Photos from the Museum of Glass




Party on, Dave and Adam

Dave says that he and Adam Curry will be sponsoring the pre-BloggerCon party on Friday night, at, um, the Hong Kong in Harvard Square.

Man. The Hong Kong. Site of plenty of late nights, some relatively sane (like the night we went there at 1:00 am when I was an undergrad, after riding a bus up from Charlottesville, and I almost lost a contact on the floor). Some not (like the night after my final exam first semester of grad school, when the acidic fruit in the world famous Scorpion Bowls made me feel like my ulcer was recurring, and I had to leave the party to buy Tums—a harbinger of more troubles later that evening).

Somehow, I can’t see myself dragging Lisa over to that party, even if it means missing out on a chance to share scorpion bowls with the blogerati.

Update on iPod issues

As the old joke goes, my operation on my iPod was a success but the patient died. That is: I got the case open, found the broken connections, re-soldered them, closed the case, went to start up the iPod, and couldn’t get it past the Apple logo on the splash screen, even to do a system test. Reopening the iPod found no obvious damage, but I still couldn’t get anything working. So either I messed up the machine with some cack-handed soldering, I somehow damaged the hard drive, or there were bigger problems that surfaced only when I disassembled the unit. So take some caution when voiding your warranty.

It will likely be a few months before I can replace the iPod. In the meantime I’m enjoying more CDs in my car (and enjoying airplane rides much less).

Trusted and untrusted

I found on Tuesday night that MIT Sloan had turned off WiFi access for unknown laptops. In olden days (as recently as last year), using a WiFi card with an unknown id number would redirect you to a page where you could register as an alumnus. Talking to the students, I learned that the IT department had shut that door to prevent Blaster from running wild.

This morning I went to one of the main campus MIT libraries and went to the IS pages, and found no mention of turning off alumni WiFi access. Opening my laptop, I found that I actually could still access the network while on MIT’s main campus. I registered my laptop and am now happily surfing in my favorite main campus location, the Lewis Music Library.

This all raises a question: did MIT find that the b-school students were less likely to patch their systems than the main campus engineering students? Or did the IT department at Sloan (which is partly independent of the main campus IS group) decide on their own to save themselves headaches by pre-empting the problem? The fact that Sloan is mostly a Windows shop while the rest of the campus tends to be pretty heterogeneous may also have something to do with it. The end result, though, is that laptops are less trusted at Sloan than on main campus.