May 13, 2005

As usual May 13th will be a culmination of another year around the sun for me. Always a time of some unforseen but inevitable convergence of events and timing.

25 years old. I made it here. Is it not time for reflection? These are Astral Weeks, slipping through the slipstream -- from the viaducts to your dreams.

Marissa and I are getting married on June 11, 2005. We've been planning this for awhile now, and it is certainly going to be an event of its kind. I've never been one to amass a large group of friends and the like, most of my relationships with blue morning people are fleeting, rarely rising above a certain level. But I have some good friends coming to this wedding. The few that I've known for years, though haven't seen in quite some time.

I have an oldest brother coming, whom I haven't seen in a number of years... late 90s some time. He has kids I've never seen and I don't know their names. But he is coming. My poor mother living near Arcata, CA is coming.

The wedding: Van Morrison sets the mood, for that down home cosmic by chance meeting love... it was certainly a deliciously cosmic night that we fell in love together down in San Francisco, CA. I still remember the fog in the air, the acid in my brains, and the world expanding.

Love's not overrated. It's there when you need it most, when you don't know what it is, what you are missing. It makes things right in the world for a moment, a lifetime. Same thing.

I was 18 when I met Marissa. 18! I can't believe it anymore. I grew up with her in many respects, I know that there are core personality structures in me now that weren't there before, structures that both she and I programmed.

Speaking of programming, another unit of my convergence is that I have a phone interview with Amazon.com tomorrow. I'm a Perl programmer. I love Perl. I'm nervous because even though I know they have my resume and cover letter that basically say as much as "while I've worked with C++ and Java, I'm most comfortable in Perl. I am not a computer science major. I studied Creative Writing and Liberal Studies which mean I dabbled in a little bit of everything under the sun. Hope it goes well.

Anyway, it's again been a long time since I've made any writeup around here besides the occaisonal daylog. That probably won't change anytime soon. I'm a happy boy though. May 13th rocks.

Patrick Bolton and Mathias Dewatripont
ISBN 0-262-02576-0
2005

• Introduction
• part I Static Bilateral Contracting.
  1. Hidden Information, Screening.
  2. Hidden Information, Signaling.
  3. Hidden Information, Moral Hazard.
  4. Disclosure of Private Certifiable Information.
  5. Multidimensional Incentive Problems.
• part II Static Multilateral Contracting.
  1. Multilateral Asymmetric Information: Bilateral Trading and Auctions.
  2. Multiagent Moral Hazard and Collusion.
• part III Repeated Bilateral Contracting.
  1. Dynamic Adverse Selection.
  2. Dynamic Moral Hazard.
• part IV Incomplete Contracts.
  1. Incomplete Contracts and Institution Design.
  2. Foundations of Contracting with Unverifiable Information.
  3. Markets and Contracts.

Now we're blaming Microsoft for Mozilla Firefox vulnerabilities!

This is too good to pass up!

Robert Lemos from SecurityFocus.com penned this priceless paragraph in today's edtion¹:

Much of what we learned security-wise from Internet Explorer is being applied to Firefox to find vulnerabilities... For example, Internet Explorer had its own Javascript flaw that allowed one page to execute scripts by navigating to another page that had higher privileges. That is one of the vulnerabilities used in this exploit.

There you have it! Respected security columnists point the finger at Microsoft for problems not caused by Microsoft!

Of course there's a very easy way to avoid problems caused by Firefox vulnerabilities! Run Firefox as a limited user on Windows XP or Windows 2000. If the user can't break the computer, an exploited application can't either.

1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/13/firefox_loses_shine/