Chris Hardie's Blog

The eminent and celebrated E. Thomas Kemp points us to a wonderful and clever use of news aggregation and weblog technologies, Plogress. Using Perl and Wordpress, the apparently anonymous administrator has created a site that sucks data out of the Library of Congress and displays a blog of the doings of individual Senators and [...]

Sometimes I get uppity and decide that there's enough wrong with the world to merit doing something (more) about it. Sometimes I get frustrated and decide that there isn't enough going on in my area in that regard. Sometimes I get lazy and decide I just want all the answers to COME TO [...]

Hayden L. Sheaffer, the pilot who is being raked over the coals for his role in flying a Cessna 150 into restricted airspace over Washington D.C. earlier this month, which prompted the scrambling of jets and the evacuation of thousands, noted today that he did in fact try to contact the military on the radio [...]

Jason Godesky has an interesting post up about why blogs are in a category all their own when it comes to publishing content online. It's a question I've thought about on occasion, given that I've had a personal website in some form or another since, um, 1994, and that I get indignant once in [...]

Bruce Schneier has saved future bureaucrats some time and written the core text of the 2015 US Congressional report on the impacts of the REAL ID Act. The report will find that the creation of this national ID card back in 2005 introduced unnecessary security risks, compounded existing data privacy issues, incurred extraordinary costs [...]

This is the second year I've taken advantage of another great thing about the area, our local CSA (community supported agriculture) program through Boulder Belt Organics in Preble County, Ohio. Since I'm doing my own garden I'll probably just use it for a few months, but it's so nice to have locally and organically [...]

Dave Pollard has a post up about conflict resolution. After a few paragraphs castigating the ability of the U.S. legal system and its agents to resolve conflicts, he talks about how to resolve peer-to-peer conflicts. It's interesting to me that the examples he gives of conflicts involving opposing worldviews pitted family members against [...]

The editorial cartoon in today's Palladium-Item depicts a lone protester standing in front of an imagined future strip mall in Richmond, with an onlooker suggesting that the protester get on with his life. It's a poignant visualization of one of the destructive attitudes that plagues this town and many others like it: "what's done [...]

After a few preparatory steps over the last few weeks and months I finally got my garden planted today - my second since moving to my house. I've planted two kinds of tomatoes, basil, bell and jalapeno peppers, celery, broccoli, parsley, cilantro, cucumber, mesculin mix, lettuce, kale, and dill. If just a few [...]

I had come to accept that possessing and using a credit card necessitated the related evil of receiving pre-approved credit card offers, and similar junk like insurance quotes. But just today I read the fine print on the back of one of these offers, and found reference to a new service that allows you [...]