Good Story and Science Fiction/Fantasy Podcasts

The top list of good podcasts that I currently follow are:

• Geek Fu Action Grip by Mur Lafferty
• Heaven all three seasons (heaven, hell, and Earth) by Mur Lafferty
• 7th Son by J.C. Hutchins
• Singularity by Bill DeSmedt
• Cory Doctrow's Craphound podcast
• MOREVI: The Chronicles of Rafe and Askana by Tee Morris and Lisa Lee
• Spherical Tomi: A Novel of Despair by Jack Mangan

ITEC 2007 at Detroit

Today I visited ITEC at Detroit's Cobo Hall. I managed to get there for most of the Keynote presentation "Technology is Broken: How to Fix IT For Your Business" given by James Gaskin. It was an interesting presentation and he brought up many good points and seemed to push open source and Mac a lot.

I also got to listen to "Social Media and Web 2.0: How blogging, podcasting, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, LinkedIn, MySpace and more are going to affect your business." given by Kelsey Ruger of Webxites, Inc. Where he talked about current trends and how Social Media and Web 2.0 is and will continue to change the ways in which businesses advertise.

One of the interesting things he mentioned is that if a business embraces some of these new technologies and the social networking tools available, that they have the possibility to reach a much larger advertising audience. If they ignore them that it will not stop the content and discussion from happening, all that will happen is that the business will lose all influence on the discussion about them or their product.

social networking, wikis and folksonomies are some of the new buzzwords.

Blogs are a place where industry and technology news, ideas thoughts and other topics of interest can be added to. Also allows for reputation management.

At the end he recommended that if you want to get more involved:

* embrace social media
* read and consume social media
* start a blog (blogger or wordpress)
* start a podcast of a video cast
* build a mashup (openkapow or Yahoo pipes)
* integrate these into your daily work life

OLPC Human Interface

Last night I just watched a couple of videos [here] and [here] about the new OLPC Human Interface - Sugar. While reading the article from the Washington post "Low-Cost Laptop Could Transform Learning" I couldn't stop thinking about Ender's Game and the computers that the kids all used, which was refereed to as their "desk". The laptop they are proposing is very interesting, and I would actually be tempted to purchase one for myself at some point in the future. I think this new design of the human interface, which they are calling sugar, is very interesting and does seem to be intuitive and understandable. It will be interesting to see how it actually performs and is regarded by kids who are the primary user of it. This will be one topic that I'll be keeping an eye on.

Blocked... Writing a Thesis

I'm probably in the same position as some writers. I'm blocked! I can't seem to make any progress on my thesis that I have been working on for Way too long now.

It is a huge pile of papers

I sometimes wonder is it good enough? Will it ever be good enough? Is there enough technical information in it to be approved?

I have family and friend who would like to see me get this completed, and so would I!

I think I'm blocked. After thinking about it here are a couple of the things that I've mentally blocked on (currently and from the past):

• I need an hour of uninterested time to work on it, the half hour I have right now isn't enough to do anything
• Work is keeping me too busy and when I get home at night I don't feel like doing it
• Work is depressing me and I don't feel like working on it (my company went through a time where paychecks were delayed and we really didn't know what future would bring)
• Procrastination (games, solitaire, books, house projects, other projects, ect....)

Now I'm not exactly sure where to go from here but I had to get this written down before I just let it drop, and just throw the towel in on completing the Thesis.

I really do want to get this thesis completed (even though it is way overdue to be completed and turned in), I just need to find a way to get it done and avoid my blocking and procrastination tendencies.

PGP is 15 years old

PGP Corporation salutes the 15th anniversary of PGP encryption technology. Developed and released in 1991 by Phil Zimmermann, Pretty Good Privacy 1.0 set the standard for safe, accessible technology to protect and share online information.

PGP is used for encryption and signing of content, but it is under utalized on the internet. For a while I used it to sign my email messages and other communications. This is a good opportunity to go look at PGP again and check out what all has been updated and is new.

From what I did digging for finding PGP software, the Authoritative source for PGP software is http://philzimmermann.com The other sites that have related information are http://www.openpgp.org and http://www.pgp.com and for the international people http://www.pgpi.org

read more | digg story

Escape Pod: The Shoulders of Giants

Just listened to EP078: The Shoulders of Giants by Robert J. Sawyer from Escape Pod, and I just loved the story. I actually listened to the story twice on my daily commute. It is a story about a colony sleeper ship who was headed for Tau Ceti, where they hoped to colonize the planet there. Their travels took them 1200 year, and by the time they did get there they were greeted by a thriving community from earth. They were honored as being among the giants that helped the community actually get there and expand. The end of it puts a new perspective to life and accomplishments that can be made.

Timeline and Risk: How to Piss Off Your Software Developers

Today we're going to focus on a sentence that will make almost any developer, even a mild-mannered one, want to box up their red Swingline and head to Tahiti for early retirement.

This Article hit the issue squarely on the nail, and I couldn't agree More! The Classical Pyramid of Time, Cost and Quality still hold true today, and that good developers already are giving +100% of their time and effort to their job.


read more | digg story