Juxtaposition

BookMooch: a community for exchanging used books (book swap and book exchange and book trade)

I am loving Bookmooch. I've mailed out several books so far that were sitting in my basement and am going to hopefully get some good ones in return. This was a great idea that my friend Mike and I actually had in college after the annoyance of paying $60 for a book that the bookstore on campus would only buy back for a pittance; only to turn around and sell it for $60 again. I'm glad someone else coded it. Maybe I'll actually get something for those books I chose to keep rather than get loose change for. Check out my mooch link on the left nav bar: my Bookmooch list

Posted by at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Exactly One Billion Mazes to Solve

This site contains one billion mazes in high-quality printable PDF
format. You may view, print and solve these mazes... and yes, there are exactly one billion mazes!

Posted by at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are several reasons you may want to think twice before borrowing against your 401k:

• If you leave your job that provides your 401k, you often are required to pay back any loans in full.  If you can't, it is treated as a withdrawl from the plan, requiring paying income tax on the amount and a 10% penalty if you are not of retirement age yet.
• While you have the loan, you have less money in your retirement account.  This means, you are not earning interest on the loan amount and you will therefore end up with less money at retirement.
  
• People at your company may be able to know that you have taken the loan out. 
  
• You may shift your mindset from an investor taking an active interest in the rest of your plan's success to a debtor, so your investment might suffer.
  

Posted by at 11:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I will say that any government (or other) program which assumes the honesty of employees and contractors is fundamentally flawed, and any associated risk analysis is either incompetent, or in failing to identify risk to travellers, seriously incomplete.

-- Ian Farquhar on the Cryptography mailing list 2/27/2007

Posted by at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yes, of course an infinite number of texts hash to the same
value; that's the way the function works.  But the odds of it happening
naturally are less than the odds of all the air molecules bunching up in
the corner of the room and suffocating you, and you can't force it to
happen, either.

--Bruce Schneier

Posted by at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)