SHA-1 has been broken. Amazing.

My mom was featured today in a local newspaper (front page!) who wrote about her upcoming bicycle trip across America to raise money for cancer. Check out her trip website to learn more or to make a donation.

The guys over at Yahoo! Search have unearthed another glorious webcam kid. Funniest thing I've seen on the web in a long time. I couldn't help but dance along as he yodelled "My Yahoo... My Yahee...".

I've installed Google Desktop Search, Yahoo Desktop Search, and MSN Desktop Search. They all pretty much work as advertised. Google is the fastest and has a slick integration with the google.com search page. MSN looks pretty but is very slow and slim on functionality; my advice is to skip it. Yahoo has an Outlook plug-in and (while not as fast as Google) is fast enough and has the best previewing of any of them. Bottom line: Yahoo has the best overall desktop search app.

Dave told me about this great animation from True Majority Action: Oreos and the Federal Budget.

Russ sent me this interesting site: The Secret Lives of Numbers.

From ACSBlog: Court strikes down federal obscenity statute: All I can say is, thank goodness the government is finally coming to its senses and staying out of people's private lives. Even more interesting to me than the original blog entry, though, was the huge number of comments (103 and counting as of today)... and their variety. Definitely worth a read.

Carl mentioned this hilarious video clip of a woman from Vanity Fair turning the tables on FOX News with regards to Bush's indulgent inaugural celebration. I have another idea for a better use of the $40 million dollars spent on the party: How about donating it to the tsunami victims? I don't really know much about how inaugural parties are funded, I certainly hope tax payer money isn't being used.

British Telecom had a man arrested in London for making a tsunami relief donation using the Lynx browser on Solaris.

US government budget deficit projected to grow to $427 billion in 2005, the worst level ever. Good job, Bushie.

I love this (free) web service: Ta-da List.

The Smoking Gun has a hilarious collection of letters to the FCC opposing their overly puritanical enforcements of late.

Oh man, this is too good: Bill Gates Strikes a Pose for Teen Beat Photospread

After reading about Verizon's crippled cell phones, I now think Verizon sucks -- and I don't know the first thing about their service! Some marketing heads should roll over at Verizon... so silly for them to have gone down this path. They should have known that anybody who drops $500 on a cell phone is going to be a power user who wants all the functionality.

Kite Runner ***** : A dark coming of age story based in Afghanistan. Exceptional writing. Best book I read in 2004.

Winner, The ** : Good fiction for a trip or day at the beach... page turner, nothing too deep.

Who's Looking Out For You ** : Easy read, but O'Reilly's approach to complex issues is too simple.

Touching the Void **** : Great reading for any mountaineer. Perhaps the most outstanding survival story I have read.

Climbing Free by Lynn Hill **** : Good autobiography of the early days of Yosemite big wall climbing.

After a month of fairly solid play, I finally finished Halo 2 today (it would have been quicker, but I played on the "heroic" difficulty level which made for slow going). It truly is an outstanding game, probably my favorite game ever. The storyline is fun and the game play is outstanding. The music and sound effects are also very good -- this is an area where games often fall down. It's quite a testament to the designers that they were able to create such a great game on such old hardware (over 3 years old).

This went out on Slashdot a few weeks ago, but I am just getting caught up on my reading: Hack a Bike is a great piece of reverse engineering by a German hacker group.

I finally retired my Nokia 8620 after 4 years of faithful service and upgraded to a Nokia 6820. It has some neat bells and whistles, including a fold-out keyboard, Bluetooth, and Java support. I'm a little disappointed in that I would have expected phones to have advanced more in 4 years, but mostly it's an improvement. Two things I really dislike about the phone: It doesn't display the elapsed time of the current call during the call (only after you hang up), and there doesn't seem to be a way to adjust the alarm volume for meeting reminders (which I synchronize from Outlook using my laptop's IR port). The latter is quite annoying in the middle of the night.

One feature that is awesome is the Bluetooth wireless headset capability. I had originally purchased a Motorola HS801 for $30, but it was really bad. Don't buy one. On about half the calls, the person on the other end would hear a whistling sound. The Motorola felt a little flimsy on my ear and it flashed a bright blue LED every 3 seconds, which garners strange stares from passersby, especially at night.

I exchanged it for a Plantronics M2500 (also $30) which has been awesome. Highly recommended.

I'm writing this from Portland Airport using their free wireless Internet access (essid "FlyPDX"). Their implementation is really slick. When you associate, you have to click an agreement saying that you realize it's free, no tech support, etc. Then it shows you a map of the airport with all of the hotspots shown along with an indicator next to the hotspot you're currently using. Signal strength is excellent and dslreports shows 1.4Mbps download and 760k upload speed.

Portland is the first airport I've seen that has done this, and it rocks! I don't understand why more airports don't include free Internet access in the services they provide. Often consumers do have a choice at how their flights are routed (if I'm flying to New York, do I connect in SLC or DEN), and I would definitely choose an airport that had free wireless first. And I can't imagine it costs them much to run, in the grand scheme of things... especially since they don't have to pay an expensive support staff to handle complaints when the billing system messes up like on every other hotspot I've used :-)

New research report: Linux has significantly fewer flaws than most commercial counterparts.

FedEx has just earned my "Monkey Company" award: It seems that if you walk into one of their stores, they won't let you ship a package by ground internationally. They'll do it by air, but if you want to do it by ground, you have to get a FedEx account, go to their website, pay online, print off the shipping label at home, and then bring it into the store. Then they'll ship it. Makes no sense to me.

I just got off the phone with UPS and they said they were fine with taking international ground shipments from walk-in customers. Looks like FedEx just lost some business... which makes me sad, since I'm a shareholder :-(

Google has done it again. Check out Google Suggest.

Cool. I'm on Google Scholar.

I received my (free) replacement Kryptonite bike locks in the mail today. (Background: A few months ago, it was discovered that "Tubular" Kryptonite bike locks could be opened with a BIC pen. Bike thieves the world over rejoiced.) I am very impressed with Kryptonite as a company for the way they handled this. They wavered for a day or two in the beginning, but eventually decided to replace the lock of any customer who wanted it. The process was simple: I sent them an e-mail, they sent me a pre-paid UPS ship label, I mailed back my locks, and about a month or so later, I received my new hack-proof replacement locks in the mail. This sort of service and support earns Kryptonite the highest Presto Consumer Rating possible!

I just realized that my RSS feed has been non-compliant up until now (just fixed it). I was advertising myself as an RSS 2.0 feed, but publishing an RSS 1.0 feed. RSS is very confusing because there are at least three different incompatible versions: One from Dave Winer (RSS 2.0), one from Netscape (RSS 0.9), and one that has been hacked up with all kinds of extensions to make it more usable (RSS 1.0).

Atom, by comparison, is much simpler, cleaner, and easier to code. Moving forward, I'm putting all my efforts into Atom, but I'll keep the RSS 2.0 feed running as well (bugfixes only, no new features over there).

Recent Gallup Poll confims it: 45% of Americans are dumbasses. Good thing that they all get to vote.

I guess this explains the recent actions to get the theory of creationism back into science textbooks. At least some people are fighting back against this idiocy with textbook disclaimer stickers.

(I have the full text of the Gallup Poll and can e-mail it to you if you are interested.)

I find more and more useful Firefox extensions every day! Here are the ones I'm using right now: PrefBar, BugMeNot, AdBlock, IEView, FlashBlock, and SearchKeys. They are all available from mozdev.org.

Two great articles in October's Wired magazine: The Plot to Kill Evolution (scary and infuriating) and Our Kids Are In Big Trouble.

Hmmm.... How would we ever know?

From W Ketchup: "Choose Heinz [ketchup] and you're supporting Teresa Heinz and her liberal causes, such as Kerry for President." I thought this was a parody site at first and laughed. Then I realized that it's for real, and this made me laugh even harder.

According to Word Count, "Preston" is the 5,818th most frequent word in English. Seems high to me, but who am I to question their findings :-)

Electoral-vote.com has a good explanation of issues concerning the electoral college. An interesting take-away: The current system is biased in favor of republicans (i.e., states that would lose power by changing the system are all Republican). Possible fixes to the system are discussed, including a non-winner-take-all system, instant runoffs (a subject which I wrote to congress about, but which I should have sent to the Oregon state legislature instead), and increasing the size of the House of Representatives.

BugMeNot maintains a quiver of valid username/passwords for sites that require registration (i.e., LA Times, New York Times). If you're using Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape, an awesome extension allows you to simply right click on the username field, select "BugMeNot", and the info will automatically be entered.

I just discovered two cool new features of Gmail - arbitrary periods and automatic aliases.

I was thinking about all of the controversy over electronic voting the other day, and I wondered why more states don't follow Oregon's example and require mail-in voting for everybody? It's cheaper, more convenient, more secure, and more consistent (in that the same process is used for everybody). It also reduces the effect of polls and last-minute advertising (because many people, like me, will already have voted long before election day). And it provides a permanent paper record to boot. Seems like the optimal solution all the way around.

This is an excellent guide on how to set up traffic shaping on your home network.

I've revamped my picture engine a bit: First, I fixed a problem that was causing the pictures and thumbnails to load quite slowly (thanks James for the bug report!). Second, I added a cool new random photos page (there's also a link under the random photo on the left side of the main page). Check it out... and if you don't see anything you like, hit reload for more random goodness :)

I happened across Robert Nichol's book reviews on Amazon the other day. They're quite entertaining, if only to illustrate how closed-minded and puerile people can be. Two thoughts that came to mind while perusing his "reviews" were: One, did he actually read any of these books (I would say "nyet!"), and, two, isn't this the sort of blind hatred that's the problem behind politics in our country today?

Vote Or Not is giving away prizes to encourage people to vote. Commit to vote and you could win $100,000!

electoral-vote.com has this cool little logo that is always up-to-date with the latest available poll data:

State Farm sent me my latest car insurance renewal letter in the mail the other day. Stuck inside the envelope was a little brochure listing "important changes to your policy," including the following:

There is no coverage for loss to any vehicle that results from:

1. Nuclear reaction;
2. Radiation or radioactive contamination from any source; or
3. The accidental or intentional detonation of, or release of radiation from, any nuclear or radioactive device.

A sign of the times, I suppose.

I just finished watching Outfoxed, a documentary on the Fox "News" Network and its extreme right balance. This is a very important movie for everybody to see. It demonstrates how easy it is for the public to be manipulated by the media and the need for reform with respect to political media coverage.

I have never cared for Fox News, but after watching this, I am seriously considering boycotting anything related to Fox and/or Robert Murdoch (movies, entertainment shows, etc.). I sincerely hope that nobody I know actually watches Fox News -- if you do, please contact me as I would be interested in discussing it with you! Also, let me know if you want to borrow the "Outfoxed" documentary.

I finally have a Google Mail account, and it is everything that I dreamed it would be and more! Highly recommended. I have basically switched all of my non-work e-mail over to it (at work I use Outlook 2003). Unfortunately, GMail accounts are only available by invitation right now (they periodically dole out invitations to existing members to give to their friends). If you are interested in one, contact me and I will send you an invitation to join if/when Google gives out more.

The newest version of the Firefox web browser was just released. With a browser this good, I don't know why anybody continues to use Internet Explorer. Yes, Firefox is that good. (Slate and the Department of Homeland Security agree.)

I registered prestonhunt.com with GeoUrl: You register your GPS coordinates and it will show you all of the other registered sites near your physical location. Here are the sites within 100 miles of me.

Whatever you do, do not vote for Ralph Nader if he runs in the upcoming presidential election. Watch this if you need a reason why.

I just finished adding RSS support to this site (check the "Miscellany" menu on the right for the RSS Feed link). If you don't know what RSS is, it means that you can get automatic updates whenever I add something new to my site. You can either add a module onto your My Yahoo! page or download a stand-alone RSS aggregator (my favorite is SharpReader but there are plenty of others).

How long should it take to toast a piece of toast? That is the question I have been trying to answer, and I think I may have finally found a question that isn't that easy to answer with Google. I have an Oster toaster oven in my kitchen right now, which I love, but every time I make toast for visitors, they always complain about how long it takes. I guess people have some fast toasters out there.

I just learned that Oregon residents can get a tax credit of up to $50 a year for political donations. Wow. I can't believe I didn't know about this before. A completely "free" way to make political donations. My money this year is going to stoporegontax.com. Why? Multnomah County is already charging its residents an additional 1.25% income tax. If this new Oregon tax passes, the total tax increase for Multnomah County residents will be over 20% in a single year! I would gladly vote "yes" for a sales tax, but no more income tax increases!

I just completed a major overhaul of the Maelstrom section. Previously, all of my stories were a loosely bound confederation of HTML files held together by a bunch of Perl scripts. I have painstakingly migrated everything over to a database, which will make everything more consistent, searchable, and will allow me to do some neat things like show the most popular stories and maybe add a ratings system. Everything should appear exactly the same to you. Please let me know if it doesn't!