Perhaps you’ve just started a small business. Or maybe you work for an established and reputable corporation. How can you promote your company? How can you convey that you provide services and/or goods that outshine all of your competitors?

Lying is the obvious answer, but let’s pretend you’re ethical. (more…)

Al’s Alerts, a web application (http://alsalerts.com).

Al’s Alerts is a service that will email you posts from Craig’s List whenever a post appears with the keywords you provide. This frees you from having to check Craig’s List every day if you are on the lookout for something specific. This is an improvement on Craig’s List’s subscriptions, which will simply send you every post in the category.

The site is operable, but I’d like to do a front-end rewrite using the Python web application framework Django. The back-end also needs to be rewritten to scale better. The user interface needs to be improved and streamlined, and I also need to include the additional cities that Craig’s List now serves.

This is currently a work in progress.

Pictures from my road trip [facebook.com]

I took the AmTrak train to Chicago, flew to San Francisco, took a bus to Portland, then flew home. About a week before, I flew to DC for a job interview, and also stayed with my grandfather in Pennsylvania.

I was hired on the staff of the Daily Texan during college. I drew Big Science and Proverbs (for which, unlikely enough, I won an award for from Columbia University). In my opinion, they’re terrible. I’ve posted some of the less awful ones, with commentary I made several months back.

Big Science [download all comics]

Proverbs [download all comics]

Some of these comics will make people give me a funny look while saying, “That wasn’t funny at all.” One could question why I put these comics online in the first place. Too which, I refer to this [xkcd.com]

Originally ran in the Daily Texan [dailytexanonline.com] on 8/30/04.

Rethinking our false security
Cameras poor solution to defend high-profile areas

By Al Sweigart

Clues for finding the culprits behind the recent MLK vandalism are limited to grainy footage from the two cameras by the statue. The tapes are only able to confirm that two bipedal figures indeed defaced the statue at 3:21 a.m., but little else. It should not be surprising that the surveillance cameras protecting the statue were useless.

Our problem starts out simple: Deter vandals from defacing the MLK statue. The University slaps up a couple video cameras and declares the problem fixed. Unfortunately, someone can easily walk up to the camera from behind to spray paint over the lens, or wear a mask, or - in the case of the recent incident - do nothing at all, because the video quality cannot identify anyone anyway. Far too often a security problem is declared solved so that authorities no longer have to shoulder responsibility for it. (more…)