Chris Hardie's Blog

Life's too short. E-mail messages I tend to delete without reading (other than obvious spam):

Messages with a blank subject line
Messages with a blank body, with only a mysterious attachment that's supposed to explain everything when I open it
Pretty much anything from Network Solutions / Verisign
Anything that asks me to forward it to 11 of [...]

I've upgraded the Wordpress software powering this blog to a more recent version, and added a few more ways to interact with my posts at the same time:

I'm now using Gravatars - "globally recognized avatars" - to display user-uploaded images next to the comments that people post. This creates a little bit better sense [...]

People sometimes ask me how much I think "The Government" is really listening in on our phone calls, e-mail messages, web browsing, text messages, and other forms of communication. I still apparently surprise people with my answer: for the purposes of my day-to-day life, I assume that every communication I send or receive using [...]

Just a few minutes before it happened, I had said, "You'd think people would pay better attention to what's going on around them on the road." We were barreling west on I-70, heading to a wedding in southwest Indiana, and I'd just watched the second police car in a row with its lights and [...]

From the "I hope it doesn't happen but wouldn't be surprised if it did" department, I have some predictions and scenarios to throw out there about stuff that could happen sometime in the rest of 2008. I suppose this is mostly just a mental exercise for me, but maybe it'll spark some interesting comments/responses:

The [...]

These "links for the week" posts are a lame substitute for real blog posts, but I hope you enjoy them anyway. I'm working on some other entries about my experience with "power off day," my preferred task list organization system (it's NOT GTD), the difficulties of personal change in a vacuum, and more on [...]

I'll be speaking this Saturday the 17th at a free event held at Morrisson-Reeves Library, on "The Internet as a Political Tool" - how the Internet continues to change the world of politics and what it means for local citizens. The talk starts at 10 AM in the Bard Room. If you're interested [...]

Last week, the Palladium-Item - Richmond's daily paper - launched an updated website. Here's my initial review:
Good:

The site clearly continues the paper's commitment to encouraging conversations and interaction between people who track what's going on in the community. As I did in 2006, I commend them for this.
The abuse reporting system in the [...]