Yesterday I put in my notice and quit my job. 2 years is long enough, and 2002 is my year of change. December 12th is my last day. I also parked my van over at John Wagner’s dad�s factory. I’m going to work on it, and then sell it. I won’t be able to have it in Chicago, and I�ve gotten enough good use out of it.
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I just started reading a great book: Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. I’m only a few chapters into it, but so far it�s going through the history of identifying people within a society. It’s weird to think that the use of fingerprints as identification was a unique concept just 120 years ago.
I love the idea of being able to absolutely identify a person by their genetic makeup—it�s the ultimate password. Of course this kind of information is more often used for controlling people rather than permitting them true security.
It’s continually a trade off between privacy and security. As of late I’m choosing the former. Ever since September 11th there have been shady dealings with what sort of permissions the government has to snoop on people. I actually found myself checking out the EFF website to see what they thought of things. I hadn�t been there since the 1996 Blue Ribbon days.
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If you follow the book title link above, you’ll notice that O’Reilly has sample chapters of the book online. They do this for almost all of their books, and I’m really impressed by it. While Amazon can give you some snapshots of up to 50 pages per book, nothing beats being able to get actual content before you make a purchase. Of course they also have a fully open source book.
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