Update 12/31/08: Since writing this I have also had another hardbound and a paperback book published by blurb.  In all cases I have been very happy with the quality.  Other family members have had good luck as well, although we have noticed that different print batches of the same book can come back with fairly significant differences in color. If you are looking for 100% color accuracy you may be slightly disappointed, but for most people blurb is a great deal and makes very nice products.

As a grad student I’ve had a few publications in conferences, but I recently published my first book. Unlike my previous work which was mostly technical giberish, my latest piece goes back to nature, and the backpacking trip that my dad, brother, and I took up Katahdin, an amazing mountain in Maine. Although the first print run was only two copies, it was very well received, and I’m planning to order a third copy soon. I made the book using software from Blurb.com, a site which makes it easy to create publish your own photo books. Read more »

I just heard of Lecturefox, a site which provides listings of publicly available courses from not only MIT’s Open Courseware, but a number of other schools ranging from UC Berkeley and Kent State to Oxford. It is great to see so much information being made available freely online, I just wish I had a bit more time to actually go through some of the videos. Lecturefox primarily emphasizes courses from scientific fields (it is run by a pair of self-trained German computer scientists), but they also have listings from other fields like economics and philosophy. Some of the offerings are full blown courses with video or audio and lecture notes, while others are recorded lectures from visiting speakers.

I don’t have any sense of the quality of the different offerings–there are certainly some courses I’ve taken in the past which would be extremely boring to watch on video, so it’s not clear to me how useful many of these full lecture series courses would really be. On the other hand, some of the shorter “guest lecture” style talks might be more self contained and accessible.

A few that sounded interesting:

• Human Beings and the Machines of Sunshine – Rice
• Alan Turing: Codebreaker and Pioneer – MIT
• Death – Yale
• The Rise of The Creative Class – George Mason
• Cyber Humor: The End of Humor as We Know it? – Oxford
• Castiglione: The Art of Being a Renaisance Man – Syracuse

I’m a big fan of Google’s Picasa application. Its primary use is as a photo organizer, but it also has some photo touch up features that work pretty well. I was recently trying to turn some of my photos into black and whites, but wasn’t getting the results I was hoping for simply by transforming the image to gray scale in photoshop. Then I read a bit about how Ansel Adams made many of his images so impressive by applying red filters to his lenses. Using colored filters makes it so that different colors turn into different shades of gray. In many of his images, the red filter makes the sky much darker, providing greater contrast against snowy rocks and mountains. I knew I could do this kind of filtering in photoshop, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could also do it in Picasa with just a few easy clicks. Here are my results.

The Grand Canyon

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We hosted a pot luck thanksgiving dinner at our house this year with a bunch of friends from our department. In total, we had ten people: Megan, Gal, Stefan, Bobby, Brandon, Laura, Marek, Jana, Philipp, and myself. As you’d expect, we had a lot of good food: biscuits, pumpkin bread, spinach spread on toast, cubed beets and turnips, mixed vegies, potatoes au gratin, sweet potato soup, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing, gravy, and apple pie. Oh, and a turkey too.

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