Invade Mali now. I wasn’t going to post this fill-in-the-country geography test for North Africa & the Middle East, for fear of insulting… [Blog de Halavais]

Well, i played this at around 7:30am and didn't do as well as I thought I would. I don't even think that I own a map that identifies West Sahara as a country…. In any case, I did alright, in the former U.S.S.R. but messed up on the islands and the south saudi penninsula…

Here is a nice op-ed about the talent flight from Virgina Tech:(
Let me see here in social aspects of IT, we've lost:
Megan Boler to OISE/UToronto
Maria Papdakis back to JMU
Martha McCaughey to Appalachian State
John Carroll and Center to Penn State.

This is not to say that we do not have others in this area or related areas, but that is quite a few people from an area that has been in a traditional strength of Virginia Tech….

Well today starts the Stepping Out Festival in Blacksburg and I really want to take it off, but I have to go do some grading and write my thousand words or so. It isn't that I really want to go to stepping out, it is more that I don't want to wander through it four or five times a day. However, it might rain, which will lessen the crowds….

Software Archeology. Apropos of an earlier entry of mine on software studies, Salon is running a good piece on software archeology entitled “Prowling the Ruins of Ancient Software” (Slashdotted copy here). Two choice tidbits: bq. “It's funny,” says Dave Thomas, a Dallas… [Matthew G. Kirschenbaum]

Umm, we do have software critics… just not many of them. not many at all… I think i can count them on my fingers….

JobforJohn. This Guy in Minnesota just got laid-off and he's spending his time following around Bush's economic team on their tour of the upper midwest as they share their “upbeat outlook” on our nation's economy. He's following their tourmobile with his own tourmobile and has been chasing them around in parkinglots and at fast food places. He finally cornered the Treasury Secretary whose advice to the job-seeker was to “just wait.” What's your economic reality? Is it closer to the sunny optimism of the big shiny tourbus, or the laid-off reality of the homemade minivan? (Check out the particularly funny bit about how he stumbled on the entire press corps only when he was looking for a dumpster.) [MetaFilter]

this is a great strategy, excellent actually, to get people to wake up, of course the somnambulism of the regime supporters is hard to break no matter what regime you have, so we'll see how it goes.

No More Reality Shows!. Want to create your own TV Show? So do some folks who aren't from the big lit up place we call Hollywood…. All you've got to do is click up on the site, sign up, pay $25 bucks, and you're in… Oh – and you have to have an idea, too. [thanks MSNBC] [MetaFilter]

This could pass many people's time far too quickly. My thought is that we need a tv show that is like an alan moore comic book but without the super powers, it could be a house of anti-heros in the suburbs whose travails through life occasionally shine bright and occasionally are crushed. I was thinking a boarding house with a little old lady that wishes she were Rosa Parks but causes trouble because she doesn't consider others, and an ex-boxer turned handyman who could have been a contender if he hadn't needed a job to keep his ex-wife happy, as the two primary characters, with say 4 two 6 others rotating in and out of the house, some staying for two or three episodes, some staying longer.

Plastic Balls. Plastic Balls – addiction alert. Flash alert. (via random abstract) [MetaFilter]

This is an fun little game, don't play it too much

Gender bias in teaching evaluations – a list of relevant readings

(thanks,
Eszter!) [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

some interesting info here