Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

One of those concepts that most North Americans don’t run into everyday is that of microfinance. You can read about it at the link, but in a nutshell it’s the idea that even “poor” people need access to financial services. One particular area where this is true is financing for the small–by North American standards–loans [...]

And once again, we have my quick opinions on a variety of things I’ve run into in the last little while. I am fascinated with the mystery of what WalMart might be doing in their giant, mysterious data center. I’m guess that it might be related to “lowering prices every day”, but doing so by [...]

You may have noticed a while back that I turned on gravatars for comments on the blog. What this means, in a nutshell, for those who aren’t already down is that if you have a “globally registered avatar” at Gravatar.com, then your comments here will show the image beside the commentor name. (Assuming that you [...]

OK, let’s do one of those patented link posts to clean out some of these open tabs… Let’s start with Mario. As far as programming goes, I’m a kernel guy–an engine guy. I don’t do UI, and trust me, you’re happy I don’t. I make it work under the covers. As such, I often deride [...]

It’s really a miscellany today. I was half-tempted to title this 88 lines about 44 links, and maybe even do it in some kind of poetic structure, but fortunately a combination of laziness and good sense prevailed. Nice to see that former local (and HGPA-member) Brian O’Malley‘s movie deal is actually happening–at least leads are [...]

I’m about to move up to WordPress 2.5. If there are any issues apparent before midnight (EST) assume I’m aware and working on them. After that, please drop me a comment if you see something broken.

The ‘net memes are often easy to pass by, but there’s something about the CD Cover one that amuses me. My result is shown above (click for the larger version). Tons of other ones–many of which are disturbingly plausible–at the flickr pool. The extremely Net-savvy among you will be able to place the font used [...]

I’ve read all of Christopher Buckley’s satires, and have almost uniformly enjoyed them. I only recently got caught up, reading the latest one, Boomsday, just before the holidays late last year. I enjoyed it, too. However, there was one thing in there that really caused me to lose my suspension of disbelief. It wasn’t the [...]

I decided tonight to learn how to write a Google gadget. I figured something simple, like a configurable RSS feed reader (with a little shiny chrome) would probably be enough to learn the skeleton of what I would need to know. So I whipped up a gadget for the Shadow Unit feed, since I’m still [...]

I was fascinated to learn that the real Baltimore Sun has an interactive page/Google Maps application that shows the location of murders, and allows you to filter by age, race, gender, cause of death, and whether or not there was an article about the murder. (It also allows you to filter by district which is [...]

For a long time now I’ve been asking to be cremated and buried or scattered, rather than being embalmed and buried whole. This is primarily because I find the whole embalming thing a bit icky and unnatural, and secondarily because as an engineer I realize that the conventional burial model doesn’t scale with geometrically expanding [...]

This is a representation of this web page: The legend is as follows: blue: for links (the A tag) red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags) green: for the DIV tag violet: for images (the IMG tag) yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags) orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, [...]