Sean Reiser

Since the supreme court ruled on Kelso vs. The City of New London allowing the use of eminent domain to transfer real property from one private owner to another to increase tax receipts and jobs, many cities have begun projects to build sports arenas, corporate parks, factories and bus stations. They have taken advantage of eminent domain to assist developers in acquiring the land they require to execute.

I can tell you my first "political memory", it was January 21, 1981, I was 11 years old. When was came to school that day TV sets were in the classroom. By mid day we were watching Ronald Reagan's Inauguration. I remember the Pomp and Circumstance around the event. As it was a Catholic school we prayed for the President, and for the Hostages released from Iran that day. Where President Reagan wasn't addressing the students directly, I do feel I learned a lot that day. I also learned a lot about the meaning of the Presidency some from Reagan's speech, some from the teacher afterwards.

Folks who follow my tweets / facebook /etc know I've been up to my ears in a project. I've got to put seanreiser.com on hiatus for a couple of weeks until I get things running smoothly with this new client.

OK, last night I wrote a piece on RSSCloud in which I touched on the 140 character network and what I was doing to implement it. A few non-propellerhead friends sent me IMs last night not getting why a loosely coupled network is important, which is OK I didn't do a good job of explaining it.

At Dave Winer's meeting about bootstrapping the Rss Cloud someone (I don't remember who, sorry) asked about the possibility of using the cloud as an opensource peer to peer IM network to replace Jabber/XMPP (there was a little discussion around how difficult it is to implement XMPP securely and correctly). As I'm working on my cloud I've gotten to thinking about how to implement IM. I have no time to lead this for real, so this may be just a mental exercise.

I've been playing with the Artisteer for Macintosh beta and thought I'd write up my thoughts. If you're curious about my thoughts about the windows version please look here. To be fair as with any piece of software that is in beta, anything I discuss may change wildly before the final release.

Since the Windows version was written in something .NET based the folks over at Artisteer decided to use mono to port the package over to mac. One of the side effects of this is that it retains the Windows look and feel, as you can see in the image below. To a Macintosh purist having a ribbon interface would probably feel uncomfortable and overwelming. At the very least it feels out of place. They say they are looking into giving the program a more windows look and feel.

As I've been engaged in a job hunt I've been dealing more and more with applying for jobs online and I've begun to notice a disturbing trend. A number of sites from reputable firms have been asking for the last 4 digits of my SSN as well as my birthday. Now that these firms also require you to have an account on their site to apply for a job, they ask you to answer "personal questions" so they can reset your password, commonly your place is birth is used.

Last night, or rather early this morning, at around 3AM, I received a Facebook IM from a former coworker (let's call him "Frank") telling me he was in London, "got mugged and robbed at gun point" and needed my help. He went on to tell me that he was beaten and bruised. Where he said he needed cash, my primary concern was for his health. I figured he needed someone to get him to a place where he could get medical care, to a police station, or the US Consulate so I began reaching out via social networking to my contacts in London.

I've received email from a few people asking how I did the Page Peal effect on the upper right hand corner of seanreiser.com. Also I've noticed people trying to grab the actual files in my logs so I thought I'd post it once so people will know.

As you probably know this site is done in Drupal, and "there's a module for that". If you're not using Drupal, the module is implementing the flash routines found here so you can grab them there.