Author: Ezra S F


  • Overuse of SSNs

    The overuse of the Social Security Number bothers me. Healthcare providers use the SSN. They all want it, so they all have it in their files and databases. Given the push to move records to electronic form, they all have it recorded in databases. This makes them tempting targets for fraudsters. They have to use…

  • What’s six miles wide and can end civilization in an instant? An asteroid — and there are lots of them out there. With humor and great visuals, Phil Plait shows us all the ways asteroids can kill us (yipes), and what we must do to avoid them.

  • Acknowledgement

    Trying to get a price quote from a vendor. It has been two full weeks. The first week plus was confusion within their organization who should be working on it. See, back in April they reclassified our account, so we got a different representative, which is fine. But four months later, they should not be…

  • Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. — Anaïs Nin (via thepowerwithin) Staying true to yourself is not about staying the same. It’s not about making a goal to be the exact individual whom you were since day one. Staying true means expressing what you think, feel, and value; regardless of when in…

  • At the time AirBNB was so small, Joe Gebbia personally went to listers to photograph homes for the listings. In taking these photos… “We got so close that we go to step into their shoes for a moment and see the world through their eyes, and really see the pain points that they were feeling,” says…

  • I loved Adam Grant’s book, Originals. The below video is essentially the TL;DR version. How do creative people come up with great ideas? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies “originals”: thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this talk, learn three unexpected habits of originals — including…

  • We built monuments to display our pride of winning or mourn our loss. They represent what we considered the great things about our society in the past as lessons for the present and future. In that light, defacing a historical marker such as both of Emmett Till’s shows the opposition that honoring the person is…

  • The government has no interest in records relating to the 1.3 million IP addresses that are mentioned in DreamHost’s numerous press releases and opposition brief. Basically, the Department of Justice served Dreamhost this warrant asking for the code backing the web site, the HTTP request and error logs, logs about backend connections to upload files to the…

  • Total Eclipse

      A friend invited others to her parent’s house inside the totality. It was fantastic placement very near the center of totality, so we got to see it for a couple minutes rather than a few seconds just inside totality. [Photo album] I experienced the annular eclipses in 1984 and 1994. I was a kid…