Eric Reasons

--Looking Back on 2008 in Shame-- First, with all the flack that's going around about the Democratic Primary slugfest, here's what I'd like to see. I'd like to see all the super-delegates get together and say, in one resounding voice, the following: 1) "We love this primary fight. We hope it goes all the way to the convention. We want every opinion voiced and every voter heard. We will not supress democracy for the sake of appearing to have a clear winner, or triumphant champion. Politics is a fierce business, and sometimes it is less-than-pretty, but to have such a strong field competing against each other is a sign of the strength of our party." 2) "BUT.... If you two can't play nice, talk about real issues, and show some respect for each other and your party, we're going to immediately grant all of our super-votes to the candidate who *doesn't* stoop to name calling. So help me God, I'll turn this convention around and take you all back...

Politically, I like to think that I'm nothing if not "philosophically consistent". (This, by the way, is probably why I have a hang-up when it comes to both major parties). But I've been wrestling with myself over Net Neutrality. I'm sure you've heard next to nothing on this issue from our presidential hopefuls, so here's a brief recap. The Internet protocol was originally specified that all traffic was to be forwarded on a "best-effort per packet basis." This means that, on the Internet, a packet of data is a packet of data, and all intermediate hosts (the stops along the way between the data's sender and it's receiver) were to attempt to deliver it without any prejudice to it's content. For a very long time, this was a non-issue. It simply meant that you could not pick which sources or destinations got preference from you. In the 25 years since the writing of this protocol, something happened that nobody had forseen. Computers and r...

As the resident gaming geek at the office, I've been asked to look into Second Life and other Virtual Worlds, and help evaluate their potential for our use. They sent me to a conference on Libraries, Education, and Museums in Second Life yesterday. I use a tool called BlogHUD to document my journeys inside Second Life. Check it out here: http://my.bloghud.com/arrykrees/

As promised, here are some essential applications and software I lean on, not just to get work done, but to make my Linux machine really feel like "home". -----iGoogle----- http://www.igoogle.com iGoogle has become an absolute essential for me. When you're on as many different machines as I am in a given day, it's nice to have everything follow you around. I am a heavy user of Goggle Documents for all my spreadsheets and word processor files. I'm addicted to Google Reader for my RSS feeds. A brief aside on RSS: RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. When done right, it is a godsend for information junkies. In short, your RSS reader grabs simple XML code for the pages you have subscribed to, and the posts to these syndication feeds are piped directly to your computer. Imagine a tickertape for your most commonly viewed websites. My RSS feed is like a perpetually updated custom newspaper for me. It should be noted that RSS feeds are only as good as their authors, ...