Bros is a Great Song – Panda Bear – Person Pitch

My first reaction to his album was that I haven’t warmed to Animal Collective yet, so why Panda Bear? I ignored the high eMusic ranking for most of 2007. It scored so highly in year end 2007 top lists that I actually gave it a listen.

The result is that my kids are frequently heard saying, “Dad that was a cool song (Bros) for the first 10 times we’ve heard it. Move on …”

Metacritic does a nice job of collecting links to all reviews of an album. Here is Metacritic Panda Bear Person Pitch

You can hear Bros on his MySpace page.

quick reading update

I’ve got too many in the fire at the moment … which meant that I picked up Ender’s Shadow at the library a few days ago and powered thru. I’m so addicted to these Ender Wiggin books.

Other irons in the fire at the moment.

• Ian McEwan’s – Saturday – I’ve read Amsterdam and Atonement so far. This guy is very gifted. I can’t power read these though. Takes time do digest, every word counts.
• Marshall Goldsmith’s - What Got You Here Won’t Get You There – I got this book title from the globe & mail’s HARVEY SCHACHTER’s Top 10 Business Books of 2007. It was number 2. It reminds me of chapter 15 “Know Your Strengths and Values” in the Essential Drucker. In that chapter Drucker notes that knowing one’s strengths and values is critical to knowing how to improve oneself, but he also notes that all people have a very hard time knowing who they really are. This book is about really coming to terms with our little flaws. ouch I’ve still got a lot of reading to do. It’s very interesting so far.
  

• Roald Dahl’s – BFG narrated by Natasha Richardson — Just how good is that It’s really good. again so far. I have too much on the reading plate

MediaWiki Admin Tutorial Guide – PACKT

I do a fair bit of work with MediaWiki and finally broke down & bought the only book available MediaWiki Administrators’ Tutorial Guide – by Mizanur Rahman. It’s not that there isn’t a lot of documentation available on-line. It’s just that when I use something a lot, it’s nice to have the book.

I’ve found this book to be useful in filling blanks for me. I use tables a lot and this books description has given me new insight on how deploy them in a more “readable-for-me” way.

I was hoping for some discussion on modifying/editing the Sidebar, but there isn’t any. WRT/ to sidebar I’ve been able to find this on-line but the syntax is still very confusing.

All in all I’m happy I bought this book.

iGTD Mac ToDo List Manager

I was reading thru MacWorld’s 2007 Reader’s Choice Awards and stumbled across iGTD to-do list manager from Bartek Bargiel. I’ve decided to give it a try.

I’m terrible with electronic ToDo list managers. I’ve never migrated from my notebook technique to the computer. Each time I start with some energy and eventually bail on it. My notebook technique is the age-old notes go in front ways and to-do lists go in the backdoor ( ie back-page first). I try to use one note book for all meetings.

I’ve been using iGTD for a few weeks now. It’s best feature also makes it kinda tuff to get started with. That is that a task has a project view and a “context” view ( that is — where are you gonna do the task?). It also supports “tags” and can synch to iCal. I’ve yet to do that. soon.

It’s looking good so far, but will I be using it in June? Hmmm … don’t know. Time will tell.

The Monster Switches of Cisco and Juniper

I’m having fun looking at the new Cisco Nexus and the Juniper EX series boxes.

I particularly like the 256 x 10GbE ports per rack feature (noted in Lightreading). Wow! Juniper even says this is wire-rate.

On a Internet design front. The focus of these boxes is intra-datacenter so it is no surprise that connectivity is Ethernet based and that there is some discussion of storage interfaces. But there is “zero” discussion of telecom connectivity. I take that to mean that they assume Ethernet connectivity to every kind of equipment in the datacenter. That includes the outside connections.

I also like how close the Cisco-stated $250M development cost is to my buddy Stacy’s estimates of such a beast a few years back. You were spot on dude!