Maryland’s legislature has passed a bill requiring companies with more than 10,000 employees to spend at least 8% on health care or put the money into a state fund for poor residents’ health care. People have been calling it the “Wal-Mart Bill” because they’re the only Maryland employer who has enough employees to qualify. And [...]

Damn, if today’s User Friendly is any indication, I’m a D-list blogger (at best).
Tags: User Friendly comic bloggers

Read Dear Elena, starting here. I can’t think of anything else to say.
Tags: children parents

O’Reilly’s Meerkat is being shut down, effective March first. Sure, there are other alternatives, but Meerkat freed you from having to do much setup and just worked. Oh well.
Tags: RSS Meerkat

There are fewer and fewer people who want to be volunteer firefighters every year. Recruiting and retention efforts help but they’re up against a number of factors outside their sphere of influence. If you live in an area served by volunteers, you can expect your taxes to go up as they are replaced by paid [...]

Ever see something at work that you know is illegal? While there may be laws that protect you from retaliation by your employer if you blow the whistle, you can still be prosecuted. You’re probably better off just blackmailing your CEO.
Tags: Diebold whistleblower voting fraud

Phil Windley attended a talk by Alan Kay (of PARC and Smalltalk fame) wherein Alan asked the question Is Computer Science as Oxymoron?
Tags: Alan Kay PARC Smalltalk Computer Science

CRW 0001
Originally uploaded by tommasz.
It’s been a very warm winter, but we’ve gotten some snow here and there. Last night gave us a couple of inches of light, powdery lake effect snow.
Tags: Rochester, winter, photo

The M4 Message Breaking Project is using distributed computing to break four Enigma Machine-encoded messages from 1942. You can download a client and help with the effort. So far, one message has been successfully decoded.
In case you don’t know, the Enigma Machine was used by the Nazis to encrypt messages prior to sending them. There [...]

NASA’s got an Apollo 11 Image Library available for browsing. Somewhere I have some prints from the original Hasselblad negatives, but these are easier to deal with. Amazing quality and amazing subject matter.
Tags: NASA Apollo 11 moon

CRW 0009
Originally uploaded by tommasz.
Also over at Iola, these sad concrete benches are suffering from neglect.
Tags: Rochester Iola photo

CRW 0005
Originally uploaded by tommasz.
This building over in the Iola complex looks like it didn’t handle that recent windstorm all that well. The plywood they used is thin and flexible; I’m surprised it stays on at all. As I was walking around the building I actually stepped on [...]