perhaps not surprisingly
the economist

has one of the most cogent analysis of the
enron fiasco

:

“That points to the most ironic twist of all in this morality tale. Mr Lay had always described himself as “passionate about markets”. That fervent belief in the invisible hand led him to spot one of the most powerful trends of the past decade: the deregulation of commodity markets. He would often forge ahead fearlessly into newly deregulating markets, bully recalcitrant regulators into speeding reforms and develop clever financial vehicles that pressed to the very edge of the law. In the end, though, Enron appears to have overstepped the mark. The resultant backlash comes as a bitter reminder that the market forces that Mr Lay once worshipped can prove a double-edged sword.”

plus – they get bonus points for using the word ‘obfuscation’ in a real world sentence.

from the “because-you-can” department:
Running Linux on the Apple Airport Base Station

:

“This page gives information about how to run the LINUX operating system on the Apple Airport or Lucent RG-1000 base station. LINUX (or any other OS or standalone program) is booted over a network using the public (GPL) etherboot software.”

[ via
hack the planet

]

finally!
proof

of something that parents everywhere have intuited since, well, the beginning of modern times – that adolescents haven’t quite figured out how to use their whole brain:

“It appears that early human ancestors grew up very much like today’s great apes – taking about 12 years to reach adulthood.

Modern humans on the other hand take much longer – up to 20 years.

The difference seems to allow us to learn how to use our bigger brains.”

it seems particularly appropriate that my brand spanking new copy of
building wireless community networks

came in the mail today, since everyone seems to be talking about the
open

spectrum.

so, i didn’t get a chance to post anything for
link and think

. and not because, as you might suspect i was busy drinking cheap beer while watching wrestling.

no, as a matter of fact, my wife and i travelled to grand rapids, michigan to attend a party thrown by my sister-in-law who happens to be a lesbian and who also happens to be happily antipicating the birth of a child being carried by her partner.

this all says something. i’m just not sure what.

today, it’s a two-fer pilfered from
jy

.

from
brent simmons’

weblog come
words of wisdom

which are simple, true and should form the basis of daily meditation:

” It’s been said by other people, but it’s worth repeating: the best programmers these days know how to use the Web to solve problems.”

and i’ll follow that up with something completely unrelated –
XMLmind XML Editor

:

“XMLmind XML Editor (XXE for short) is a full-fledged XML 1.0 editor featuring a word processor-like view (CSS2 styled). It has been created to make technical persons comfortable and productive at editing XML documents and XML data.”

i’ve been using
cooktop

, but the word processor-like features of
xxe

could come in handy.