Should we call a landslide of white votes for a black candidate an avalanche?

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Ubuntu is great, but my installation of it crashed and would no longer boot. After considerable research, I figured out how to uninstall it using Windows only.

It took just three minutes and worked flawlessly.

My tech blog has full details.

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And so can UK border agents. Should business users travel with “blank laptops”?

If you access everything via the cloud, i.e. with online apps like Google Mail and Docs, then your laptop won’t need to have much on it.

Important or sensitive material stuff can be encrypted. However border agents could demand the encryption key? But only if they know something was encrypted.

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the sender and intended recipient even realizes there is a hidden message. By contrast, cryptography obscures the meaning of a message, but it does not conceal the fact that there is a message.

One common method is to hide the message in a JPG by changing the lower order bit of each byte. The image looks virtually the same, yet a message is encrypted within.

Do governments have the right to search laptops and phone at entry points to their country? I would say, sure, if they have reasonable suspicions about the person entering the country. But this can also be a slippery slope down to an all-surveillance society, like the UK has almost certainly become. Adam Curry podcasted about this eloquently on Friday.

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It could just be a ploy for more money. But maybe not.

It sure does look like Yahoo grew a pair over the last week, and that this “no” may really just be a “no.”

Whatever happens, this is great stuff. Yahoo is being bold. It may be a whimper, but it’s a bold whimper. And I’m damned excited to see what happens next.

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A botched survey two centuries ago put Georgia’s northern border just short of the Tennessee River. Given their unprecedented and severe drought, some in Georgia want the border redrawn so they can get the water.

The reaction of the Tennessee governor? “This is a joke, right?”

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Greenspan and Bernanke have taken a hands-off approach for two consecutive great bubbles, first in TMT — telecommunications, media and technology — and second, in housing. A hands-off approach is a polite way of saying they facilitated this.

And what is the point of a 125-basis-point rate reduction, other than to provide reinforcement for the people who borrow short and lend long? From bankers who have committed every crime you could possibly accuse a banker of, to hedge funds who borrow short, leverage, and invest long in the stock market — that’s who really benefits from the interest-rate reduction. The economy, broadly defined, does not.

– Jeremy Grantham, Chief Investment Strategist, GMO

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Amazon has huge amounts of excess capacity and sell it to corporations at very low prices.

Now they’re doing the same for online storage.

Jungle Disk has no minimum charges or monthly fees, is accessible from any OS, will backup your computer automatically, and costs a mere 15 cents per gig, much less than comparable services.

$20 for one-time purchase price, works on Windows, Mac, Linux, install on as many systems as you want. ($1 extra per month to access backups via browser, plus other features.)

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US News and World Report implies (hopes?) we may be nearing a bottom in housing prices but with a mountain of resets coming in the next few months, it’s difficult to see how a bottom can be seen or even predicted.

The real problem is mortgages. They are much hard to get now. We moved from CA to CT about this time last year and got a fixed rate alt mortgage because neither of us had jobs here at the time. The alt rate was slightly higher than for a top rated mortgage. Given the tightening of the credit markets since then, were we moving now, we might not be able to get an alt mortgage because they’ve mostly vanished. And we have high FICOs and money in the bank.

So imagine what it must be like for a first time buyer scrambling to get into a home now. Mortgage applications are indeed way up. That’s because people are making multiple applications and hoping one of them is accepted. In 2005, if you could fog a mirror, you got the mortgage. But those days are gone.

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L.A. Rex. A novel by Will Beall

This is not your normal cop novel with LAPD officers standing on the thin blue line protecting ungrateful citizens from the ravenous predators surrounding them, then getting drunk at cop bars at night.

Will Beall is a LAPD officer who works homicide in south L.A. He’s a gifted writer with an ear for slang and jargon equal to that of Tom Wolfe (a master of the art.) His prose is almost hallucinatory as he describes the violence, vendettas, and multiple personas and loyalties of the cops, gang members, and drug cartels whose not-so-fictional lives intertwine and collide in L.A. Rex.

But the storyline has to be coming out of loonyland, right? There’s no way that LAPD officers could be stone cold gang members whose first loyalty is to the gang, not LAPD. Or that rap moguls get murdered in cold blood on a L.A. city street. Well, of course, all that happened, as witness David Mack, former LAPD officer. He was a central figure in the Rampart police corruption scandal, was named in a wrongful death suit filed by Notorious B.I.G’s family, is currently doing 14 years in prison for bank robbery, and is a self-admitted member of the Bloods.

Beall fictionalizes that twisted saga, and uses it in this dark morality tale. There’s no easy answers here, no snappy resolution of the conflicts. And yeah, he appears to be one of the good cops too.

Will Beall, quoted in The LAPD blog.

Spend enough time in South Central and you make some unpleasant historical connections. You begin to see the body count not just as the work of Crips and Bloods but as the legacy of restrictive housing covenants and economic isolation. Believe me, this nation’s history of racial oppression doesn’t feel so abstract after a few autopsies.

I know a lot of black people still don’t trust cops. Can’t say I blame them. For generations, police were the street-level enforcers of segregation and miscegenation laws. We were the guys with the dogs and water hoses at Selma. Little wonder the relationship between the black community and law enforcement in this country remains badly broken.

Read the book to view from the inside looking out, a depiction a world most of us never see (or want to see.) And read it because it’s an exciting, well-written novel too.

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