Posts by Berck

When I got my Motorola Razr several years ago, I was annoyed that there wasn’t an option to buy it without a camera. The camera added a little bit of weight and a slight protrusion on an otherwise very slick telephone. The camera was absolute crap, and generally provided poor results. And the whole idea of a camera phone just seem dumb to me. But in spite of that, I found a took a lot of photos with the crappy camera, simply because I always had it on me. For years, I’d wanted to buy a Minox camera, so I could always have a camera with me, but never got around to it. The camera on the Razr probably isn’t quite as good, but is certainly a lot simpler than dealing with Minox film and processing. Walter Zapp said his goal was that everyone could carry around a camera in their pocket, and now they do.

Now that I’ve upgraded to a new Motorola Droid (which, by the way, is an excellent little device), I downloaded all the pictures I took with the Razr and went through them. I’ve put 100 of them up in the Gallery. They pretty evenly span the last two years of my life, and most of them haven’t been posted here before, though some have. Many of them were e-mailed to Jonah in a sort of “I’m thinking about you, and here’s what I’m doing,” sort of mode. Taken individually, none of them are very interesting. The quality on all of them is poor. As a whole, however, I think they paint an interesting slice of life. Maybe I only think so because it’s a slice of my life.

On a barely-related side note, this is absolutely hilarious: The camera on the Droid hasn’t focused correctly, and it’s an obnoxious software bug. I knew about it when I bought it, and a fix was promised for December 11. Strangely, though, a few people noticed that their cameras were miraculously working today, ahead of schedule. Folks got mad at Verizon for issuing a secret patch that fixed everyone’s phones without even mentioning it. Only, it turns out that the problem fixed itself! It’s apparently a date-related bug that cycles every 24.5 days. So, we’ve got working cameras for 24.5 days, which is just in time for the December 11 patch. You couldn’t make something like that up!

Here’s a video of several prisoners who were held in Guantanamo for 3 years during which time they were tortured, interrogated and sexually abused then released. They were never even charged with a crime.

There is no excuse for this. This treatment isn’t justified for criminals, much less innocent people. We should be working to make sure this never happens again.

Jonah got the following e-mail today:

[removed, at least temporarily, thanks to an obnoxious e-mail virus scanner]

I edited the link to take out the evil bits. Amusing things to note: it *looks* like, if you’re not paying attention, that the link is on nachzen.net, and it pretended to come from an administrator account on my server. In fact, for the first half-second I read it, I thought, “huh, what useful daemon sent an e-mail to my users?” before I realized it was malicious. This is a reasonably well-designed attack. I downloaded the file and let the internets analyze it for me. Here’s the report.

Fortunately, since there are no Windows computers here, this would have been harmless even if Jonah had clicked on it, but paying attention is still a good thing.