I've been running Windows 7 for a couple of weeks now. Not on my main box--on the HTPC I've been setting up. On the whole, it has been relatively painless. I'm getting tired of security notification popups, but... c'est la vie, right? The price you pay for security!

Only... not.

WARNING: Massively geeky post ahead.

Short and sweet: holy monkey biker spit. As trendy as the HTPC is becoming in the hardware world, you'd think someone could write some half-decent software to go along with it. It took me less than a day to put together the hardware and I've spent almost a month getting the software right. I think I have it down though.

I was noticing the other day that my daughter writes almost all her letters from the bottom up. This mystifies me. I write all my letters from the top down. Not that I've ever given it a ton of thought. I have extremely legible handwriting; if you look at the subtitle of my website--"In the Words of Kenneth R. Pike"--that is in my handwriting. I always print and I write all of my letters in as few strokes and direction-reversals as possible. No fuss, no muss. I'm a complete efficiency freak.

Except with my lower-case "g."

In this episode: telemarketers, Kubuntu 9.0.4, and 3L grades!

A couple of weeks ago, I had a funny (in retrospect...) conversation with a couple of kibitzing 1Ls. I had (in a separate conversation with a somewhat brighter 2L) sweepingly generalized this year's presidential election as a choice between "stupid hope" and "stupid fear." The 2L asked me whether it was "really" stupid fear, suggesting that we may not know how many terrorist attacks have been prevented since the Towers went down. I responded that, no, I could hardly claim epistemic certainty about the absence of theoretical events--

A while back, an old friend of mine called to say that his brother's baby had been born. I responded, reflexively, "Oh yeah, I saw that on Facebook!"

I was immediately angry with myself. Some of you will remember that I tried Facebook out several months ago in order to contact an old friend from high school, a pursuit I felt justified a discrete sip of the social networking kool-aid. So when did "getting in touch" become "no need to get in touch?"

Alright, everybody, time for some serious geekery! For the first time in probably ten years, I have built myself an entirely new computer. It's not bleeding-edge, but it gets the job done. But this is not about my new hardware--rather, this is about how pleased I am with Linux, both on my new wireless router and with regard to the progress desktop Linux has made in the last 18 months. In fact, I daresay Ubuntu is about two steps away from surpassing Windows Vista by every conceivable measure.

Microsoft says:

"Any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidate over 90% of the search advertising market in Google’s hands. This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo!"

The emphasis is mine, but come on. Are they even trying anymore? Or was this press release written by a PR intern who was simply unaware that Microsoft's share of the OS market is over 90%?

Remember when I ranted about social networking sites not too long ago? Well, I've been working on a paper that would be much improved by some virtually unobtainable source material. I heard I might find someone on Facebook with access to the material I'm after...

So, TorrentFreak is reporting a massive security lapse on the part of MediaDefender, a company that makes its money running interference on internet-based copyright infringement. In addition to exposing what probably qualify as trade secrets, quite a lot of sensitive personal data was also exposed (social security numbers and the like).

Executives, take note: this is why you cannot ignore the security policies written by your IT guys.