Today was my first performance review since the rest of the e-smith operations team was laid off pretty much exactly one year ago. I moved from a little mostly-unmanaged group that took care of its own stuff then into the middle of corporate IT — a week in the network group before it was clear […]

Yesterday was the sort of day which one might term “fun and productive”, because it was both fun and productive. Candice and I went down to Montreal for the day. While we were there, we: Went out to St Hubert Airport to pick up my Pilot Training Record, which I talked about over in the […]

An update on the car situation: Late last week the engine started misfiring, so I made an appointment to take it in today. One cylinder was having problems even when its spark plug was swapped with a good cylinder’s, which meant replacing the ignition cassette, which is what a Saab uses instead of a coil […]

So Apple introduced the new form factor of the new iMac. They describe it as futuristic, but I think they’ve confused the future with a 1999 dot-com: I don’t get it. Apple’s designs have been clunky before, but they’re usually appropriately derivative — “It’s shaped like a TV”! “It recalls a desk lamp!”. But “It […]

So I’m thinking about starting flying lessons again. I’ve set up a separate blog for my flying stuff, partly to play with WordPress and partly because it’ll be sufficiently topical to need its own space. The blog is here, and you can add it to your friends page as Mendel_flies. I’ll be posting about how […]

Anyone seen the lobsters? I can’t find them anywhere.

I remember playing with the POVray 3d graphics tool a few years ago, but I never managed to get past teapots on checkerboards. Others have done better.

This writeup from Eric Rescorla (which he also posted to the NANOG mailing list) is a great summary of the implications of the recent discoveries of collisions or weaknesses in the SHA-0 and MD5 cryptographic hash algorithms.