Ellis Live

In Google Reader, I usually star things that I want to read or follow-up on later. These have been piling up due to everything I’ve had going on lately. I briefly debated declaring feeder reader bankruptcy but I decided instead to core dump the links that I want to keep into the blog. If you’re interested in a few cool or interesting links, keep reading. If not, catch me next time around. Without further ado…

Science

• Cool Skyscraper Idea
• The Realignment of the American Population (Where they live to be specific)
• Princeton physicists connect string theory to established physics

Music

• 40 Albums that Rolling Stone should have given 5 stars

Books

• Free Audiobooks

Culture

• Who are all the people wandering around the city during the day?
• Tech users split into groups by usage
• Timeline of a Shabu party
• I am 8-Bit art gallery (I love the Q-Bert and Pacman photos)
• Scott Adams - What’s Your Permanent Age
• NYTimes - Data Mining Goes Mainstream (I love data)
• The effect of “Top 10″ and “Most Read” lists on journalism

Movies

• The new Transformers movie trailer looks so great that I may weep with happiness
• The new Golden Compass trailer looks cool too
• Heath Ledger as the Joker - Revealed, Awesome!
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix trailer
• Die Hard 4 trailer (I refuse to call this movie by it’s other extremely stupid name)

Sites That Might Be Cool

• HopStop - Plan Public Transportation
  
• OurFaves - Citysearch meets something social
  
• Overhear.us - Corporate Gossip

Programming and Software

• Scott Guthrie talks SilverLight
• Scott Hanselman talks SilverLight Samples
• SilverLight Developer Reference Poster
• Michael Arrington explains why SilverLight is important
• Scott Hanselman puts Silverlight into context
• SilverLight 1.1 Alpha SDK
• Jeff Atwood talks learning design as a programmer
  
• Jeff Atwood talks learning a graphics editor as a programmer
• Scott Guthrie talks Lambda Expressions in “Orcas”
  
• Scott Guthrie talks ASP.Net 2.0 Data Access
• Scott Guthrie talks Javascript intellisense in “Orcas”
• Scott Guthrie talks Query Syntax in “Orcas”
• Scott Hanselman talks adding MP3 artwork via command line using C#
• Jamie Thomson’s SSIS Live Search Macro
• Jeff Atwood talks using Firefox as an IDE (Firebug ROCKS)
• Jeff Atwood talks software and rock climbing
• Microsoft and Teradata approaches to Business Intelligence compared and contrasted

Just Plain Cool

• How the infamous MIT blackjack team operated and won
• Time-lapse video of a boat going through the panama canal
• Roomba with a laser and Air-Soft pellet gun
• These UPS whiteboard commercials ROCK (I’m a huge sucker for a whiteboard)
• Really strange (yet interesting) flash game

Funny

• Why it doesn’t pay to be the computer guy - Top 10
• Xkcd - Online Communities
• Penny Arcade talks Ping Pong (halfway down the page)
• Xkcd - Skynet stole my cd
• For Sale - One Useless Cat (Pics)
• PVP talks Lost: The Role-Playing Game
• Xkcd - Floor Tiles
• Xkcd - Guitar Hero

Tech

• How to really erase a hard drive
• Wordpress Theme Generator
• How Digg uses the LAMP stack to scale
• Open-source hardware
• Ken Thompson talks about theoretically building a backdoor into the “login” Unix program by inserting commands into the C compiler that ensured that not only would the backdoor code be inserted into the login program, but also into the C compiler itself when compiled
• What happens on the other end when you click “Send Error Report” in Windows (I’ve always been fascinated with how Microsoft gathers data on crashes using Watson)
• Jeff Atwood talks Twitter: Service Vs. Platform
• Scott Hanselman talks email signature etiquette

Software to Download

• Better Gmail (Greasemonkey script for Firefox)
  
• Synergy (Software KVM)
• Wireshark Network Packet Analyzer
• Mozy Online Backup (I use this. $4.95 a month for unlimited off-site backup. It rocks)
• Notepad2 - Updated with Ruby Support

I hope some of these are interesting to you. I am trying to get used to use Google Share Links these days so I’ll probably have a lot fewer links next time. You can subscribe to the Shared feed here. Later.