Sardoodledom

I've seen this funny spelling bee clip before, but thanks to Neatorama for reminding of it.

The Job

Thanks to Neatorama for pointing me to this short film, with a clever twist in the tail.

Where The Writers Are

As you know, gentle reader, I'm hopelessly slow at getting through novels.

However, I'm sure you aren't, so let me tell you about a little discovery I made this morning, via Geek Sugar.

Red Room is a new social networking site that bills itself as "the online home of the world’s greatest writers".

I have to admit, when I perused the enormous list of authors, I only recognised a couple of the names, but that's probably more an indication of my technical bent than the quality of the content.

If you're interested in books, I'd say it's definitely a site to check out. Who knows, you may just discover your next favourite writer!

The OLPC Story

The most recent ABC Science Show consisted entirely of a talk that Nicholas Negroponte gave at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In it, he tells the story of how the One Laptop Per Child project came about, and how it is progressing.

One point he made, that reminded me of my beloved MacBook Air, was that the cost to build a computer with a given set of specs will halve over a period of roughly eighteen months.

So, in theory, one would expect the price of decent hardware to keep dropping as time goes on.

Of course, that's no good for the manufacturer's bottom line. So, instead, they simply keep bumping the specs sufficiently to be able to charge the same price.

In reality, the benefit of these escalating specs, to the average user, ceased a long time ago. Most people use their computers for word processing, e-mail and web surfing. The greatest demand they're likely to place on their machine is asking it to recalculate a spreadsheet.

The reason this reminds me of the Air is not that it's cheap ... I wish! ... but the fact that while my precious has a relatively feeble processor, by current standards, it handles everything I throw at it admirably.

Anyway, I think the podcast tells an interesting story, so here's a link to the MP3 on the ABC site.

Regular Expression Service

Thanks to Download Squad for pointing me to RegExr, a browser-based regular expression tester.

There are dedicated applications out there for playing with regular expressions.

However, it's nice to have a web service for those times when you're not in front of your own machine.

Sad, But True

"The Real Cost of Financial Clutter on the Road to a Remarkable Life" is an essay over at Unclutterer that holds some hard truths, indeed.

Here are a couple of quotes ...

"Every time you spend a dollar, you sacrifice a bit of your future."

"Everywhere I looked around me in that apartment, I saw stuff I didn’t need. Video game consoles piled high under the television, along with a small mountain of games for the consoles. Over a thousand DVDs. A gigantic television set that dwarfed our living room, looking almost comically out of place."

I can certainly empathise with this. Over the years, I've spent a phenomenal amount of money on "stuff" ... some of which I threw out just a couple of months ago, and some of which still awaits ejection.

Every time I think of the thousands of dollars I've thrown away on CDs and DVDs, computers, gadgets, expensive dinners, nights out drinking and taxis, I feel just a little ill.

Fortunately, I've mended my ways ... apart from the occasional Apple lovefest :-) ... but if the description above sounds like you, I highly recommend the article.

Can't We All Just Work Together?

I found this clever short film over at Mathematics Under the Microscope.