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Monthly Archives April 2007

Corn rationing

I went to grab a sandwich at the Loeb grocery store down the street from work at lunch today, and they had a sign up on the door which got me thinking about economics and the practical matters of selling produce. The sign said, roughly: Due to unforeseen circumstances, we must limit corn purchases to […]

Posted 30 April 2007 † Rich § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (8) ° Tagged: ,

Mitel acquires Inter-Tel

Mitel, my employer, is reportedly acquiring US business VoIP company Inter-Tel for $723M: Citizen story, Ottawa Business Journal story. No punditry from me; I don’t know enough about the business side. I’d never heard of Inter-Tel before now.

Posted 26 April 2007 † Rich § voip ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged:

Social engineering with USB keys

A comment on a Reg story about USB-key malware led to a great story from about a year ago about a tiger team hired to audit a credit union, who launched a successful social-engineering attack dropping trojan-infected USB keys around the parking lot: Once I seeded the USB drives, I decided to grab some coffee […]

Posted 26 April 2007 † Rich § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: ,

file file file file file

Taxes completed and netfiled. Awaiting refund, even what with Candice’s self-employediness. Yay! That will make me feel a little better about the pending laptop purchase. Did you know you can still file Canadian income tax returns over the phone? I can’t imagine. “Please enter the dollar value from line 132 and press pound. Please enter […]

Posted 23 April 2007 † Rich § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off ° Tagged: ,

I’m on LibraryThing

I’ve finally got around to putting my books on LibraryThing, the online book cataloguing service. I, too, have a hard time reading “online book cataloguing service” without snickering, but as they go, this one gets things right. I was able to import my Amazon “I own this” list by pasting in Amazon’s HTML, and the […]

Posted 23 April 2007 † Rich § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (10) ° Tagged: ,

Zen and the art of.. Zen

Having gone through the basics of Buddhism — the Four Noble Truths that outline the core beliefs, the Eightfold Path that outlines the core practice, and a bit about the Buddha himself — I’d like to get a little more specific now and talk about Zen. The reason that I’ve been explaining the basics of […]

Posted 20 April 2007 † Rich § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off ° Tagged:

Particle physics cat macros

I has some particle physics cat macros.

Posted 20 April 2007 † Rich § Quick links ‡ Comments Off ° Tagged:

Ikea box charging station

I now have a charging station for portable things! This Ikea storage box has a recessed lid with a hole in it, making it a great charging station. I got the idea from this Instructables post, but didn’t bother with the switch, and used an extension cord instead of a power bar because space is […]

Posted 19 April 2007 † Rich § gadgets ‡ Comments (1) °