policy

From a discussion with my team lead:

The Policy

  1. Do the right thing.
  2. If you need to do the wrong thing for the right reasons, you are in fact required to do so (see 1).

end-of-year

From our director of Purchasing:

DO NOT CREATE ANY REQUISITIONS ON MONDAY JUNE 30. Any requisition created on June 30 will be canceled by Purchasing and you will need to recreate it on July 1 with new year funds and your name will be removed from the book of life.

gravatars

The Gravatar logoGravatars – Globally Recognized Avatars – may be the coolest thing since MU*s. Yes, I’m showing my age. I was a text-only geek. It’s how I learned to roleplay. It’s how I learned to program/code. It’s how I had my first social-networking interaction via the internet. This was back in the day when people were trying to get all sorts of “universal” ideas going. Every web site (that I was interested in) seemed to be a new kind of trinket you could add to your internet satchel. I thought all of that was gone with the dot.com bloom and bust, and the web 2.0 age of slick social services.

But thanks to WordPress, I find out (belatedly, of course) about Gravatar. You upload your avatar – a small photo or icon – to a central place, and the icon will auto-magically appear next to your name the next time you comment on someone’s blog. Of course, it only works with those blog sites that are using compatible blogging tools or plugins (WordPress now supports it natively).

But what a great idea! And they’ve implemented it in true web 2.0 style – not AJAX for AJAX’s sake but a clean and simple interface that lets you do exactly what you need and then gets out of the way. Bravo!

all i want is to eat your brains.



Daniel with Heather Armstrong
Originally uploaded by poortvld

I am at sxsw interactive. This is my second year. This conference gives me the ideas and the energy to try and make a place for myself in the web industry. This is Day Two, and the panels have been great (most of them), the people I meet and re-meet have made this a blast (most of the time), and in the same day I met Heather Armstrong (dooce.com) and Jonathan Coulton. I also walked past Mike Birbiglia but he was sitting at a table and I figured it would be like swooping down on a helpless rabbit who told really funny jokes, so I kept on walking.

I’m not a fanboy. Right, I have an iPhone. Right, I wear Converse or Adidas shoes. But I have never a) stolen a set list and gotten it autographed, or b) told a famous blogger that my mother doesn’t like it when she uses the F-word. Until today.

Continue reading “all i want is to eat your brains.”

gray hat hacking

In mainstream culture, the term hacker has a negative connotation. It is a synonym for a person who commits computer crimes, usually by breaching security systems. The hacker community prefers to bestow the name hacker to highly skilled programmers who are admired for ingenious and clever uses of technology and programming. In the security industry, there are three “shades” of hacker: white hat, black hat, and gray hat. Each type of hacker is known by his intent, ethic, and authority to breach a security system.
Continue reading “gray hat hacking”