of posts on Jihadist internet security tools and tactics. Apparently they wrote their own encryption tool, which is universally stupid...

Dancho Danchev - Mind Streams of Information Security Knowledge: Cyber Jihadists' and TOR

July 27th, 2007 (Last Friday Of July)
8th Annual
System Administrator Appreciation Day

System Administrator Appreciation Day

when you make any decision involving equity,
run it through 1/(1 - n) to see if it makes sense. You should
always feel richer after trading equity. If the trade didn't
increase the value of your remaining shares enough to put you net
ahead, you wouldn't have (or shouldn't have) done it.

The Equity Equation

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours.
art.cat.ap.jpg

His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means the patient has less than four hours to live.

"He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," Dr. David Dosa said in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Many family members take some solace from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one," said Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor of medicine at Brown University.

After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He'd sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.

Dosa said Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof. "This is not a cat that's friendly to people," he said.

Creepy...

'Furry Grim Reaper'

Publisher American Media Inc. said on Tuesday it will stop printing the Weekly World News, which for 28 years gleefully chronicled the exploits of alien babies, animal-human hybrids and dead celebrities.

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Weekly World News to close (aliens not blamed!)| Entertainment| Industry| Reuters