I'm happy that TimesSelect University
program opens up TimesSelect to university folk like me. (It would be
even better if my friends and family outside the university could also
read the special features of The New York Times for free.

Enchanting TED - Pogue’s Posts points to the latest round of TEDTalks (audio, video).

Guidelines for Using a Cellphone Abroad - New York Times is useful if I ever go to Europe or Asia -- but mostly, when I leave the USA, I'm in Canada.

The Bach Birthday Bash sounds tempting. Stanford is just a bit too far away these days for me:

Join us for a celebration of the master's 322nd
birthday with a musical party, featuring Bach family videos, a wig
tossing contest, and an intimate performance of several of his
wonderful Brandenburg Concerti. Featuring the award-winning Palo Alto
Chamber Orchestra and their music director, Benjamin Simon, this
evening will be an opportunity to brush up on your Bach trivia, have a
fugue explained to you, and learn the names of all of Bach's
twenty-plus offspring. Those attending in period costume are eligible
for valuable door prizes!

I want to do a closer reading of Philip Jenkins' Believing in the Global South
because it helps me to see how much of my cultural heritage/baggage is
entwined with my particular experience of Christianity in the west.

The functionality I showed in class a week or two ago, namely the
blogging integration in Flickr, got mixed reviews. I think it's so cool
to be able directly to weblogs right within Flickr. Some people agree,
others thought that things are still too messy, that few non-techie end
users would use this functionality. I would certainly agree that
configuring weblogs is still a bit too difficult to do within Flickr.
(I think the flock is a pretty good job of figuring out how to
configure a weblog given its URL.) It is true that plumbing is really
exposed right now. And that in the future, we need to move towards more
hidden and interconnected plumbing.

It's good to know that you can get average temperatures for places such as Sitka, AK when you think about traveling to such places.

Little Asia on the Hill is a fascinating NYT article about the huge number of Asian-American students on the Berkeley campus.

This morning, I read Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Lecture: My Father's Suitcase, an essay that stirred up deep emotional wells in me as a writer and a son. A choice quote:

The writer’s secret is not inspiration—for it
is never clear where that comes from—but stubbornness, endurance. The
lovely Turkish expression “to dig a well with a needle” seems to me to
have been invented with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the
patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love—and I
understand it, too. When I wrote, in my novel “My Name Is Red,” about
the old Persian miniaturists who drew the same horse with the same
passion for years and years, memorizing each stroke, until they could
re-create that beautiful horse even with their eyes closed, I knew that
I was talking about the writing profession, and about my own life. If a
writer is to tell his own story—to tell it slowly, and as if it were a
story about other people—if he is to feel the power of the story rise
up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and give himself over to
this art, this craft, he must first be given some hope. The angel of
inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on
others) favors the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer
feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his
dreams, and the value of his writing, when he thinks that his story is
only his story—it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal
to him the images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to
build. If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my life, I
am most surprised by those moments when I felt as if the sentences and
pages that made me ecstatically happy came not from my own imagination
but from another power, which had found them and generously presented
them to me.