matt shelton

I was incredibly excited to read that Neal Stephenson‘s next novel, Anathem, will be released this September.

*does a little dance*

The amazon affiliate boxy thing on the right doesn’t look nearly as cool as it could with the actual front cover image, but I don’t believe one has yet been released, so for now.. empty box. I don’t actually care about the 2 cents I’d get if someone clicked on that link and pre-ordered the book. Really, I just wanted a straightforward way to embed some amazon content, and the affiliate account was the fastest way to go.

Hey, it’s late.

The back-panel text or, more correctly, “catalog copy” is as follows:

Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians—sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable “saecular” world that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides that only these cloistered scholars have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his cohorts are summoned forth without warning into the Unknown.

According to a Q&A published six months or so ago, the book is primarily about Platonic mathematics. I am, therefore, bound to read it in about e working days. Count me pre-ordered!

Hat tip to Nerd World.

I’ve been thinking about blogging for a while now, but it’s been busy these days. During these busy days, however, I stumbled upon the blog being run by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). My wife tells me that it’s been commonly known of for a while now, but digg.com seems to drive most of what news I read, so somehow I missed this one.

Nevertheless, I’ve been finding it very interesting. Two recent posts about the troubles that passengers have recently had with the new MacBook Air was very enlightening. It was also the perfectly appropriate response to the complaint. The average MBA user is probably the same demographic as the average reader of blogs, so it stands to reason that the most appropriate marketing channel is the TSA Blog. Kudos to that. I’m also curious to see how/if they’ll post about the article which hit the wires today about a Texas woman being forced to remove a body piercing with a pair of pliers to be able to board a flight. The article was somewhat sensationalist, but that’s the mainstream media for you.

Edit at 8:10pm: And it looks like they did.

I leave you with italic kittens, which is both entirely irrelevant to this post, and quite geeky at the same time:

Happy π Day!!

Spotted this over on Of Zen and Computing, and I thought it bore repeating to gain some Google traffic.

If you have ever used G-Archiver to back up your GMail, immediately change your GMail password and uninstall G-Archiver.

G-Archiver e-mails your GMail username and password to the program’s author. The program’s source code contains the author’s GMail login credentials — an abnormal ocurrance [sic] that led a curious reader of Coding Horror to discover the dark side of G-Archiver.

Coding Horror reader Dustin Brooks took a peak at the author’s GMail account, and discovered that John Terry, creator of G-Archiver, is in possession of the usernames and passwords of thousands of people who have used G-Archiver.

I’ve not tried G-Archiver, and for certain I won’t knowing it’s going to up and steal my account password! There are safer backup ideas out there for GMail.