This was alternately irritating and quite funny, which was a nice surprise, since I expected much more irritation than humor. If you liked The RM or The Singles Ward, it might be worth borrowing it from a friend.
Since taking a semester-long class on the Brontës at BYU many, many years ago, I have been interested in visiting Haworth, home of the Brontës. Patrick Brontë , father of the three famous author sisters, was clergyman at the local Anglican church, and the Brontë children grew up and lived most of their adult lives there. The Brontës are a fascinating family -- all four of the children who lived to adulthood had poems and/or novels published. Charlotte is probably the most well-known of the sisters due to her novel Jane Eyre , but Emily is also pretty famous for Wuthering Heights . Branwell , the only son, had some poems published. Anne , the youngest, wrote what my BYU professor considered the first feminist novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall . Charlotte and Anne both wrote other novels and all of the sisters also wrote poetry. As children, the siblings created two imaginary worlds inspired and peopled by a set of toy soldiers given to Branwell by his father. The worlds had de...
The full title of this book is Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World , and the book delivers on the promise of that title. I started it a couple of months ago, and enjoyed taking my time reading just a few chapters at each sitting. Bruce Schneier is a well-known cryptographer -- he was a major participant in the AES cipher contest a few years back -- but this is a nontechnical book. He does an excellent job of demonstrating that security is all about tradeoffs: cost vs. benefit in terms of money, attention, convenience, freedom, etc. There's no perfect security, and all security decisions need to be re-evaluated from time to time. Based on what? Bruce outlines a five-step process to evalute security decisions: What are you trying to protect? ... "So much of the bad security surrounding us is a result of not understanding exactly what is being protected and of implementing countermeasures that move the risk around but don't actually mit...
I finally finished the sweater I designed and made for Jon, and here it is: Jon is a programmer, user, fan, and proponent of free software (similar to open-source software), hence the "free as in freedom." I don't know if the phrase is the official tagline of the Free Software Foundation , but it's the title of a biography of Richard Stallman , the father of the free software movement, and it describes what is meant by "free software." Anyway, I wanted Jon's sweater (the first I've made for him) to be unique to him, and this is what we came up with. It looks good on him, right? :)
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