Making Flickr badges work with https

Following Eric’s instructions, I switched paulschreiber.com to https. I then had to get rid of the pesky mixed-content warnings. Most were pretty straightforward — I had a few JavaScript files and images that used absolute URLs and HTTP; I switched them to use HTTPS. However, my flickr badge presented a problem. (It’s bothering some other …

What to do with $11M

Give it away: They took care of family first and then began delivering donations to the two pages’ worth of groups they had decided on, including the local fire department, churches, cemeteries, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, hospitals in Truro and Halifax, where Violet underwent her cancer treatment, and organizations that fight cancer, Alzheimer’s …

MAPLight’s awesome Money Near Votes tool

If you haven’t heard of MAPLight.org before, here’s what they do (which is fantastic): MAPLight.org, a groundbreaking public database, illuminates the connection between campaign donations and legislative votes in unprecedented ways. Elected officials collect large sums of money to run their campaigns, and they often pay back campaign contributors with special access and favorable laws. …

Lost in translation

In English, when reading numbers out loud, one often “chunks” the numbers into smaller groups. For example, when reading the phone number “555-1212,” one would say “five five five, one two one two,” not “five hundred fifty-five, one thousand two hundred and twelve.” Similarly, one would call Interstate 280 “interstate two eighty,” not “interstate two …

telecom regulation

My friend Sonia, who works for a bunch of a libertarian think tank wrote an opinion piece for TechNewsWorld arguing for deregulation in telecom: Companies like SBC and Verizon were forced to share their lines with so-called competitors at below-cost, government-set rates. This type of policy is a disaster, not only because central planning was …

josh’s ten insane ideas

Josh Ledgard, a program manager at Microsoft, has an interesting blog entry: “Ten Insane Ideas for Microsoft.” Some of it is pretty mundane, like towel service, but he makes a few great points: 1. The “2 Secrets” Rule So, I propose the “2 secrets” rule. Every VP must tell their groups what the two protected …

bush a wimp on genocide

Nicholas D. Kristof calls George W. Bush “A Wimp on Genocide in Sunday’s New York Times: Mr. Bush’s position in the U.N. negotiations got little attention. But in effect the United States successfully blocked language in the declaration saying that countries have an “obligation” to respond to genocide. In the end the declaration was diluted …