I do not think that four-dollar tolls are too much to pay for driving over the Bay's Bridges (excepting, perhaps, the Hayward-San Mateo: you couldn't pay me enough to drive over that). I blame mis-management for the third rise in seven years (in 1998, the toll was $1): paying for ice-cream castles sure ain't cheap. The Golden Gate Bridge, which suffers under its own transit authority rather than the state's, will have the opportunity to raise its rates, currently starting at $5, separately.
The Portland TriMet may squeeze out of a $48k lawsuit, thanks to the statue of limitations. A bus and its unruly passengers whacked a cyclist on the Hawthorne Bridge.
As modern-day literary liars James Frey and JT Leroy raise public awareness of truth vs. falsehood (or, as Herr Dr Strasser would put it, "Richtig oder Falsch?"), one thinks back to great literary identity crises: William Shakespeare, for example. Frey created a milquetoast personal mythology; he followed up with a weak story of redemption, one calculated to bring a tear to a certain eye. JT Leroy is a composite designed to fit the personality that would write the books published under his (her) name; the blame for this equally rests with readers and the media, who fan the fires of celebrity: who is behind the books becomes as important a question as what does this book mean? The character of an author cannot be completely divorced from the author's work: think of what the Divine Comedy would be without Dante and his Beatrice; or, for that matter, without its translators?
Don Asmussen's Bad Reporter -- the only reason to read the Chronicle! -- sheds light on the public perception of memoir embellishment.
Amit Singh, of kernelthread.com, has an upcoming book on Mac OSX internals. He has a nifty presentation available through his web site; the book itself will take a constructivist approach to examining the kernel, much as Kirk McCusick did with his book on the BSD kernel.
Some of the interesting bits he discusses:
kernel messages
drivers in kernel- vs. user-space, shielding programmers from "gory" details of i/oWith the advent of the new Intel core computers, the drivers need to be written in C (-based EFI) vs. the G5 Forth-based Open Firmware.
IPC vs Sockets: the former optimized for the local, rather than network, case. Copy-on-write
