Alan Zeichick explains why if you must get a new passport, you should invest in a lead foil billfold.

::: {.hreview} A Board Game That Adults Can Play {#a-board-game-that-adults-can-play .summary}

11/9/2006

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::: {.item .fn} Puerto Rico :::

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Visiting friends gave me the opportunity to coerce a try of Puerto Rico, a very well-reviewed board game. Unlike most people who review board …

I'm really not upset. It's the price I pay to work out of my house in Hawaii. I normally keep West Coast hours, and just a week ago, during Daylight Savings Time, I would have been checking my emails and drinking coffee at 6. So please feel free to call …

I don't do a lot of database work, I believe in rendering unto the DBA that which is the DBA's. But ya got's to pay the bills, so I've been doing some refactoring work on a database. While flirting with RedGate's SQL Dependency Tracker, I finally figured out how to …

This is probably obvious, but my life has been eased since I've created a OneNote section called "Product Keys" and used it to store serial numbers and keys.

Joel Spolsky briefly explains this very common security defect. Because my last name (O'Brien) contains an apostrophe, I'm particularly conscious of how common is this vulnerability.

This has been around for a month, but I wanted to lament that Microsoft has cancelled their plans to hold next year's major conferences in New Orleans. New Orleans is one of my favorite cities (and is a great place to ~~get really drunk~~ hold a conference) and certainly needs …

My very favorite technical book of last year was Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp. APress has recently released Practical OCaml by Joshua Smith. OCaml is the language implemented by F# (I don't know if F# is super- or sub-set -- perhaps the book will clarify).

I doubt that lightning will strike …

I've been writing an article about software brittleness and found myself asking a question I can't answer: Why was there so little software chaos in January 2000? There really were hundreds of millions if not billions of lines of COBOL that were at least potentially vulnerable to the rollover bug …

Supposedly, a group of scentists and academics in Britain have, on an investment of \\(8700, used a mathematical approach to win a \\)13M jackpot. (Source: A Statistical Approach for Winning Lottery -- Group Wins \$13M!)

Momentarily assuming that there's no "rake" and that the lottery pays \\(1 in prizes for each …