Misc

Some time ago I complained about Maryland restrictions on direct-to-consumer genetic testing. The FDA is currently deliberating about whether to impose similar restrictions for the entire US, essentially forcing anyone wanting access to their own genetic data to do so only through their doctor. If you’re at all interested in this particular issue, or if you’re concerned about government restrictions on personal freedom in general, I urge you to submit a public comment before the deadline of midnight tonight (Monday, May 2). (Note that the page has a timeout feature, so if your comment is more than a sentence or two I advise you to compose and save it beforehand and then paste it into the comments field. Also, for really long comments you can upload a Word or PDF document.) ...

Today is one month since I started the Newt Gingrich weight loss program, and it’s time for a progress report. As you’ll recall, my initial weight as announced a month ago was 75.0 kg; as it turned out, my weight on the first day I started the program was 75.3 kg, so I was actually starting at a higher point than I anticipated when setting my first month’s goal of losing 1.0 kg. ...

just a quick note for those of you wondering what’s happened to the blog: Due to being very busy with both home and work stuff, I haven’t had time to do any blog posts recently, and most likely won’t be able to do any posts for the foreseeable future. Perhaps in a few weeks I’ll have some spare time again, but no guarantees. JessieX - 2011-02-09 04:17 At least we’ll see you at the upcoming blogger party. :-) Thank you for your support of the blogger parties… especially and even when we were a small group gathering. Your belief in us helped me keep going … Invite your fans. :-) http://hocoblogs-ramshead.eventbrite.com/ ...

One of the blogs I subscribe to is Ribbonfarm by Venkatesh Rao. I came across it as a result of a standing search I have for items related to Clayton Christensen and disruptive innovation, and kept reading it because Rao does interesting in-depth posts on various topics of interest to me. His most recent one is on the “discovery of money,” where he asks Do we need to elevate the notion of money from the level of cultural construct, where we created our problems, to the level of universal fundamental, where we might be able to solve them? ...

Recently I read a post on Chris Messina’s blog about the Yuri’s Night event at NASA Ames Research Center. It sounds like it was an interesting event ("Burning Man Meets NASA,” as Daniel Terdiman of CNET referred to it), and this is one of those times I regret not being a twenty-something living in Silicon Valley. (I could have watched the webcast, but got distracted by other stuff.) Although I can’t comment on the event itself (I’ll leave that to others), I can provide a little historical perspective. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-29: The piece below was originally written in 2006, and has been cited by Dave Herman of Mozilla Research as an influence on Rust community governance. I’ve fixed dead links where possible. This article is an outgrowth of my personal experiences as a participant in the Mozilla project working to create policies for the project that are both reasonable in terms of addressing the presumed problem at hand and acceptable to the various people who have a perceived stake in how the problem is addressed. In the course of doing that I evolved my own personal approach to approaching the problem of creating policies in an environment where people might disagree deeply about what such policies should be. ...

On my old web site (in the pre-blog days) I had a page with brief reviews of various books and music. Now that my blog is up and (sort of) working I’ve decided to revive that practice. For my first entry I’ve chosen Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out. I found out about this album from a story in the Washington Post, and was intrigued enough to check it out. As it happens I’d never bought or heard the original version of The Who Sell Out, so except for “I Can See for Miles and Miles” I was hearing every song for the first time. And there are some excellent songs on the album, of which my favorite at the moment is “I Can’t Reach You.” ...

UPDATE 2023/12/31: This is the first post for my blog after I converted my personal website hecker.org to use Blosxom. I’m including it here for historical interest. After a long period of neglecting my personal web site, I’ve decided to start my own weblog, with the goal of making it easier for me to publish new material and therefore (I hope) more likely that I’ll actually write more. My plan is to write about things that interest me, on the theory that they might interest at least a few other people. As part of that I’ll occasionally discuss the volunteer work I’ve been doing for the Mozilla project. ...