Paul E. Ester's Flogger

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The Enron Voice Mail System, 2002
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The definitive article of all things blogger..
A couple of years ago, friends of mine persuaded me I should get a website. It seemed like a nice idea – very 1999 – but I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. I didn’t even have a clue how technically to write for it. A good friend helped design the thing – and very snazzy it looked too. But, as with so much electronic media, a certain question was never quite answered in my mind. I liked the vanity of a site devoted to ME; and, to begin with, it was thrilling to get emails directly from readers. It was also useful to have a single place where all my work was collected and archived. But still, I kept asking myself as I stared at the laptop screen: What is this new medium really for?… Rest of Article

WASHINGTON (AP) – A Florida technology company is poised to ask the government for permission to market a first-ever computer ID chip that could be embedded beneath a person’s skin.

For airports, nuclear power plants and other high security facilities, the immediate benefits could be a closer-to-foolproof security system. But privacy advocates warn the chip could lead to encroachments on civil liberties.
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I switched to OS X and thought I would have to rework all the applescipts I use to update the site. Just like that they work. God Bless the MacOS X Team.

It’s not easy being the father of the Chinese Internet. Children are running by, boats are paddling, the smell of roast lamb fills the air, and Michael Robinson, a young American computer engineer, sits rigidly, facing an empty cafe on the shore of Qinghai Lake, speaking in a low voice of the crackdown. “What is better? Big brother Internet? Or no Internet at all?” Michael asks.

Michael was hired in 1996 by the Chinese government and Global One (a Sprint-France Telecom-Deutsche Telekom joint venture) to build the first network in China providing public access to the Internet. One day sticks in his mind. The Chinese engineers working with him suddenly convened a special meeting, demanding to know if it would be possible to do keyword searching inside e-mails and web addresses on the Chinese Internet. Not really, Michael replied; all information that travels the Net is broken up into little packets. It’s hard to “sniff” packets of information, particularly coded packets. You would need to intercept packets as they travel, and then there’s the problem of collating the information they contain, actually making sense of it. Yes, yes, they said, but can you do it? On the third go-round, it dawned on Michael that his fellow computer geeks wanted to end the meeting, too. But at a higher level, someone required assurance. Before Internet construction proceeded further, they would need to monitor what Chinese users did with it. For the engineers, this was just cover-your-ass stuff. As long as the foreigner assured them that down the road the Chinese would be able to build an Internet firewall against the world and conduct surveillance on its own citizens, the engineers could continue working with him. Yes, yes, it can be done, Michael told them, and they went back to work. 

Finally caught up at work after the holiday break. I haven’t seen many months like January was at work. I hope don’t see many more.
Lost my car to the autobody shop for a week so I took public transportation to work. It’s a 45 mile drive so the adventure begins, N to Caltrain 20 minutes, Caltrain to Mountain View 75 minutes, Mountain View to Tasman Station 20 Minutes, 20 minutes in-between trains, so something like 2.5 hours each way. The bright spot I got a lot of work done this morning. Something odd happened today I did not have any caffeine until noon.
My bro got his bonus today…he sucks