I recently finished the free online Stanford cryptography course offered through Coursera and taught by Dan Boneh. It’s a challenging class, with at least four hours of lectures a week, and it actually took me two attempts to get all the way through it. I’m really glad I did though: cryptography is a tremendously empowering subject, and learning the theoretical foundation can be not just educational but inspirational. In one early lecture, Boneh lays out a basic tenet that really spoke to me:
I’ve submitted two proposals for panels at next year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin. I really hope one of them gets picked. The PanelPicker is currently open for voting (I’d appreciate your votes!) and then I’ll know later this year if I’m in.
I can’t believe six months has already passed, but I realized the other day that I’ve been running Iron Blogger SF for half a year now. A lot has happened: we’ve added a bunch of members and lost a few, too. We’ve had great meetups, gotten to know each other a bit better, and with a convention of the Global Iron Blogger Council this month,1 we’ve even expanded the rules to establish reciprocity for members of different global chapters. Very nice.
Two articles that crossed my desk today described the difference between the two kinds of hackers. Howard Rheingold offered this distinction in his memoir of the WELL:
I’m not much for drawing, but I’m working on a set of minimalist representations of San Francisco icons for a project right now. I’ll post more about that project later. For now, here’s my rough take on the Golden Gate Bridge.
My written one-to-one communication patterns can be grouped into three major categories: longform, synchronous shortform, and asynchronous shortform. For the most part I use email, IMs, and SMS, respectively, for those purposes.