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Psychology of risk
Interesting article I just read, linked from Bruce Schneier’s blog (one of my favourite morning reads), about how irrational people are about judging and comparing risk. People often overestimate one risk, and underestimate another, and end up making poor choices. An example from the article: after 9/11, people became irrationally afraid of flying. They cancelled…
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Transferring ratings from Gallery2 to ACDSee
Recently I wanted to transfer the image ratings from one of my online photo galleries into the ACDSee program I use to manage my photos at home. It was a large album, thousands of photos, so doing this by hand was just not going to happen. Here’s how I did it.
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God dammit, I hate spammers!
I have a default forwarding rule on my domain, which has the effect that any email sent to any address at all, at my domain, will come to me. I do that so that whenever I have to give my email to some CompanyA, I can give them “companyA?thegatesofdawn?ca” (change ‘?’ to you-know-what.) Then if…
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Weekly World News: Gone but not forgotten
The tabloid newspaper Weekly World News stopped publication of its print version in August, leaving only the web-site version. This gives me mixed emotions. I will miss it. It was always a feature of any trip to the supermarket to see what kind of crazy bullshit they were spewing this week. I will miss reading…
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Learning Mandarin
I’m part way through my first “Conversational Chinese” course at the University of Waterloo’s Confucius Institute. From what I’ve learned so far, I’ve found Mandarin Chinese to be a very elegant language. It’s a language like a talented computer programmer might design a language. Everything is very regular and consistent. It has a quality that…