It's been unseasonably cool so far this spring in Abu Dhabi, but yesterday it was hot: 99F. And this morning my iPhone tells me that the weather is about to turn ... seasonable. For those of you who think in Celsius (something I haven't yet learn to do after...
Almost three years ago, I signed up for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Give One, Get One program. For $400, I donated one of the program's laptops to a child in the developing world and received one myself. I was interested in Nicholas Negroponte's idea of putting...
I've written here about how much I'm looking forward to the Apple iPad (yes, still, despite the faulty MacBook I wrote about in my last post). This week I've been teaching from two Penguin Books editions, Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a...
I still love my MacBook, even though it's developed a case of screen rot. I don't regret switching to Mac as my primary computing platform, but let's face it, Macs aren't all they're cracked up to be. Macs hardware is elegant, but in recent years Macs have been...
Well, Chani, how many of these should I buy? (I'm thinking six: a Jedi and a Sith each for me and my two boys.) They're available from ThinkGeek. And, while I'm there, I'm might get myself one of these, as well:
I've always been interested in astronomy, and at a young age I learned all about red giants, white dwarves, and black holes. I spent a lot of nights during the second semester of my freshman year in college at the telescope in the science center while I was taking a...
This is an amazing video portrait of Dubai made by the time-lapse photography wizard Philip Bloom. Click here to read Bloom's account of the photo shoot and here for a more detailed account of Bloom's timelapse techniques (with additional material about Dubai). NYU...
In his New York Times op-ed piece yesterday, former Microsoft vice president Dick Brass commented on Redmond's inability to make the kind of hardware that people want to buy: Not everything that has gone wrong at Microsoft is due to internecine warfare. Part of the...
I read today's op-ed piece in the New York Times by former Microsoft vice president Dick Brass today with great interest. Entitled "Microsoft’s Creative Destruction," the piece argues that Microsoft has created a "dysfunctional corporate culture" marked by...