Cyrus Farivar

My home media/backup server officially has an obscene amount of storage. I have three internal drives and one external: Utnapishtim – 400 GB (I scored this last week for $120 shipped, via DealMac.com) Shamhat – 200 GB Enkidu – 25 GB Humbaba – 250 GB Now that I think about it, perhaps I should rename the 400 GB drive Humbaba.

So last week I blogged about cyber security, and Stephen Colbert joked last week about entering random search queries to throw off an online profile. Today, life imitates art: Enter the TrackMeNot Firefox extension.

Shah of Shahs, by Ryszard Kapuscinski (1992). A quick read but an intimate literary impressionist tale of the Iranian Revolution and the effects before and after.

Maximum City, by Suketu Mehta (2004). An astonishing portrait of a city that I knew nothing about: Mumbai (Bombay). It’s a biographical love letter to a megapolis that sports everything from strippers to Mafia dons and Bollywood stars, with dashes of street poets and masala Cokes. Incredible book.

Forget Snakes on a Plane — it’s all about Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan! Only 76 more days ! There’s a new trailer (in the Borat link above) that was released two days ago. Fucking briliant.

So I don’t know which is more ridiculous, the cover of this new book Chine-Afrique: Le Dragon et l’Autruche (China-Africa: The Dragon and the Ostrich), or the fact that it would cost me 40 € to buy the book and have it shipped to the U.S., or the fact that I can buy it direct from the publisher in PDF form for 17.85 €.

I was reading up on Hezbollah on Wikipedia earlier this morning and got side tracked to the 1947 UN Partition Plan. Why doesn’t anyone talk about this anymore? The map is pretty sweet. I wonder if we’ll ever see something like it actually implemented.

With all this talk about search data being leaked, I’ve given a little bit more thought to cyber-security. First, I use my ISP‘s VPN almost all the time now. Second, I’ve switched from Fire to Adium, if for no other reason than it’s more customizable and has really super easy built-in encryption. Then today I came across these tips from the EFF on how to keep your search history private, including a suggestion to get the CustomizeGoogle Firefox extension. All…

This evening, I installed Parallels Desktop to my Mac, enabling me to run Windows XP on my Mac. It’s a weird feeling.

Seems to be working now.