The First 100 Years Are The Hardest

Read Paul Boutin's Quicksilver reivew in Slate, " The World Outside the Web ", which includes references to Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach", Todd Garrison's " Cracking the Code " and John Wilkins' "Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language" which was published in 1668.

The Quicksilver Metaweb is an online community making use of wiki technology. Like a real community, the metaweb is a living document, an organism that reproduces and multiplies and evolves based on the work of its collaborative authors(villiage idots and highway men included). The web provides a great opportunity for unlimited contributions as readers reflect on the various characters, plots and underlying themes presented in the book. Use the search facility to help navigate through the web; hit the main page if ever you become lost. As Neal is quoted, Quicksilver is not part of a " trilogy" but the first volume of 7-8 interconnected novels he envisions as part of the Baroque Cycle .

The MIT OpenCourseWare project is pretty amazing. The direct URL is http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html From their Announcement: The official "launch" of MIT OpenCourseWare, with the publication of 512 courses, came on September 30, 2003. We hope that you are finding material that interests you among these courses, which come from all 33 of MIT's academic disciplines.

Online resouce for Saul Bellow's novel "Herzog" . Includes study guide, notes on recurring themes, and a nice multiple choice quiz (25 Questions). I scored 95% (missed one) after finishing this "challenging novel". Favorite quote: Moses' paraphrase of the infamous Wilson administration quip that "what the world needs is a five cent synthesis." You don't say that to the masses in the midst of the depression, unless you're anxious to make the kind of mistake akin to Marie Antoinette's ill fated advice to "let them eat cake..." (I won't argue with "History", but this quote is often incorrectly attributed to her ).

"Winter is Coming!" I just finished George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones . Thrones is the first volume of a planned 6 series story arc that is sure to keep me reading for the foreseeable future! The prose is excellent and tThe writting is crisp. The characters fully developed and the action believable. This is Fantasy at its highest form. I don't know why it took 7 years to come to my attention! From the Amazon.com Book Review: Martin's Seven Kingdoms resemble England during the Wars of the Roses, with the Stark and Lannister families standing in for the Yorks and Lancasters. The story of these two families and their struggle to control the Iron Throne dominates the foreground; in the background is a huge, ancient wall marking the northern border, beyond which barbarians, ice vampires, and direwolves menace the south as years-long winter advances. Abroad, a dragon princess lives among horse nomads and dreams of fiery reconquest. There is much b...

Ever Hear of " R.A. Salvatore "? I've spent the Summer reading WOTC Collecor's Editions of " The Dark Elf Trilogy " and " The Icewind Dale Trilogy ". These books recount the tales of Drizzt Do'Urden, Salvatore's famed dark elf set in the D&D Forgotten Realms RPG campaign setting.

Summer 2003 Quotes " In great affairs men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small things they show themselves as they are." (Nicholas Chamfort) "It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it." (W. Somerset Maugham) "If you are going through hell, keep going." (Winston Churchill) "I fell asleep reading a dull book, and I dreamed that I was reading on, so I awoke from sheer boredom." (Heinrich Heine) "The Fountainhead is a compelling world where man is not presented as he is, but as he could be: a heroic being with productive achievement as his noblest activity, reason his only absolute." (Ayn Rand paraphrased). "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." (Samuel Johnson) "If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going." (Professor Irwin Corey) "Writing comes more easily if you have som...

Great Quotes Round up for April: "The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible." (Ben Hecht) "Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain." (Edward de Bono) "Try to learn something about everything and everything about something." (Thomas H. Huxley) "Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again." (Franklin P. Jones) "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." (Isaac Newton) "The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance." (Laurence J. Peter) "I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it." (Pablo Picasso) "Budget, quality or schedule... pick two." (business school maxim) "A work of art is never finished, just finally abandoned." (unknown)

Get Sun Certified for the Java1.4 platform! Now that I've got it, I can recommend it (yes, this is where I've been hiding out for the past few months). I highly recommend this book from Amazon.com to help you study for the Sun Certified Programmer's exam for Java 1.4 (310-035). The book comes with a CD-ROM that includes a PDF version of the book and several simulated exams that will prepare you for official version available at your local Prometric Testing Center . If you already have your java certification, be sure to check out SunEd's other certification programs .

Shace Shuttle Columbia Coverage: USA Today has put together a very good website to cover the Loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia . The site is graphics and sound intensive and requires the flash multimedia plug-in to be enabled, but it is well worth it.

I can attest to this : A Linux dekstop reference for the rest of us! Having recently installed Suse Linux 8.1 with no problems (installation was a snap- I did it three times before I was satisfied that the install was done correctly; getting my LinModem to work was the hard part!). What I really needed was a desktop reference to ease me over some of the tough spots, such as upgrading packages with breaking dependancies, looking for key information in the /var/log directories, deciding when to set-uid some processes as root (I still run my ppp dialer as root!). Mark Rais new book "Linux for the Rest of Us" promises to change all that. From the book review: Be not afraid, dear PC owner, be not afraid. Today's Linux flavors (or "distros", as they are called) are easy to install, easy to configure and easy to use. Yes, they are more configurable than any version of Windows, and you can tell a Linux computer to do things a regular Windows box doesn't eve...

The infamous and now bankrupt telephone company for which I've worked for 12 years has a "song-of-the-day" to help inspire us to achieve the company's "100 Day Plan." However the latest rounds of layoffs (2/28/03) have me singing "Getaway Car" from hardrock greatness AudioSlave : The first time I saw you You were chasing down A cyclone All alone in a field With rail yards and clovers I kept rolling on and never thought You'd wind up chasing me Chorus: Well settle down I won't hesitate To hit the highway Before you lay me to waste Settle up and I'll help you find Something to drive Before you drive me insane You're tired of walking and you Loathe the ground The sidewalk will barely Touch your feet and life moves Too slowly to hold you down With rining hands You take it out on me [Chorus] So get yourself a car and drive it all night long Get yourself a car and ride it on the wind....

REALITY BASED TELEVISION The New York Times (Feb 24) provides coverage of the new round of reality based TV shows the big four broadcast networks have slated for this summer. With titles such as "Love For Sale", "Wife Swap", and "Around The World In 80 Dates" one wonders how much lower we can sink in our pursuit for entertainment. Stephen King predicted our fate 20 years ago with his classic " The Running Man ": ...where people work in dangerous jobs for low wages, but employment is still extremely hard to get. Ben Richards knows that the only way his wife and daughter can get out of the low class lifestyle is for him to try to win money on one of the many gameshows on television.... These are no ordinary gameshows, because they make you suffer, or even die, and Richards has been chosen for the top show of all - The Running Man. The rules are fairly straightforward. $100 for every hour that you stay alive, and if you manage to stay alive fo...

Business Week Coverage (March 2003). Want to know what's really interesting about what I do at work (and at home for that matter?). Be sure to check out the March 3 cover story in Business Week. You can also click here to see an advance copy of the article that includes interviews from my staff. The cover doesn't look to shabby either! Be sure to read the rest of the issue for the special report on Linux and Open Source Development (OSD) in general. My group actually saved closer to $1.5M (yes million!) by going open source in the few areas we could get approval to use it. I'm sure 2003 will be a different story as the corporate environment begins to embrace the open source philosophy in general. We've already made extensive use of CVS and Sun One Studio for our integrated java/web development. For production web systems we also tools from the Apache Software Foundation , including the apache webserver, mod_perl, mod_ssl, and several tools from the ...

Squirrel Hazing -- The Untold Story . This site is great and proves I still have a sense of humor. Its amazing what random Google searches provide during conference calls.... literally hours of entertainment. Enjoy! Later on you can check out what those crazy google guys are doing in their lab !

Worth Thinking About: "You must have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star." (Friedrich Nietzsche). Nietzsche may be more famous for his oft' misquoted phases such as "God is Dead" or "Will to Power" than for the philosophic battles he chose to fight. What creative impulse defines a man who has exhausted the alternatives available to him? Does he remain a man, a simple animal with relative needs and desires, or does he become a superman, something approaching our concept of God? What Nietzsche really represents is the epic philosophical battle of the moderns against the ancients - Freud vs. Socrates- which can be characterized as the desire to rationalize ones actions versus the desire to know ones self, no matter the cost (Freud was heralded as champion of the repressed ego while Socrates was eventually put to death for "impiety and corruption of the youth" ). Nietzsche morns the loss of a badly needed father and a...

Worth Thinking About: "Many engineering deadlocks have been broken by people who are not engineers at all. This is simply because perspective is more important than IQ." ( Nicholas Negroponte ).

Chris White's Weblog Roundup : Alien Barbeque April Gem is quirky and funny. Reading her posts definitely offers something different. ComputerUser: The art of the blog The original Mike Finley article (November 2002) that piqued my interest in blogging by asking, "Anyone can create a weblog, but how many are any good?" The Cathedral and the Bazaar ESR has plenty to keep himself busy, and unfortunately his websites are not updated fequently enough. Doc Searls Interesting perspectives from the senior editor of Linux Journal . Geek Press Technology News... shaken, not stirred! NewsForge Old Reliable... the gateway for information on OSD (open source development). Open Source Developer's Network Enough Said!. SlashDot News for Nerds and Stuff That Matters. TechDirt All the news that is fit to read . Webmonkey Weblog Roundup All you need to know about weblogging software and hosting services. Weblog Industry Report Truely the final Final wo...