parker higgins

I took this photograph this morning from Bernal Hill, a little earlier than I would normally be awake because the dog I’m sitting for (Hi, Ace!) demands it. I’ve been up to the hill a bunch of times, and the view is still striking.

Maira and I were walking around her neighborhood in Glen Park when we stumbled across a tiny road called Ohlone Way. It’s pretty charming. It’s properly marked as a street, but the entire length is unpaved, and not much wider than a single car across. It rained a few days ago, and the ground was still a bit muddy and marked with deep tire tracks.

The San Francisco Public Library has the right idea about offering unfiltered Internet access. When you connect to the open wifi network, you’re given this notice and the ability to click right through:

Tetris may be the perfect game, but the beauty of its play is woefully ephemeral. Worse, the lack of a consistent and robust system for recording and annotating individual tetromino drops has, for decades, stunted serious scholarship.

Last week Earl Shuman, a songwriter behind several hits in the 50s and 60s, sued Alicia Keys for copyright infringement in her recent single “Girl on Fire.” He alleges that the song infringes a tune he wrote in 1962, which was recorded as “Hey There Lonely Girl” by Eddie Holman and which peaked at #2 on the Billboard top 100 in the week of February 21, 1970.¹

I enjoyed getting this update from my dad about meeting a local UPS bike messenger. During the holiday season, UPS puts some of their drivers on bikes to reduce fuel costs and increase capacity while they’re delivering more packages than during the rest of the year.

In November 2005, Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters gave an impressively candid answer about copyright terms being too long, and that she thought such a situation was a “big mistake.” Unfortunately link rot has begun to set in, and it was somewhat difficult for me to track down a copy of the video.

Advanced users of the New York Times may know about the “two-shift click” trick on that website: hit the shift button twice on any article page, and you then have the option to link to specific paragraphs or even highlight arbitrary sentences throughout the article, in a way that’s stored in the URL so you can send it around. It’s a shame it’s not more widely known — it’s pretty amazing.

There’s an important rule in the cryptography world: you should never implement it yourself. So much can go wrong in the implementation of a crypto-system that you’d better leave it up to experts. Funny, then, that exactly the opposite rule applies to planning CryptoParties.

On Tuesday, I’ll be voting in person for the first time in my native California. I’ve only ever voted by mail before. (I voted from Berlin in the 2008 presidential election, and had a charming exchange in broken German with the women working at the post office. They, like nearly all of Germany, were following the election as big Obama fans, so I had little trouble convincing them of the significance of the letter I was handing off.)