Rondam Ramblings

I wrote this in 1992. (It was originally entitled "The Reader.") Maybe should have posted it instead of the "Thud" pos...

Thought I'd tell a little about the reality that motivated me to write my philosophical Kobayashi Maru scenario. I've been doing a...

I've been writing Rondam Ramblings for over seven years now, which probably makes it one of the longer-lived continuously maintained blo...

Imagine one evening you meet a stranger at a bar. You exchange the usual social pleasantries and begin to establish a rapport, until the st...

On this the ninth anniversary of the most traumatic event in recent memory I mourn the loss of 2996 of my fellow human beings (because not a...

Gripe mode on: If you think about it, sockets are the elephant in the unix living room. Everything in unix is supposed to be a file. ...

Hooray! It seems to be working too. I'm seeing a lot of spam attempts, but nothing is getting through. Thanks, Google!

I don't want my money to be used for bullshit like this .

The AT&T 3G microcell is like a little personal cell tower that uses your internet connection to provide cell service in places where t...

I don't normally do endorsements on Rondam Ramblings, but I'm going to make a rare exception for the Singularity Summit (August 14-...

The EFF has achieved a rare victory for individual liberty by convincing the U.S. copyright office to officially declare that circumventing...

Lately everything I post collects at least one piece of Chinese comment spam. I've been manually deleting them, but I don't know ho...

The Boston Globe recently published an interesting story about how facts backfire : It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern dem...

It wasn't just the escrow from hell that has made our lives stressful over the last few months, but we've also had a fair amount of ...

I was in the process of writing up the story of the Escrow from Hell. It was up to six or seven chapters and I was only about half way thro...

Rondam Ramblings has been quiet lately because we have been in the midst of the Escrow From Hell (and its companion feature, the Move From P...

This sneak peek at Windows 8 would be funny if it weren't so sad. "There appears to be considerable planning taking place as to ho...

You know you've made it to the big time as a blogger when people start stealing your material. Variable3.com has ripped off my top t...

I've known for a while that AT&T sucks but they just took suckage to a whole new level. We recently moved to the Bay Area from Los...

Scientists the INFN1’s Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy announced today that they have detected a muon neutrino spontaneously changing into a ...

I wasn't planning on blogging about this until later, but since Miles pointed out that I'm being pretty gloomy lately I decided to ...

It appears that there may be some actual benefits from acupuncture .

As usual Glenn Greenwald gets to the heart of the matter: Late last night, Israel attacked a flotilla of ships in international waters carr...

Heather Havrilesky asks How can the Lost finale not suck? [UPDATE:] Yep, pretty much every bit as bad as I was expecting it to be. God, I...

A Pennsylvania man faces eight years in prison on what are almost certainly trumped up charges of assaulting a federal agent. The alleged ...

Slate has a fascinating interview with Diane Ravitch , former member of the Bush I administration, about her changing her position on the v...

Facebook seems to be getting more and more evil . I have an FB account. I hardly ever use it, but I'm seriously considering shutting i...

Finding examples of things that CSS can't do seems suddenly to be all the rage. Here is my favorite example of something that is imposs...

Jeff Atwood agrees with me that CSS should not be used for layout . ...even if you have extreme HTML hygiene and Austrian levels of disci...

(I wrote this many years ago as a web page but decided to repost it here so people can comment on it.) The Email Cold-Call HOWTO A "co...

It's because I regularly get email messages that look like this: Joe Shmoe requested to add you as a connection on LinkedIn: Ron, I'...

Japanese researchers have built a robot that balances on a ball . It's wicked cool , like a Segway taken to the next level. It is real...

The image of Jesus has shown up on Google Maps.

The inventor of Tickle Me Elmo (and no, I am not making this up) has invented a new gun -- as in weapon -- that can be adjusted to fire both...

Researchers at U.C. Berkeley have built a robot that can fold towels . Veeeeeeerrrrrryyyyyy sssslllloooowwwwllllyyyyy. But it actually wor...

Barack Obama has apparently ordered the assassination of a U.S. citizen without a trial in the name of fighting terrorism. This is an even...

I haven't been writing much because I've been too busy dealing with getting ready to move. Buying and selling houses is a nice prob...

Before the ink even had time to dry, the state of Virginia filed suit to challenge the health care reform bill as unconstitutional. And I ...

An orange dwarf star is going to collide with our solar system in about a million years, more or less. That's million, with an M. Tha...

Winston Churchill once observed that the history books are written by the victors in a conflict, but I sometimes wonder if even he appreciat...

Forbes has a thorough debunking .

I just had a very disturbing conversation with a Rackspace Cloud CSR. It went something like this: CSR: Can I have your account user name a...

Theodore H. Frank observes that Toyota vehicles apparently engage in age discrimination . Not Toyota the company mind you, the vehicles th...

Allen Hartwig created this freakishly accurate Toyota simulator . It's even better if you have sound turned on.

James Sikes, the driver of the runaway Prius in San Diego the other day may have had ulterior motives . Are we about to see a repeat of ba...

Just stumbled across this amazing video of an ant colony that was pumped full of cement and then excavated. I can hardly imagine a more st...

He calls the uncontrolled acceleration hysteria (ambiguity intended) a witch hunt .

Washington DC has become the sixth "state" to legalize same-sex marriage , joining Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshir...

It seems the Toyota hysteria has spread to Australia : A former recreational rally car driver says she experienced sudden unintended acceler...

Ever since I was a geeky kid lusting after a 48k Apple ][+ I've dreamed of moving to the Silicon Valley and making it big there. That ...