Day: August 15, 2006

Audio from the MIT CIO Symposium

ZDNet: Nine great podcasts from MIT’s CIO Symposium. While the timeliness is questionable (the symposium, of course, was in June), it’s still nice to have this on the record and to allow other people to listen in.

If I recall correctly, particularly interesting sessions were The Habits of Highly Effective IT Leaders, with our own Brian Whetten stepping in as a superb last minute moderator; Liberation Technologies (listen for the clash of opinions between the Media Lab’s Michael Schrage and Hyperion’s Howard Dresner about, well, everything); and of course the final session on the Future of IT and Sports, in which all present made it quite clear that any attempt to use data relating to major sports for any purpose, mash-ups or otherwise, will be met with the long hammer of a lawsuit. (Well, that was my takeaway, anyway.)

If you like these, you may want to subscribe to the Between the Lines podcast (and blog) from ZDnet, on which these items were featured—or just plan to attend next year.

Snakes on a Plane countdown 2: TSA???

Boing Boing: As with gels, liquids: TSA bans mother})(^!#$ snakes from planes. Heh. I give Hollywood a lot of credit, but surely they didn’t arrange a major international terror alert just to promote the movie, did they? Hmm?

Best not to ask. Besides, if they had, the movie would probably be called something else.

From the semi-official advisory:

Protecting the Aviation System. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will be implementing a series of security measures—some visible and some not visible—to ensure the security of the traveling public and the Nation’s transportation system. TSA is immediately implementing following changes to airport screening procedures:

NO SNAKES OF ANY KIND WILL BE PERMITTED ON A PLANE. SNAKES ARE NO LONGER ALLOWED IN CHECKED BAGGAGE. This includes all pythons, boas, rattlesnakes, vipers, mambas, adders, and other known species of snakes.

Exception: some limited amounts of snakes may be allowed if Samuel L. Jackson is traveling; licensed snake charmers are allowed to have snakes in their check in baggage only if the name on the snake charming license matches the one passenger’s ticket; people whose name is Snake will be allowed on board but only after full body cavity search.

Battery recall, from another party

Hot on the heels of my MacBook Pro battery recall (mini-update: still waiting) is a recall from the other side of the force, so to speak. Dell, as reported in dozens of news outlets (Boing Boing, NY Times (who win for the best picture, of a burnt out pickup cab where an overheated battery exploded and touched off live ammo(!), and the gas tank(!)), Business Week, BBC), is recalling potentially as many as 4 million lithium ion laptop batteries because they are potentially explosive (imho, a very good reason for a recall). The BBC gets points for being the only one of the news sources I link above to actually mention the URL at which you can see if your battery is affected. They didn’t actually link it, of course, so I will: dellbatteryprogram.com.