Encephalosponge » Soaking Up Life

I kind of fell back in love with reading during my year off from school. I started around Christmas of 2006 and actually got quite a few books read before school started this past Fall. Unfortunately, as you might expect I don’t have a lot of time for leisure reading. Actually, I [...]

Apparently my blog has taken a turn for the worse . I guess my content hasn’t been very interesting over the past few months or something. I should have time to work on better stuff this summer hopefully. If you’re reading this and have any suggestions on new stuff I could [...]

Lawrence Lessig gave a great speech at the National Conference for Media Reform a few days ago. It was a very insightful look at the way our government runs and how we can address its problems. He uses a bunch of great examples. It’s kind of long (~30 minutes), but take the [...]

Did you get a $600 (or more) economic stimulus check from the government? Been looking around for a new laptop for you or the family? Wouldn’t it be great to get a top quality laptop for under $600? Lenovo always has great deals on their ThinkPads, but there is a particularly good [...]

Today marks the release of Ubuntu 8.04, code named “Hardy Heron”. This is the day that occurs twice a year to celebrate the culmination of 6 months of hard work from the folks at Ubuntu, Gnome, Linux Kernel, and the thousands of other free software organizations who’s work is combined to make Ubuntu possible. [...]

I think one of the best examples of how free software can work great (and be even be sold) is Dell’s adoption of Ubuntu. They can take free software (Ubuntu) and custom-tailor it to work on their specific laptops and desktops. They can even custom-compile their own Linux kernels that they don’t contain [...]

I read an article about the future of book industry and authors [hat tip Sadie]. In it, they describe the ways that authors are suffering from the effects of piracy. Many authors are concerned about their lost profits at the hands of e-Book pirates and they are trying to come up with new [...]

I read a very interesting article today, linked from an article on ifacethoughts (a blog I read). The article itself is about undergraduate Computer Science majors, but I felt like the premise goes far beyond that specific example. In reality it speaks to the terms of higher education in general, and I’m going [...]

For those of you who did not get my email, I’ve uploaded 2 albums of photos of my niece, Lily, for viewing:
Lily’s 2nd Birthday
Lily at Lil’s House
Feel free to pass these links out to anyone you know who might be interested.
EDIT: If you’re only interested in photos of Lily, feel free to subscribe to [...]

This is probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in my life. MIT is sponsoring a program to put their entire coursework online free for anyone to use (called OpenCourseWare). They include tests, lecture notes, videos, problem sets, and more. Everything is distributed under a Creative Commons Share-Alike License. [...]