Great David Milch video

I highly recommend this video of an interview / Q&A with David Milch (hosted by David Thorburn, who taught a lit. class that I took my freshman year). Milch talks about Deadwood, NYPD Blue, his own life, and the writing process. Perhaps the most interesting factoid: the role of Al Swearengen was originally written for Ed O'Neill (the father in Married with Children), but HBO wouldn't cast him; crazy.

Yahoo! Pipes

I messed around a bit with Yahoo! Pipes a few days ago, and it seems like a very cool tool (if a bit hard to use). I made a pipe for my brother's columns in the Stanford Daily, and it works nicely. I also recommend this Freakonomics pipe that only includes Levitt's posts from the blog. There are pipes that do all kinds of crazy mashups, but even the basic filtering functionality is quite useful.

Hacking a felony?

I just saw this article in The Tech about three students being charged with a felony for getting caught in the middle of a hack. It seems a bit overboard to me; you would think that the MIT Police would be able to figure out that no harm was intended in a case like this one. Hopefully the charges will be dropped.