The following is An Annotated Critique of President George W. Bush’s March 17 Address Preparing the Nation for War. A very interesting read indeed.
Monthly Archives: April 2003
Pictures of Civilian Casulaties
Having returned from my holiday, I am going over some blogs and Scot Hacker’s birdhouse.org has an interesting post entitled lucky. Two interesting links from there. For one, these pictures are of civilian casualties in Irak. No, we didn’t see those on TV. The second one is an Iraq War Justification flowchart by megnut. Still trying to keep an open mind here.
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix was a great movie and The Matrix Reloaded is just arround the corner. If you can get your hands on the latest WIRED then I highly suggest getting it because it includes a great article about the making of The Martix. The second one now includes a fully computer animated fight scene in which they put the faces of Neo and Agent Smith back on the computer animated figures because this is the part of the human body that people notice to be fake the fastests. With the help of this technology, they can now fly the camera arround the scene at will, finding the best angles.
Nick Denton, Blog Mogul
This was the title in WIRED about what Nick Denton is currently doing. What he is doing is coming up with ideas for blogs, having them designed and then paying an editor to handle the site. It’s an interesting concept, even though I do not know if it will ever be profitable. Actually, I doubt it, but it largely depends on the return of the advertising industry in termf of revenue. You can read more about the current sites here on his blog.
Interface by Neil Stephenson
Based on the other books by Neil Stephenson, especially Cryptonomicon, I was looking forward to this one. It’s writting together with Frederick George and I couldn’t put it down until I was finished, reading it the entire trip back in the plane from the US, which made the trip back seem a lot shorter than it was.
To keep this short, the book is very good. Without giving anything away, it’s about somebody wanting to be president of the united states, a lot of money, interaction of chips and brains, understanding human emotions, demographics and great characters. As always, the characters are layed out in great detail, which allows the reader to feel part of the story to some extent.
If you like Neil’s other books, you will like this one, even though it might be called a bit simpler than his previous ones. I actually like that though because I feel that Snow Crash was a bit too complicated. Sure, it was an amazing book, but I felt that Neil Stephenson was trying to prove his writing skills with that book, moving to just writing a great book in Cryptonomicon. With Interface he has simply written a great book, with the help of Frederick George, or vice versa, whoever was taking the lead in the writing of the book.
Take on the Street by Arthur Levitt
The sub title of this book by the ex SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt ist: What Wall Street and Corporate America Don’t Want You to Know – What You Can Do to Fight Back and this exactly what he is telling you in this book. Here is a Chapter overview to help you decide if this is a book for you:
Continue reading
MacStumbler
I finally found an application for the iBook that lets me scan the airwaves for 802.11b aka Wifi networks whereever I am. The nice thing is that it works without any big changes in the system and is a graphical OS X application. Simply wonderful. <a href=”http://www.macstumbler.com/”>Check it out</a>! And while I am at it, EtherPEG is a tool that lets you monitor your ethernet port for GIFs and JPEGs. You can recompile it for connecting to the AirPort port and then when you are in a nice network with lots of people this might be a fun thing to watch 
The American Record in Nation-Building
The American Record in Nation-Building is a report by the Carnegie Endowment for Internaltion Peace. I haven’t read more than the Executive Summary yet, but it sounds like something interesting.
Oh… I’m back from my holiday. More later.
Off we go
I’ve been silent the last few days, which was largely due to being rather busy at work and in real life. This also had a reason. HOLIDAY!!! I am off to sunny (hopefully) Florida for a relaxing 12 days. I’ll report back afterwards. For now. Talk to all of you soon.
Andrew about the Second Superpower
Andrew Orlowski of The Register has written a very interesting and as always smile provoking article. This time it’s about the new famous term of a “Second Superpower” and how it went from meaning something like world opinion to something totally different in just a matter of days.
