What I'm Hearing: A Short History of Nearly Everything

My audible.com listener pick for this month is Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. The scope of this book is absolutely breathtaking! It represents the fruits of Bryson's quest for knowledge about, well, everything.

The book begins by tackling such trivial subjects as the formation of the universe and the age and composition of the Earth and the solar system. It then takes on nuclear and particle physics, natural disasters and just about anything else you ever wanted to know about, well, anything.

What Bryson has accomplished here would be an absolute dream to me. Imagine traveling to the far corners of the globe for three years to learn at the feet of the world's most brilliant scientists about both the history and origins of their fields as well as the bleeding edge of their current research. All I can say is - WOW!

Update: Include picture of book jacket

Star Wars Mini-Review

I went to see Episode III: Revenge of the Sith last night, and was pretty impressed. The Empire Strikes Back is still my favorite episode, but this one moves into a close second. The special effects of the battle scenes were a step beyond any of the other Star Wars films, which is to say that they were spectacular.

I think that the best part of this movie is the way that it answers all the questions (I won't spoil any of them here) and ties up all of the loose ends. The dialogue is a little hokey in places, and the film seemed to drag a little bit near the middle, but overall this was an excellent effort from Lucasfilms. Definitely worth seeing!

Coding for Fun

Scoble's got a link to the Coding for Fun site today. This is a site from Microsoft that's dedicated to hobby programming (games and web sites mostly). I'm just getting my first look at this site, but it looks pretty good. It's always fun to dabble in game development and other new stuff that most of us coders don't normally do.

I'm pretty lucky in that what I do for my day job is also one of the things that I like to do for fun (in other words, my sex and cash coincide). Obviously, the Coding for Fun site deals only with the MS tools. I really enjoy using VS .Net, but I use it all day long. When I code on the side, I like to pick up tools that are new to me (like Java and more recently Ruby). Still, this looks like a site that I'll be spending some time on.

Link: Do you code for fun? Check out this community

Dream the Big Dream

I watched a fascinating show called Black Sky on the Discovery Channel this morning about Burt Rutan and the Scaled Composites team that worked on the Spaceship One project for the Ansari X Prize. I was mesmorized by this show and by the amount of passion that the team displayed. These are people that know how to dream big and literally shoot for the stars. The show was very inspiring; I want to find something that I can be that passionate about!

Back to work

Alright, Derby week is over here in Louisville and it's back to business as usual. Raise your hand if you picked Giacomo in the big event. No? Me neither. Seriously though, if you've never been to Louisville for Derby week then you are missing out. It's not just a horse race - the whole city comes alive for all sorts of celebrations.

There are the usual host of civic events like the Pegasus Parade, but there are many events that you won't see too many other places: a steamboat race, a bed race, and a basketball game (and I've already mentioned the mini-marathon and Thunder). Of course, we do have some horse races too!

43 Things

The 43 Things web site is a great place for tracking your goals. It works like this: you write down your goals, make notes on your progress, and check them off when you've completed them. C'mon, you know that writing down your goals and checking up on them regularly increases your chances of completing them. An additional benefit of this site is that you get to see goals from many other people (and they can see yours), thus adding an element of social commitment to your goals. Incidently, some of the goals posted there are pretty inspiring, and it's very easy to make the goals your own and add them to your personal list.

Here are my things.

Ugh - Mini Marathon results

Well, as promised, I participated in the Derby Festival Mini-Marathon Saturday morning. My official time was officially bad - 2:55:22. I guess I still have some work to do on goal number 7 at 43 things!