Inside Cheeky’s Office:
I fill my office with a lot of silly and fun things. This is one of my absolute favorites (in fact, I’ve purchased a couple of these for colleagues as gifts).

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I like IT. i want one.

FOSS and OASIS:
Groklaw just published an open letter from representatives of the FOSS community directed against a new IPR policy at OASIS. However, I do wonder if there was any discussion behind the scenes at first before taking this step. The IETF just might be next…

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i do hope someone will lay the smackdown on ietf’s new policy, which is one step away from foolishly corporately aligned, and is likely pushing the organization farther from the innovative engineer base than i think it should.

Bagpuss:
Bagpuss, dear Bagpuss

Bagpuss, oh hear what I sing

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are they bringing bagpuss back?

Thomas L. Friedman: The sliding dollar:
“Given the number of people who have refinanced their homes with floating-rate mortgages, the falling dollar is a kind of sword of Damocles, getting closer and closer to their heads,” Rothkopf said. “And with any kind of sudden market disruption – caused by anything from a terror attack to signs that a big country has gotten queasy about buying dollars – the bubble could burst in a very unpleasant way.”

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yep, the knot will be undone.

Having winter fun like snowbody’s business.:
The problem is that in my discipline students often expect the coursework to be easy, the content be ‘common sense,’ particularly in the lower level classes. I always get a lot of students who take this sort of class their senior year hoping it will be an easy filler only to realize they’ve made a serious mistake.

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i generally get the same thing “its theory, it is just common sense”. good luck with that….. students need to ‘learn’ and they need to be graded’ on that learning….

Library Journal – Revenge of the Blog People!:
Who are the Blog People?

It is obvious that the Blog People read what they want to read rather than what is in front of them and judge me to be wrong on the basis of what they think rather than what I actually wrote. Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. In that case, their rejection of my view is quite understandable.

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wow….. talk about an uninformed assumption.