Matthew Gifford

The marine behemoth boasted teeth the size of machetes packed into 3m jaws powerful enough to bite through granite.

Wow.

Where is the candidate who asks: Must we sell our soul to win this “war”?

I couldn’t say it any better than that. I fear that the 2004 election is going to be very frustrating. I just don’t see any candidates who are going to be willing to challenge the government’s insane quest to achieve absolute security.

While I was visiting my family for Christmas, my grandfather gave me this interesting bottle of Berreteaga habañero and sugar cane liquor. If you know anything about this bottle or where I can learn more, please let me know.

Yes, I know it’s a crappy picture. I’m too tired to mess around with eliminating the glare.

[A]s soon as I demanded to know what the federal employee had done to make her cry, I was swarmed by Portland police officers. Instantly. Three of them, cinching my arms, locking me in handcuffs, and telling me I was under arrest. Now my wife really began to cry.

I can’t describe how much this story disgusts me.

I’ve written Kevin Cosgrove, the editor of OregonLive, about this. I hope that he decides to have someone check it out.

A couple months ago, I decided that I should provide only summaries of posts in my RSS feed for two reasons.

The first was that there was a lot of talk about how people were having to pay more for hosting because of their large RSS feeds. This has not been a problem for me. Only a few people regularly download the file.

The second reason is that I wanted to drive traffic to my site. By providing only a summary, I figured that people would click through to my site and be more likely to post a comment or look at other pages. Meg Hourihan’s latest article for O’Reilly confirmed something that I felt: People who use RSS aggregators prefer to read posts within the aggregators. I’ve been noticing that I tend to pay less attention to summary-style RSS feeds.

So, I have returned to providing the full text of posts in my RSS feed.

Reid Ellison, an 11th-grader at Anzar High School in San Juan Bautista, recently decided a cool student project would be to hack into the school’s computer grading system. So he presented the idea to school administrators, and they gave him the go-ahead.

So he wrote a script that cracked the system in 200 ms and received a perfect score for his efforts. It’s nice to see that some educators still seem to have a clue.

This website is now licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 license. If you’re not sure what this means, watching this movie [via Boing Boing] should clear things up.

For those of you who generate RSS 2.0 syndication files and use a Creative Commons license, Dave Winer is working on a creativeCommons RSS module.

According to George Ziemann, the RIAA is fudging its numbers [via Interesting People] in its effort to demonstrate that piracy is the cause of slipping music sales. Why do I find that easy to believe?

Great news! Elcomsoft has been found not guilty on all counts. Take that, DMCA!

Katinka Matson’s [via Interesting People] scans of flowers are wonderful. I love when people approach their art with a spirit of inventiveness. I hope the images print well.