I enjoy good conversation and a good beer or two... "Beer is far more than a drink, it is a token that a man can move his limbs and stretch in safety."
- Erich Remarque
Rick Smolan, a photographer who has worked for National Geographic, has published a fantastic book that discusses a worldwide concern: safe drinking water. The powerful images and essays in Blue Planet Run make it a compelling read. A PDF of the book is available on Amazon for free.
In an interview with Robert Scoble, [...]
My son just got Guitar Hero III, and I was skeptical at first if it was worth it. I mean, if you want to play guitar, buy a guitar and practice, right?
I play guitar already, albeit badly, so I get a bye, okay? Well, let me just say, Guitar Hero III is awesome. [...]
In William McNeill’s World History, he makes an interesting point about evolution in general. He states that “when cultural evolution took over primacy from biological evolution, history in its strict and proper sense began.”
I noticed a parallel between his comment and Ray Kurzweil’s idea of the singularity, the point at which technology causes or becomes [...]
Leo Laporte, the host of some of my favorite podcasts, recently went on a photo-safari to Tasmania. During his trip, his podcasts net@night and This Week in Tech were on hiatus. In my search for fresh commuter podcast material, I stumbled across several excellent podcasts.
This Week in Photography is a great program [...]
I thought this was timely and apropos; the RIAA released this holiday “news clip” for use by local news channels too lazy to do their own research. To my mind, this is a classic example of propaganda. Interestingly and ironically, their bullet points mock their own amateurish production (maybe they want to make it seem [...]
OMG this is cool. Looks like most of O’Reilly’s blogs have a reader built in (through the ReadSpeaker service). The voice is understandable, and if you don’t like the embedded player, you can download MP3s for portability. Apparently this has been online since at least April 2007, and it’s still being perfected; [...]
I was surprised when I tried locating some Israeli cities for a history course and noticed that Google Maps is noticeably lacking any info on Israel. Both Google Maps and Microsoft Live Maps know that Jaffa (formerly an ancient city and battle site of the Crusades) is now a neighborhood in Tel Aviv.
What Google Maps [...]
Here’s the dilemma: you’ve got a paper due, and you waited longer than you should have to gather sources. You need some additional resources but don’t have time to wait for library holds to come in. Sometimes having a source to cite is all you need. This works really well if you have a quote [...]
I attended a recent network mapping workshop hosted by the University of Washington Grey Hat Group at the Tacoma campus. Although the nmap exercise was review for me, I found out about a couple new tools and an upcoming event that are worth sharing.
BackTrack is a sweet Linux distro that bundles some great security [...]
It’s not like everyone isn’t already suffering from information overload, but just in case someone missed the boat, here’s another great RSS feed.
The Burton Group provides high-quality business analysis as a paid service. However, they also offer free RSS feeds to a handful of their blogs. The info is timely and deals with [...]