July 2007 Archives

...try not to be too obviously American, use deoderant, and carry lots of water! :) Just a quick note here to say that we're having a fabulous time on our tour. This Italian (European?) keyboard is driving me nutty, but otherwise, things are decent. Well, and Citibank sucks rocks, but that's a long story for a different day (which I promise to tell because when you get screwed by your credit card company making multiple mistakes and then having absolutely no way to fix it for you while you're on the road, well... annoying!).

Ok, so, anyway... we've been to the Vatican, Roman Forum, and the Colosseum today. Tonight we're going to Piazza Nuvona (or some such spelling like that) for a walking tour, a dinner show, and then maybe browsing the pubs with some of the other folks.

Well, my time is up, I need to get cleaned up. Cheers!

Greetings and solicitations! :) Just a couple quick notes. First, I'm now an official Dragon Door Affiliate - so please help me out by clicking on the Dragon Door link at right when purchasing kettlebells and related materials, including Qigong videos, KB videos, and health supplements. I love my 16kg kettlebell and even my wife is looking enviously enough now that I'll be ordering her an 8kg kb when we get back from vacation.

Second, I will be almost completely out of pocket until August 5th or 6th while the wife and I head out on vacation. I like to completely unplug while traveling for leisure. I might check email or make a quick blog post from an internet cafe, but don't hold your breath! Maybe I will, maybe I won't. :) At any rate, don't you worry about me... until after 8/7 anyway... :) cheers!

I was able to attend a great seminar at work today. Guy Kawasaki of Apple Mac and Garage.com fame delivered an excellent presentation titled "The Art of Innovation." Below are my notes on the presentation.

Well, I've done it! I've purchased my first kettlebell, and it's awesome!!! I'm a huge fan of Pavel, as you can tell from my previous posts here and here.

I also purchased a copy of a Qigong video, and it's pretty cool, too. Far more of a workout than I would have expected. I received the videos and kettlebell ("li'l red") on Saturday and immediately pulled them out and went through the training videos. I need to go through Qigong a few more times to get it down. But, man, it's killer!!

I highly recommend the kettlebells to anyone serious about strength, anyone who might be getting bored with the gym, to anyone who's working on strengthening their core, and so on. Head over to Dragon Door and find the good stuff!

You'll have to forgive my lack of posts, I've been deeply ensconced in a very important endeavour: I've been trying to re-read the first 6 Harry Potter books before the new book comes out this weekend. Given that my wife will get first read of HP#7, I figure I have a little over a week left to get this done. I've thus far completed the first 2 books and am about a third of they way through the 3rd. Hmmm... If it comes down to packing for Europe and reading Harry Potter, I'm not actually sure which will take higher precedence... :)

Speaking of Harry Potter, we watched the latest HP movie last week at a midnight showing and it was pretty good. Obviously, much had to be trimmed from the 700+ page book, but it seemed to cover the story adequately. Once I finish re-reading the original six, I may come back and post commentary on the differences between the books and the movies... maybe... we'll see if time permits...

(Update: Forgot to mention that my original submission is available here if anyone is interested or would like to provide feedback.)

Today, this Friday the 13th, I think that sentence could be completed with either "give up" or "get angry and fight back." I might have mentioned a while back (couldn't find a blog entry on it) that, in order to complete my grad research, I needed to produce a paper and get it published in an academic, juried journal. These journals have peer reviews in addition to editors and are supposed to be of higher quality. I did the exercise as requested, but I've always been leery. My expectation was that the submission would get bounced back with a request for revisions. I did not, however, expect the result that I received today: outright rejection. Not the best way to start the day, and a good way to get me very wound up about things. Here it is, my very first attempt at publishing something, and I was not even given a chance to submit a revision. But it gets worse...

Greetings! I'm back! :) I'm sure you missed me, oh so much (mom). So, I've collected a few things of interest over the past couple days (or more) and thought I'd toss them all into a single post (since technorati whines if I post more than 1 article per couple hours [which is so weird]). Anyway, a quick overview of the topics:

1) A good blogger law resource.
2) Interesting notes from groklaw on MS, SCO GPL tapdance.
3) 9th Circuit Court ruling on warrantless monitoring.

Some good take-offs on WWII era styled images. Hat tip to Shawn for finding this site. Check out the Project For the Old American Century for more examples and opportunities to buy items. Here's my favorite:

As the temps in the Western U.S. soar to new records, it's probably very easy for us to think apocalyptic thoughts about the impact of global climate change. Look - it's clearly getting hotter! As I've mentioned recently, Greenland is melting quite rapidly, which is creating a unique opportunity to view evidence on the past. According to BBC News, a new article in the journal Science is showing that Greenland may well have been a lush, forested place a mere 450,000 years ago. If you think back to the tree ring data that Al Gore uses in An Inconvenient Truth, which shows a natural series of peaks and valleys over the past 400,000 years - correlating to increases in temp/CO2 and then mini ice ages - then this new data should jump out at you. The tree rings don't go back farther than 400k years. Hmmm. Might that be because of a major global climate shift? To me, an interesting question, and one that I still maintain we'll see played out in the next 50 years...

I'll be returning to regular service after the weekend... until then, I don't plan on further posts. :) I'm still recovering from my India trip, plus my parents have been here for the July 4th holiday. We've just gotten back home from 2 nights in the city (DC) and are, quite frankly, exhausted. I know, my last post said I was exhausted. I'm not perhaps that tired now, but I'm still fairly tuckered out. In the meantime, I recommend pulling up a seat and watching some of the Wimbledon tennis tournament. :) cheers!