* “The Geography of Bliss”:amazon by Eric Weiner. A solid book exploring the nature of happiness; community, sharing, connections, a sense of a greater purpose, and a laid back approach to life all seem to be key. * “The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead”:amazon by David Shields. Reflections on mortality. I don’t really get it, he seems to be yelling at his readers and his father “don’t you get it? How can you be so carefree? We are all going to die” and my response is so what? How would I live differently? Am I supposed to be more dour and depressed, and how would that make things better? * “An Army At Dawn”:amazon by Rick Atkinson. The story of the US Army at dawn of WWII in North Africa – disorganized, soft, bickering, self-centered. All this was blasted away as the army learned how to fight and as the men ill-suited to war were rendered casualties. At the start, we viewed this as someone else’s war. By the end of the North African campaign, the war was deeply personal to the army with resultant changes in behaviour. * “Silver Spoon Kids”:amazon by Gallo, Gallo, Gallo. Trite examples, middle school vocab, shallow thinking. If you have no moral compass whatsoever and can’t bring yourself to engage in deep thought or true acts of compassion, I guess this book is for you. I’d personally recommend almost any classic or autobiography or meaningful nonfiction (any of the other books mentioned) as a better way to develop morality, and of course real engagement with real people in your community.

Comcast HD Quality Reduction: Details, Screenshots - AVS Forum – wow, comcast cheating on HD. add this to their “traffic shaping” and gosh they don’t seem super customer friendly

C-jump will teach your kids how to program » Coolest Gadgets

Dark Roasted Blend: Disturbing Wiring, Part 4 – we have 5 miles of Cat5 in our house, I can relate

CrunchGear » Archive » NVIDIA makes up a manly slice of Vista Crash Pie – wow, the pc business bites msft in the ass hard. i don’t see how msft can let this stand long run.

BuckeyeXtra - The Columbus Dispatch : Boren considering OSU after departing Michigan – wow, UM takes another hit. Michigan is going to get worse before they get better.

nytimes article today mentioned beatunes at www.beatines.com, and also a roundup at snipurl.com/228ai.

Snelflight Jump Jet – seriously, who would not want one? What a great way to terrorize the housepets.

My Damn Channel » You Suck at Photoshop » You Suck at Photoshop #9 – this entire series is awesome. and helpful.

* TeraCopy – asynch copying with pause, resume, error handling * Doublekiller – find and kill file dupes. And then RED to kill empty dirs * Defraggler – individual file defraggler. UPDATE: faulted when I ran it. not going to use a defragger that faults * Drivermax – backup all your drivers. UPDATE: pretty cool, MSFT should buy this thing. * Xinorbis hard disk analyzer. Also windirstat. UPDATE: both nice and useful. Man do I have a lot of storage committed to FLAC * Process Scanner or Taskpower3 to figure out what all those running processes are. UPDATE: process scanner doesn’t really provide any more detail than task manager, and taskpower wants money from me to try. * Netsharemanager to manage network shares in bulk * InFormEnter to complete webforms * HD Tune for checking hard disk health * Ed Bott’s list of 10 best utilities * Fix stuck pixels – does this actually work?? * Powercfg to control which devices can wake Windows. Or at least see which ones can

Physicists show electrons can travel over 100 times faster in graphene than in silicon – and faster than in copper.

Brett on Stuff » A Backpackers Dream – wow this site is really awesome, who needs to hike anymore? Top 10 survival tools over on wired – handy. Micro LED light – another ultralight goodie from brett

blog.pmarca.com: Brad DeLong on trade and wages – excellent articulation of the China strategy that makes sense to me – basically, lets be great friends with them. (I guess this should be our strategy in dealing with almost every nation in the world, excepting a very very very few)