In Season 2 of Breaking Bad Walt decides it's time to scale up the drug making operation. There's a supply chain problem with going big, though. Jesse has been sourcing pseudephedrine pills, an over-the-counter cold medicine that can be crushed up and used as of the key precursors to making methamphetamine, by sending a network of buyers out to ( Read more... )

It's in the news this week that the drug phenylephrine, used as a key ingredient in a variety of cold medicines to reduce swelling of nasal passages, simply doesn't work. An FDA advisory panel made this unanimous finding on Tuesday after reviewing recent scientific studies showing that oral forms of the drug (i.e, pills and cough syrups) provide no ( Read more... )

The REAL ID program, which requires enhanced drivers licenses to do all sorts of not-driving things such as enter an airport, federal courthouse, or your Congressional representative's office, has been postponed another 2 years. Today the DHS pushed back the deadline for full enforcement from May 3, 2023 to May 7, 2025. Source: DHS press release, 5 ( Read more... )

Last week I wrote about what the modern-day risk of hacking really is vs. how people think hacking works using a recent comic from XKCD. One friend got a chuckle out of it and sent me another XKCD comic from years ago that touches on a similar point.


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Israel/Jordan Travelog 36
Wadi Rum, Jordan - Saturday, 25 Nov 2017, 6pm.We left Petra around 3:30pm today. There was a misunderstanding about the size of vehicle they were going to drive the four of us in to Wadi Rum, two hours away. They wanted to put all of us in a pick-up truck. Our purchased itinerary specified a 7-seater van. Hawk let 'em have ( Read more... )

It's been a tough week this past week just to read the news. Our presidential race is down to two pathological liars, there were two shootings of innocent people by police that probably would have been swept under the rug if not for the surging popularity of smartphones and streaming video, and then a hateful nutjob with a rifle in Dallas killed 5 ( Read more... )

I got pulled over by the police for a traffic stop on my trip to Arkansas a few weeks ago. I believe it was a garbage stop, targeting me because a cop thought I might be an outsider.

( TL;DR: I avoided getting framed by a lying cop because White Privilege )

UK/Ireland travelog #18
Back at the hotel in Belfast. Wednesday 18 March 2015, 10:30pmWith my last several blog entries being about St. Patrick's Day in Northern Ireland you might think I'm here on holiday. But this trip is all about work-- so far, anyway. I did put in about 6 hours of hands-on-keyboard work yesterday. And that despite doing the ( Read more... )

It's like the events in Ferguson are a contagion that's spreading. Barely a week after a grand jury in St. Louis declined to charge police officer Darren Wilson for killing unarmed Black man Michael Brown, a grand jury in New York City declined to charge officer Daniel Pantaleo for killing unarmed Black man Eric Garner. [NY Times news story: "New ( Read more... )

The much awaited decision from the grand jury on the case of police officer Darren Wilson killing unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown has come in. The grand jury chose not to indict ( Read more... )