iWoz

Steve Wozniak's autobiography -- cowritten with Gina Smith -- iWoz is his attempt to set history straight on how he became an engineer, invented personal computing, founded Apple, didn't-quite-leave-Apple, and tried to inspire others to become engineers and do something good for the world. I didn't find it all that inspiring and I probably won't bother reading it again.

Google Reader + Fark, take two

I've updated my GreaseMonkey script that skips Fark's comment threads to be slightly less of a hack and also to go directly to the vote results thread for Photoshop posts.

The Way to Win

Mark Halperin and John Harris put together The Way to Win, their guide to the strategies necessary to win the White House in 2008. The book focuses on the setbacks and successes of the presidential campaigns of Bush 43 run by Karl Rove and Clinton 42 while drawing in lessons from the losses of Bush 41, Gore, and Kerry. The three most important strategies are to be organized, proactive, and responsive. Rove took advantage of advances in information technology to communicate faster and more directly with colleagues in the campaign and with voters and volunteers in the rest of the country. He also planned far in advance of issues, and prepared to deal with potential opposition effectively. Halperin and Harris then apply these lessons to analyze Hillary Clinton's 2008 prospects and offer suggestions about issues that Senator Clinton will have to watch out for. Already though, Clinton appears to be following the three tenets. The main downside of the book is that the analysis can be overshadowed by the authors constant complaining about what they label and repeatedly refer to as the "Freak Show", the "new media" of talk radio, bloggers, and other extremist sources. The complaints get old quickly and don't really add much to the book.

Google Reader + Fark

I got annoyed tonight at reading Fark in Google Reader. When I see an article I'm interested in, I have to click on the link in Reader to open up the comments page in Fark and then click on the image to get to the linked story. So I hacked something together in Greasemonkey (and hack is the key word there) that takes me straight to the story (although going through Fark's redirection server so they still have an idea how many people are clicking on the stories...ok, I was lazy and didn't feel like figuring out how to get the actual story URL from somewhere on Fark). I put it up at web.mit.edu/rradez/www/software/greader-skip-landing.user.js.
The filename and description reflects the fact that I'm probably going to get annoyed by another feed that does this type of landing page thing and redirect that too.

Borat

Went and saw Borat last night with a bunch of folks from work. Overall, I'd say it was worth the ten bucks to see it once, but I'm not gonna bother spending money to see it again. It was mixed; there were some really hilarious parts, a few parts that were sobering doses of reality, and then some really, really, really disturbing parts that I'm trying to block from my mind. None of the trailers before the movie looked amazingly good either.