People are getting pissed at SixApart for their stupid modifications to LiveJournal, apparently in the name of cracking down on child porn. (They're doing it wrong.) The problem is that people want to move away from LJ to a decentralized system (such as the way email and web hosting works), but blogging software does not yet generally support locked posts. (Locked posts are blog entries that only selected friends have permission to read.) I'm thinking that OpenID could help with this situation.

Sorry for the disjointed, skimpy post: I just want to get these ideas out there for discussion.

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The five-second rule surely owes its existence to the popularization of germ theory. People who abide by the rule must believe (at some level) that pathogenic microbes are tiny little beasties crawling about on the ground, with nothing better to do than to clamber onto dropped potato chips.

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In Chemistry class today we talked about forms of energy. I've always been a little irked by the notion that there are two main forms of energy, kinetic and potential, but it's never been annoying enough to grab my focus. Today, however, I formed a definition of kinetic energy that puts it squarely within the realm of potential energy.

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Due to a lawsuit by Eolas against Microsoft, Internet Explorer (both 6 and 7) is not allowed to auto-load movies, flash, and other plugins. The effect is that users must click an empty area with a gray outline to load the content or start interacting with it. The standard approach to route around this usability fiasco is to dynamically load the <object> and <embed> tags with javascript. Here I present an easier, more readable, and unobtrusive technique for embedding content in IE6 and IE7.

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Star Simpson, the 19-year-old arrested at Logan airport for having a "hoax device", is just another living, breathing, hoping, dreaming human, like you. Essentially, she was arrested for being an idealist, for not understanding that the people with the guns and the power see "different" as "dangerous".

The following was written by a friend of mine, who wishes to remain anonymous, but gave permission to share it.

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