Vacuum

Former Michigan Supreme Court Justice Diane Hathaway pleads guilty to bank fraud charges in an Ann Arbor federal courtroom

The story from the Detroit News's Chad Livengood (@chadlivengood):

Ann Arbor — Former Michigan Supreme Court Justice Diane Hathaway pleaded guilty Tuesday to bank fraud and could face up to 18 months in prison.

Hathaway negotiated a guilty plea with federal prosecutors and waived her right to indictment or trial. She appeared before U.S. District Court John Corbett O'Meara in his Ann Arbor courthouse just eight days after stepping down from the high court.

From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130129/METRO/301290394#ixzz2JOCmoeA6

There was a full quota of vehicles outside the Federal Building today in Ann Arbor, including three Homeland Security SUVs and three news trucks from 2, 4, and 7. I'm certain that more details will follow. Thanks to Bruce Vielmetti for the heads up on Twitter:

 

Former MI Supreme Court justice pleads guilty to bank fraud, 8 days after stepping down from court. bit.ly/X6eaL5

— Proof&Hearsay (@ProofHearsay) January 29, 2013

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Finn Brunton, The Accidental Archive. Notes on a talk Monday January 28 2013

Finn Brunton, U-M Assistant Professor of Information, will present "The Accidental Archive." Brunton's talk, with the alternative title "Researching criminals, otherkin, cipher anarchists, spammers and the online history that doesn't want to be kept," kicks off a new series of monthly events addressing emergent research. Light refreshments will be served.

Notes to follow. There's a hashtag, #MLibRes, on which a half dozen people are tracking. This is an impressionistic transcript, not a summary or tidy narrative, more notes drawn from what I remember from the time and some of my own thoughts mixed in.

"Preservation is constant toil, entropy requires no maintenance."

Links are not permanent, and the scholar who depends on them persisting risks losing their research materials. Finn gave out bits of a manifesto, one of which was "embrace wget".

The Law of the Good Neighbor, a theory of library collection shelving from Aby Warberg. An essay of the same name by Michael Steinberg.

A discussion of Rodona Garst, a notorious spammer, and the ephemeral collections of data about her operations collected under the name Behind Enemy Lines. One such collection is on archive.org so it has some hope of permanence. (but if you really want a copy, make one now)

Deep Blue is an institutional repository run by the University of Michigan. One notable project archived there is the Michigan Terminal System, which has original distribution tapes saved into non-ephemeral bits. Finn has been collecting tarballs of references for the works he's done, and one idea (new to him and recommended by the audience) was to put his tarballs in Deep Blue, with the right kind of dark-archive permanence that was suitable to the contents.

Reference to "shearing layers" from Stewart Brand's "How buildings learn". Different parts of the system change at different speeds. From Quiet Babylon, a discussion of shearing layers looks interesting.

Heresies expounded: "we should save everything", primarily because the Internet is all significant but to different populations. The example given is the Enron corpus, which is also a very useful spam corpus; if you discarded the spam you'd have been left with something less useful. Saving everything is problematic to archivists who are used to assessing collections and picking the good parts and compiling a finding aid, rather than taking all of the unfiled materials and collecting them willy-nilly.

There's more, but this captures the flavor of the event well; there will be a recording released.

Future events are Fourth Mondays. Follow @UMLibRes for details.

Downtown Ann Arbor fire at 401 S Division St

A downtown rental house caught fire on the evening of Friday, January 25, 2013. Initial reports did not include any mention of injuries, and two dogs were reported rescued.

Coverage:

Damn Arbor:  Huge fire!

AnnArbor.com: Fire breaks out at apartment house in downtown Ann Arbor; pets saved; Saturday 1/26/2013 update Ann Arbor fire aftermath: 'I'm so grateful' about dog rescue and resident safety

Michigan Daily: Fire breaks out at house near ISR. "AnnArbor.com reporter Ryan Stanton lives in the house and his dog, Stan, was one of those saved by the fire fighters."

Ann Arbor Journal: ANN ARBOR: Firefighters rescue 2 dogs from house fire, 8 residents displaced. Extensive quotes from Battalion Chief Randy Menard.

Washtenaw County Red Cross, via Facebook: "Five volunteers from the Washtenaw-Lenawee County Chapter of the American Red Cross responded to an apartment fire in the 400 block of South Division Street in Ann Arbor Friday night, and assisted four individuals with food, clothing and lodging. Volunteers also provided canteen service (beverages and snacks) to approximately ten first responders at the scene."

Downtown #A2fire coverage by @john_counts; relieved @ryanjstanton & dog in @annarborcom newsroom bit.ly/WWZDTr twitter.com/amywrites_/sta…

— Amy Biolchini (@amywrites_) January 25, 2013

The building is at 401 S Division St. City records show that rental permit CR072626 had expired for the dwelling as of 6/1/2012, so it was being rented without a permit. This from the city "eTrakit" system. The property is marked in eTrakit is noted as been managed by Old Town Realty. This listing shows that a 1 BR unit is asking $1010 for September 2013 occupancy.

Thanks to @johnnn, @msdrdata, and @damnarbor for updates, and for @trevorstaples for the first alert that something was going on. At the time he alerted me I was walking past his classroom.

 

Related articles

DTE substation fire and Ann Arbor power outage, June 28, 2012

Apartment fire at 1310 Packard, Ann Arbor injures 6

Downtown Ann Arbor fire at 401 S Division St

Smoky house fire on Harpst Street in Ann Arbor on the evening of October 7, 2011

SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab Security Advisory: "Critical SSH Backdoor in multiple Barracuda Networks Products"

The full security advisory is here:

https://www.sec-consult.com/fxdata/seccons/prod/temedia/advisories_txt/20130124-0_Barracuda_Appliances_Backdoor_wo_poc_v10.txt

Some industry reaction:

Information Week:

According to SEC Consult, however, the security definitions update still leaves three accounts on all devices -- cluster, remote, root -- which Barracuda told it are "essential for customer support and will not be removed." But SEC Consult warned that the password for the "root" account can be cracked, if it isn't sufficiently strong, and noted that although only Barracuda possesses the private key for the passwords for the "cluster" and "remote" accounts, this is a security problem. "This still leaves considerable risks to appliances as the password for the 'root' user might be crackable and the relevant private keys for the 'remote' user might be stolen from Barracuda Networks," said SEC Consult. "In secure environments it is highly undesirable to use appliances with backdoors built into them. Even if only the manufacturer can access them." 

Security Week repeats mostly the same news.

The Register is characteristically sharp-tounged:

Backdoor root login found in Barracuda gear - and Barracuda is OK with this; Hidden accounts 'needed for remote tech support'

Remote tech support is hard work, as is systems security.

AATA Route 5 service changes

From the news release - Sunday January 27, 2013 starts a new bus season, with improvements on the 5 route. All Route 5 details here for trips to Ann Arbor (PDF) and trips to Ypsilanti (PDF).

--

The service improvements are intended to provide:

• More reliable service (better on-time performance)
• Less crowded trips
• More direct and faster service for riders

The number of buses on Route 5 will be increased from five to seven during morning and afternoon peak hours.

The segment of the route between downtown Ann Arbor and Packard/Stone School Roads will be increased from 4 to 6 trips per hour, and will continue to use the current routing.

Trip segments east of Packard/Stone School Roads will be divided into four variations:

• 5A trips will travel between downtown Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti via Packard Rd., Stone School Rd., Ellsworth Rd., and Platt Rd.
• 5B trips will travel between downtown Ann Arbor and Meijer via Packard Rd., Stone School Rd., and Ellsworth Rd.
• 5C trips will travel between downtown Ann Arbor and Meijer (Carpenter Rd.) via Packard Rd., Stone School Rd., Platt Rd., and Ellsworth Rd.
• NEW! - 5D trips will travel between Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti directly via Buhr Park/Packard (with no service to Stone School Rd., Ellsworth Rd. or Platt Rd.).

a2b3 meeting non-summary for Thursday, January 24, 2013 at Eastern Accents

A bunch of folks met for lunch on Thursday. Here's some notes from that meeting.

I asked people how they stayed warm. They dress in layers, use solar thermal heating, wear sweaters, wear hats, huddle under electric blankets, and all manner of good adaptive Michigan behavior.

Some events coming up, each of which features some a2b3 group member. Some details elided in the interests of brevity, click to links for more details.

Already happened: Linda Diane Feldt spoke at Crazy Wisdom about the liver. "The liver is the largest and most critical organ for detoxifying the blood, moving lymph, and processing food and storing nutrients. I'm in awe of how well it functions, and how much it does." About 18 people were at the event.

Friday night 1/24/13 is David Bloom and Friends playing lounge-jazz standards at Chelsea's "Back to the Roots" cafe, details on Facebook.

Thursday 1/31/13 2-8p at Burton Manor in Livonia is ACE '13, the Annual Collaboration for Entrepreneurs. Details on their web site; volunteer opportunities are available which I'm happy to help you track down if you're interested.

Saturday 2/16/13 10a-noon at Eastern Accents is the 4th Death Cafe, led by Merilynne Rush. Notes on the 3d meeting are here with contact info and more details.

Wednesday 2/27/13 from 7pm to 8:30pm in the Multi-Purpose Room is Dan Romanchik about how to self-publish e-books, based on his experience with writing books on amateur radio. Event details.

Thanks to everyone for coming!

How to mount your smart phone on a tripod, by Roger Rayle

Roger Rayle (@wguru) gets the credit for this slide deck, which shows you how to adapt an automotive aftermarket phone mount as a holder for that phone in a tripod.

Tripod Mount for Smart Phone from wguru

Brrr! Cold overnight temperatures on Tuesday, January 22, 2013 in the Ann Arbor area.

The cold overnight temperatures in the Ann Arbor area are illustrated nicely by the Weather Underground's Wundermap for the area - here's a snapshot from 12:30 a.m. Brrr!

Assuming that school is on tomorrow (and not called off because of bitter cold), this should be one of the few days of the year I don't just send my second grader off to make it to school on his own.

If the Ann Arbor Public Schools were to be called off because of bitter cold, it would be following these guidelines: no outdoor recess if temperature or wind chill is below zero, and no school if temperature or wind chill is below 20 below zero. Their table, under "Unsafe Weather Guidelines":

Here's local school closing information:

WDIV, Channel 4, "Click on Detroit": Detroit School Closings. (11 reported at 1 am.)

CBS Detroit, WWJ 950 AM: First School Closings. (11 reported at 1 am.)

Fox 2 Detroit: School Closings (11 reported at 1 am.)

Contactually, an early review of this contact manager

I'm on a 30 day trial of Contactually, a contact manager that seems to handle one important function only: reminding you to follow up periodically with people who are important to you.

On the plus side, it does a good job of importing data from my Google account and from a handful of social media sites, and by doing so the amount of manual labor needed to do something with it is kept to a minimum. New contacts are created by it watching your inbox.

On the minus side, its sense of creating reminders depends on creating "buckets" of similar contacts to be reminded on a similar schedule, and the process of putting a living, breathing, complex human being into exactly one bucket is difficult if not impossible to do completely. They try to make a game of it, which at least lets you speed through decisions, but it's still a difficult task.

Once you have someone in a "bucket" it pulls a few of them out of that bucket every so often and reminds you to follow up with them. You can mark someone as followed up via email or through some other method, so it will keep track of phone calls or in-person meetings or whatever if you need to.

When I used to use ACT!, once upon a long time ago, I was better at following up with people because I kept track of when I last contacted people. I'm always surprised that native contact managers don't have a field that they keep updated for "last contacted" that can easily be sorted and will automatically be populated from other things that the system knows. ACT! never made it into my Internet world successfully, but I still remember its ideas. 

Contactually is interesting, in the way that every single new contact manager is interesting. The price point is $0/mo (for a cut-down version), $20/mo (for what I have now), and $99/mo/user (for an enterprise version that I have no interest in). At $20/mo I had better be able to point to $1000/mo in new value coming from this, and based on the experience to date, I can't say yet that it's worthwhile to me at that price point. But I like the idea - hey, let your computer unearth some long-lost friends to remind you to chat with from time to time! I'm just not sure that I couldn't get the same results by taking my contact list, putting it in a file, and then generating a random line in the file to inspire me.

Related articles

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Contact Management Series by Jennifer Allan-Hagedorn - Part 4: How Does a Contact Management System Pay for itself?

Contact Management, Without the Contact Management

finding buckets to refill regularly

Startup Stories: Contactually

Big data is any data set too big to fit into Excel.

Big Data is any thing which is crash Excel.

— DevOps Borat (@DEVOPS_BORAT) January 8, 2013

 

As evidenced in the following laments:

"There must be some software or solution that can handle a lot more data than excel without getting too complicated." - Quora question 

"Explaining the 8 Weaknesses of Traditional Excel" - product pitch from PowerPivot, an Excel add-on.

"Point being: a lot of us are going to be working with large datasets soon, if we’re not already. And while the current toolset of choice – Excel – has its strengths, that doesn’t happy to be one of them. So either it gets there, or someone goes island hopping beyond the most popular spreadsheet product in history and defines the user interface and experience for Big Data." Read more: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2009/11/19/whats-after-excel-big-data-and-the-future-of-spreadsheets/#ixzz2IZ4jRn1u