Berkeley

Today I got a response from Councilwoman Maio: Dear Cyrus, I felt as you did until I heard the program. Since you haven’t, as you said, maybe it would be helpful to you to track down the Tuesday “Our Healh and Fitness” program and get a sense of what was presented. You might even be able to get a transcript. Linda After spending some time online, I responded with the following: Dear Linda, I’ve found and listened to the program…

Dear Councilwoman Maio, My name is Cyrus Farivar and I am a technology journalist who learned my trade while a student at UC Berkeley. I wrote for The Daily Californian and watched the City Council take stands against various issues. Sometimes those decisions are made with conviction and well-thought out reasoning, and sometimes those decisions are made with half-baked ideas that come from somewhere else. When I found out that the Berkeley City Council was considering building a citywide WiFi…

My response to this earlier post on Berkeley pizzerias is up on Slice.

Welcome back, Dave.

LA Times: Michael Davidson, Republican of Berkeley, is standing in the circular, two-story foyer of a Mediterranean dream home in a gated neighborhood in Laguna Niguel, sounding every bit like a headliner at a political fundraiser Ñ which he is. Davidson, 25, is running for chairman of the College Republican National Committee, a powerful grass-roots organization with thousands of members and a multimillion-dollar budget. He’s in the race partly because of a fundraising controversy that has threatened to tarnish the…

For those of you who knew me back in 2001, then you’ll know that I went on a trip to Cuba with my Freshman Seminar at UC Berkeley. We got a chance to spend a week in Havana, acting as researchers (us lowly undergrads at the time) for the grad students. I was the researcher for this piece, called Cyber Libre: Cubans Log On Behind CastroÕs Back. There was talk that these would be put into a book, and it’s…

Well, the folks that said that he was bluffing — you were right. The Inquirer: Most techies consider that anyone could see that the Rine was telling porkies. One of the ways that Rine claimed he identified the tea leaf was by installing the same version of Windows on another computer. If the professor had attempted to use the same key to activate a copy of Windows, the activation servers would have denied him access. Some of the technobabble that…

From BoingBoing: The last few minutes of this video from a biology class at Berkeley is of professor explaining the terrifying consequences that will soon befall the student that stole his laptop. Hell, I’m 500 miles away from Berkeley and I’m scared after watching this. (Forward to 48:50. It’s a RealPlayer file, unfortunately, so be prepared for it to stop playing at least three times while you’re watching it). Video link | Audio Link (Zipped)

This morning I went down to the post office and sent my first bundle of things back to California — a box of books. (I was wondering though, I sent them Media Mail, but do they just take my word for it? What’s to stop people from sending things via Media Mail that don’t fit the criteria?) I may send another box later this week — winter clothes. Six weeks from Friday, I will be on a plane back to…

AP: SAN FRANCISCO, March 28 (AP) – A thief has stolen a laptop computer containing personal information about nearly 100,000 alumni, graduate students and past applicants at the University of California, Berkeley, university officials said Monday. The incident is the latest in a string of security breakdowns that have illustrated society’s growing vulnerability to identity theft. University officials announced the theft under a state law requiring that consumers be notified whenever the confidentiality of their Social Security numbers or other…