* “The Prophet”:amazon by Kahlil Gibran. Been on the shelf for years, finally read it. Simple poetical musing on the big issues of life. Quick read, worth a moment – the section on parenting touched me most. * “Daemon”:amazon by Daniel Suarez. Fun cyber terror romp. Many parts scarily possible. “Fun” understates the book, it was great fun. * “Master of the Delta”:amazon by Thomas H. Cook. Small town secrets and class differences get out of control. Also an exploration of the nuances of evil. Quite good though the author explicitly foreshadows too often – it is obvious early on that some story threads are going to collide, the author doesn’t need to keep hinting. But I am nitpicking, a good story. * “The Good Thief”:amazon by Hannah Tinti. I gave this book a long time. But ultimately I gave up, there was no reward. Seems like a retelling of Oliver Twist and I never liked the original. And if you want to read Dickens, go read Dickents. Maybe it is just the fact that Dickens was forced on me in high school that I am reacting to.

• “The prospect of hundreds of billions of newly minted dollars coursing through the global financial system caused currency traders to thrash the greenback by almost 3%.”
• ” The Fed is “now bringing out all the ammo in its arsenal”, according to Rosenberg.”
• “And, for those who think the time is ripe for upping their equity allocations, Mr. Rosenberg would like to remind them of what happened to buyers of the Nikkei 225 after Quantitative Easing was tried in Japan. Longs were treated to a 20% rally that lasted six weeks before stocks set new lows just four months later. Ultimately, predicts Rosenberg, QE helps bond buyers more than stock buyers.”
• “But since I doubt dollar holders will sit idly by as the paper they hold shrinks in value, I see a quick and happy resolution as being a low probability event. Then again, other central banks (the BOE & SNB) are engaging in the same currency-busting policies, so it’s not altogether clear whether the world’s fiat currency system can survive a war of attrition.”
• “We’ve arrived at this unfortunate juncture in our nation’s financial history because of reckless behavior in both New York and Washington D.C.”
• “Let us all hope the U.S. experiment with pushing the button on Quantitative Easing is more successful for us than it was for the Japanese. But given all the behavior that brought us to this point, we will need to be both lucky and good from this point forward.”

Hard to feel good about nearterm prospects for anything. Betting on volatility seems to be the smartest thing. Holding any asset seems risky.

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen - FizzBin - The Technical Support Secret Handshake. Yes please!

Need to check out

* Maxima, a Computer Algebra System * Mathomatic * Octave

This is exactly what is so frustrating – these parties bear no cost of their misdeeds, we bear it all. Bailouts are dumb dumb dumb. We need to let these organizations go through bankruptcy so that all can share in the pain.

* Poken: Tiny RFID thingies that share all your personal data with others. Nice idea but looks like something an 8-year-old would carry. * Jean Marc Gady vases. * Timberkits. Look like fun * Cleo wall mirror with photos. I could actually see buying this.

“It’s time to let the sun shine in on this mess.” via Scott Loftesness: The AIG Firestorm Spreads.

Hear hear.

Open Terminal and type “drutil tray eject” to eject the disc/tray, and “drutil tray close” to close the tray.

via Force Eject a Stuck CD or DVD - Mac Guides.

I like the all-you-can-eat economics of my Zune player, it has allowed me to try a lot of music that I would not otherwise have heard. A problem for me tho is – I do most my music consumption in the car while driving. I have the Zune car pack and it is fine for what it is – an FM transmitter. But I hate the experience – dynamic range compression (and this seems to be a particularly bad unit for that), difficulty in finding an unallocated slot in an urban area, interference, etc.

I wish my car had an AUX in jack but alas that slot is already consumed by an iPod interface which works great but of course is unusable by the Zune. Some guys claim they are building an adapter but nothing exists. And I don’t have the time to hack one up myself.

So the other alternative is to somehow get Zune songs into MP3 format so that they can be on my iPod or burned on data CDs and thence playable in the car. I don’t really care about stripping off DRM, I want to be legal, but I want to listen to the songs easily in the car with greater fidelity than the FM path allows.

I’ve been trying TuneBite which as I understand it, pretends to be a sound card, captures a playback, and encodes into MP3 using LAME. It also grabs all the tags from the source song and whacks them onto the MP3. It works but is funky. Very sensitive to task load on the PC, any other task will interfere with the encoding. And it just misses some songs from my collection for some reason.

I’d prefer a less Rube-Goldbergian software solution, but for now this is kind of working.

“It did good work on the collapse of Bear Stearns a year ago, but for the most part it has done a mediocre job of explaining all that has gone wrong with our economic system.” – I’d have to agree, the Journal is not getting it done for me increasingly. Instead they are wasting pages on crappy sports coverage, movie/book reviews, etc. I can get all that content elsewhere.

via Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard » Blog Archive » Why is the Journal flubbing its biggest story ever?.

Continuing my educational adventure this spring:

ME 568 Active and Sensing Materials:  Fundamental knowledge of the nano-structure property relations of active and sensing materials, and their devices. Examples of the active and sensing materials are: shape memory alloys (SMAs), ferromagnetic SMAs, ferroelectric, pyroelectric and piezoelectric materials, thermoelectrics, electroactive and conducting polymers, photoactive polymers, photovoltaics, and electrochromic materials.

ME 518 Seminars on Advances in Manufacturing & Management: Current topics and advances made in manufacturing and management. Topics presented by invited speakers from academia and industry. Emphasis on the multidisciplinary nature of manufacturing and management.

via Course Descriptions.

Matter is strange – “These isotopes consist of a compact nuclear core and a cloud made of diluted nuclear material - called ‘heiligenschein’ or ‘halo’”

via For the First Time, Scientists Measure the Size of a One-Neutron Halo with Lasers.