VPHC™ for short. 

It hit me today that the right way to design a lighting system to turn off, is with a series of timers. That way when the last person is walking down the long hall, as they walk down it, the lights will turn off one by one, just after they pass them, and get absolutely freaked out by it, thinking they're stuck in a horror movie.

Today I rebuilt my laptop. It solved a number of mysterious problems, like VirtualBox having never worked before. Unfortunately all of my browser state is gone, and I need to remember about 25 different passwords. Fat-finger one and you're in Captcha hell for 10 minutes.  All in al I've had to "solve" captchas about 55 times today (since most of them are illegible). There has to be a better way.

I was just reading about a court-ruling about a potential violation of the WireTap recording act here. It made me think of a meeting I had with SlideShare. I sat down to interview for a position I later decided to turn down, because SlideShare mostly hires cheap engineers in India to save costs, so they tend to offer insultingly low salary and stock packages to their SF employees, or at least they did with me.  The first person I interviewed with decided it was within his rights to record the interview with his iphone's recorder app, without even giving me the courtesy of asking for permission. This made me extremely uncomfortable, and was the second deciding factor,  behind the funny salary and ahead of the cheapskate mentality.

Simply put, when I buy a dvd or a cd, I'm buying a license to that content. What I should be getting is a token added to some central media licensing database which tells any service which sells access to this media that I am entitled to it. This way if I already own 10,000 songs legally then say internet radio stations could play mixes of songs from my media license database and legalize all of the features that killed so many music start-ups, like letting people choose specific songs to play online.

When I first moved out on my own I moved to this small town in Eastern Pennsylvania called Stroudsburg, to work at some 2-bit web-hosting operation. That first year was a good one. I worked two jobs, one at a hosting company, and one at the local dial-up ISP. My free time was mostly spent at the town's one offee shop, or  hanging out with my neighbor listening to progressive jazz and watching him practice drums and sax. On hot summer days (yes, there's such a thing as summer, you just need to leave California to find it) open all of the windows to create a cross-breeze, enjoy a simple meal, and fall asleep listening to the night time shows on the incredible public radio stations I could tune into from Philly.  One of my fondest memories of this time was falling asleep listening to Abbey Lincoln sing, "Who used to dance" and having an evening of incredible dreams. She was definitely my favorite female voice, but more so, the feelings and moods she created in her songs always seemed to brighten up my day.  

http://www.incrediblethings.com/style-and-gear/wine-rack-flask-bra/

My good friend Fred just decided to open source the software he's been pouring his life into the past few years. It's a suite of utilities that he built to enable people to build their own WISP out of their excess DSL/Cable bandwidth. Kind of a neat idea. http://blog.silverliningnetworks.com/2010/08/announcing-the-silversplash-open... is a link to the blog posting.