Reading Material

OK - I'm not going to make it a habit to link to commercial websites (commercial in the sense that you don't get anything at all unless you put up some money.).

I want to read more, and I never seem to have time.  So I decided to try out Audible.com.  Other than the fact that their website is kinda web 1.0 and a bit slow loading pages on my 16 meg broadband connection (yikes!) the idea is pretty neat.

Basically if you are coding or doing work where you have time to do some casual listening this is pretty nice.  You download the content (DRM, YUCK!) and listen (or stream).  Their selection is pretty good...only a handful of things like Kurzweil, not everything that I want, but it's convenient and cheaper and quicker than ordering from a place that has to ship to your home.  I recommend trying it if you want to read but don't have a lot of time.  If anyone has an alternative that they like please leave feedback.  My local library has audiobooks available, but you have to use their player to listen to them :-( 

On a political note I saw the Obama family tonight on 60 Minutes.  Wow, they seem down to earth.  Barack even had a car with a hole in the floor....that's awesome.  I had a car like that once.

Back on topic, evolving-software: I read something recently (I think it was from the Singularity Summit) that was presented by a C level from Intel.  Interesting stuff indeed - he sees that software will lag hardware in terms of holding back more advanced computing.  I agree.  A keyboard and mouse is so "yesterday".  C'mon people, think outside the box.  We all have a finite lifetime, and it takes us generally 20-40 years to get to the point where we can become an "expert" and make significant contributions to technology.  We need to engineer machines to move themselves forward.  Where is the intelligent software?  The fastest computer in history running Calc.exe is still just a machine waiting for a human to give it instructions...

At least we have google - and we are getting better (much better) at information sharing.  Keep it going google - think outside the box.  Oh yeah, google - get a suggestion box that I can find.  I seriously wanted to send a suggestion the other day and I can't find any place to do so.  Yeah, a suggestion for google.com, the search engine page.  If you know how to send google a suggestion - let me know.

If you are a South Park fan the episode "Go God Go" is hilarious.  You can watch it at http://www.southparkstudios.com/guide/1012 .