Not an Opera Fan, but this might be worth investigating...

From MSN (yeah, I know, what ever...)

Illnesses Cause 2 More Debuts at Met

March 23, 2008, 4:57 PM EST

At this rate, the surgeon general could issue a warning that singing at the Metropolitan Opera can be hazardous to one's health.

Illnesses have knocked out stars at dizzying speed, with six singers making unscheduled debuts in leading roles over 13 days.

Three tenors appeared as Tristan, one of whom stopped the show when a set malfunction sent him tumbling into the prompter's box. A soprano took over Isolde in mid-performance, and two other sopranos were thrust into Verdi operas on short notice.

Some singers spend years waiting a chance to sing on the Met's stage, working their way up at regional theaters with the hope they can become the next Luciano Pavarotti or Birgit Nilsson. Various viruses have catapulted those waiting in the wings into the spotlight, usually with not even a single stage rehearsal.

Angela Meade, a 30-year-old soprano still in vocal school, hadn't sung a single professional performance before her debut Friday night as Elvira in Verdi's "Ernani."

A little more than 16 hours later, tenor Robert Dean Smith sang Tristan in a performance simulcast to theaters worldwide. He jetted in from Berlin on Thursday, had a few piano rehearsals Friday and planned to head back to Europe on Sunday. Even Met General Manager Peter Gelb joked that the revival of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" was "cursed."

More at MSN Entertainment, probably Topix.net too.

Quit Procrastinating

While procrastinating doing some MBA research, I decided to quit procrastinating copying the pictures from last week's robotics competition in Milwaukee. Most of the photos were blah, but this one seemed to sum things up nicely. It is an action photo showing the Eagan Blue Twilight (Team 2220) Robot reaching for a ball on the overpass (blue robot to the right in the photo, arm extended upward) while the Edina Green Machine takes a dive backwards. The Green Machine ended up disabled and laying on the ground, but the team made repairs and the robot recovered nicely in later matches at the competition.

Naked City writer Malvin Wald Dies

Original Line: There are 8 million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.

Updated to 2008: There are 8 million blogs on the Internet. This has been one of them.

Malvin Wald dies

Six Word Stories

A book of thousands of six word stories has been published. The book's title, "Not Quite What I Was Planning" (by Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser) is an example of the kind of stories in the book. Some others...

"For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn"

"Bring it to a boil. Often" - Mario Batali

"Revenge is living well. Without you" - Joyce Carol Oates

"Wasn't born a readhead; fixed that." - Andie Grace

- From the Kindle Daily Post, Feb 13, 2008

From the editor of the newsletter:
One Life. Six Words. What's Yours - Molly

On Economic Forecasting

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." -- John Kenneth Galbraith

It's time for Carnival- Winter Style

Look up the Winter Carinival in Wikipedia and you will find:

In 1885 a New York reporter wrote that Saint Paul was "another Siberia, unfit for human habitation" in winter. Offended by this attack on their Capital City, the Saint Paul Chamber of Commerce decided to not only prove that Saint Paul was habitable but that its citizens were very much alive during winter, the most dominant season. Thus was born the Saint Paul Winter Carnival.

It's still pretty cold out there, but the sprit seems right and the storyline, with the winter king boreas being banished by Vulcan, thus allowing summer to come is pretty fun.

(fyi, the photo credit for the ice sculpture goes to Gregg at Metro Blogging)

Charlie Rose on Why Bloggers Blog

In an interview with Jeff Bezos (founder and ceo of amazon.com), Charlie Rose mentioned a quote he (Mr. Rose) has apparently said several times on his show:

How do I know what I think until I see what I've written.

This could be the Blogger Mantra.

Capital Bunnies

There are (apparently) several photos on the Internet of "Capital Bunnies" (Rabbits in the Washington D.C. area). Here's an example that caught my eye.

Neglected Blogger

Blogger has been neglected. All my recent posting has been going to Word Press (WheresAdamsIPod.com), LiveJournal, or Twitter. A good new years resolution for me would be to figure out exactly how best to use this blogger space.

GMail / GChat Adds AIM Interaction

The lines in the sand appear to have been drawn.

Yahoo Mail has a Yahoo Messenger interface through Yahoo web mail .
GMail has a GChat interface through GMail's web interface.

Yahoo Chat can cross communicate with Windows Messenger
GChat can now cross communicate with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)

That leaves Hotmail/Windows Live Mail as the only remaining mail program without an integrated web based chat system.

Windows XP SP 3 = XP + some Vista?

Windows XP SP3 To Include Vista Elements


Portions from:
Paul McDougall, InformationWeek, quoting research done by NeoSmart.

An update to the Microsoft Windows XP operating system will include patches that add pieces of Windows Vista.

"Contrary to popular belief, Windows XP SP3 does ship with all-new features, not just patches and hotfixes," said researchers at NeoSmart, a nonprofit group that tracks computer technology. Most of the new features are "backported from Windows Vista," according to NeoSmart.

Some Features NeoSmart says are crossing over include:
- The Product Activation Model, "meaning that product keys don't need to be entered during setup. The feature should prove popular with corporate IT managers, who often need to oversee hundreds, or even thousands, of operating system installations".

- Vista's Network Access Protection modules. The system verifies a computer's health before allowing it access to a network, and has been "one of the more well-received features in Windows Vista," according to NeoSmart.

- The Microsoft Kernel Mode Cryptographic Module, which is meant to "provide easy access to multiple cryptographic algorithms," NeoSmart reports.

Information Week says Windows XP SP3 is set to debut early next year. Microsoft has reportedly widened the beta test program to include members of its MSDN and TechNet program.

McDougall said in InfoWeek, "Microsoft is in a bit of a Catch-22 with XP. The more it strengthens the OS, the less reason users have to upgrade to the newer Windows Vista."

Hard Question or Conversation Starter

Over on Live Journal they have a feature to inspire writing. The profile page that appears after logging in includes a note on the page called "What do you have to say?" with an open ended question or topic. The question that appeared recently was:

What makes you unique?

The first time I saw this I blew it off with a shrug and thought "who says everyone is unique?".

I have a theory that challenging questions that contain both the word 'you' and either 'who, what, why, when, where' tend to have a bit of a negative undertone. In this case the implication is that the person is supposed to defend that they are in fact unique. An alternative response is to attack the question as flawed, that was my first response.

Then I thought about conversation starters. Different settings have different thresholds of acceptablility. Imagine you are at a family Christmas party, shouting this question at your cousin across the dinner table probably isn't going to get a response. Maybe you'd get a response if you were having a little side conversation, just one or two other people. The question would almost certainly get a response as pillow talk. The more personal the setting the more likely the question will be recieved as a geniuine interested inquiry rather than as a challenge.

The question works well as a blog entry starter because the writing of a blog entry can be a very personal setting. The responses might be slanted based on the topic of the blog or the audience the blog is appealing to. This blog has (a) no topic and (b) appeals to an indeterminante demographic (aka whoever stumbles across it, and 'appeals' is almost certainly the wrong word in that case). It also works well on Live Journal because the entries tend to be, well, journals- not blogs.

The distinction between the two is a topic for another post.

Windmills

While road tripping across Iowa we came across a couple windmill farms. They just look cool.

Holloween

Holloween came and went without much excitement. Far too busy doing other things this year, next year the hollowed eve should get more attention. Take this picture for example. I walk by this yard often while walking the dog and didn't even notice the poor witch that apparently had miscalculated her approach. These are the kind of things a person should notice. If they go unnoticed, I think that is an indicator you are far too busy.

Free Education from Pricey Colleges, Part 2

A while ago I wrote about MIT offering free access to curriculum.

Now I've found that UC Berkley is offering free pod casts of some of their lectures and guest speakers on campus.

Bedtime stories or interesting stuff? Dunno. You be the judge.
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

Vatican paper set to clear Knights Templar

Vatican paper set to clear Knights Templar
By Malcolm Moore in Rome
Last Updated: 2:08am BST 05/10/2007 (October 5th)

The mysteries of the Order of the Knights Templar could soon be laid bare after the Vatican announced the release of a crucial document which has not been seen for almost 700 years

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/05/wvatican105.xml

Just a tag line, bragging, or an excuse?

Mitch Wagner over at InfoWeek had an interesting editorial about people who include "Sent from my {mobile phone or iPhone or Blackberry}" in their e-mail messages. I know of a few people who do this because they want to offer an appology for short (blunt?) replies. I also know of a couple people who do this because it was the default when they got their phone (nice marketing, Blackberry).

In the editorial, Mitch quotes liberally from a Slate story that suggests the 'Sent from my Blackberry' tag line either acts as "...a subtle signal to my correspondents that I'm getting a lot done" or "...gives the impression that you're on the move but still chained to work". The Slate author (Paul Boutin) seems to have a double standard, suggesting that when these tag lines mention an iPhone instead of a blackberry they "...conjure an image of a doofus who wants you to know he has an iPhone".

Mitch then goes on to raise a more interesting point, suggesting that regardless of the type of phone involved these tag lines are "...symptomatic of a workplace culture that places more emphasis on effort than results."

Ouch. But maybe he is on to something...

Writer's Block...unblocked.

One of the cool features of Live Journal is a little promotion going on called the "Writer's Block". It is sponsored by HP, and appears as a question on each Live Journal user's home page (sort of like the Dashboard on Blogger, but with more options reflecting the variety of social networking tools within Live Journal).

These "Writer's Blocks" are simple questions that encourage a response, for example:
- What's been your biggest influence in making you a better writer?
- What's the best advice you've given or gotten for taking good photos?
- If you could travel back in time to spend a day with someone, who would it be and why?

Each statement is presented individually, with navigation buttons to move through the question. There is also an "Answer" button, clicking it lauches the editor with the question filled in and ready to take your response. The entry is also automatically tagged and, presumably, writing a response enters the author in a contest for HP stuff.

Blog in search of a topic

I've come to the conclusion that all great blogs have a topic, a unifying theme that ties the entries together and establishes an expectation amongst the readers of the blog. This blog is lacking in that category. The unifying theme? Things that I was thinking about when the post was written. Sure, that is technically a theme, but not very good for establishing an expectation amongst readers.

With that shortcoming in this blog in mind, I've launched an eight month initiative to identify a topic. Why eight months? Because I've got another long-term project I'm currently working on that should wrap up in eight months. In the meantime, I'm planning on trying out various blog topics. Today's topic: State Constitutions and their relationship to the US Federal Constitution. Yep, sounds nuts. In other words, 'and now for something completely different'. Speaking of other words, here's a quote:

"An important distinction exists between the federal and state constitutions. The U.S. Constitution contains grants of authority from the states to the federal government. All powers not specified in the federal constitution are retained by the states. This means that the U.S. Constitution identifies what the federal government can do, but the state constitutions tell the state governments what they cannot do."

- Reed, Shedd, Morehead, & Corley, 2005, The legal and regulatory environment of business

Survival Notes

Doing some research on Survival stuff I cam upon SurvivorMan (a Discovery Channel series). In browsing through the related websites I came upon the following notes, but didn't have anyplace to store them, so I put them here for future reference.

www.lesstroudonline.com
The Psychology of Wilderness Survival, Gino F. Ferri
Wilderness Living and Primitive Skills, John and Geri McPherson
Bushcraft, Mors Kochanski
Outdoor Survival Skills, Larry Dean Olsen
The Art of Survival, Cord Christian, Troebst (out of print)
Any of the Peterson Field Guides (wild edibles, etc.)

Les first started by taking every and any survival course he could find, including at Humber College in Ontario and Prairie Wolf in Kansas.