From Daniel Berlinger's Archipelago News Weblog:

"Earl Shaffer has passed away. As I recently mentioned, I met Earl this past January. We talked a bit and played a bit of guitar... but its one of those things, not enough time, too many folks who wanted to meet and talk with him.

I read the book above this weekend. He wanted to write it as an ode, as an epic poem. He didn't. I guess he felt the weight of time. Earl was the first person to "thru-hike" the Appalachian Trail, the 2000 mile trail that runs along the ridge of the Appalachian mountains from Georgia to Maine. "Thru-hiking" is completing the length of the Trail in some version of one fell swoop. He was also the first person to hike it from north to south, and he repeated his first hike 50 years later just shy of his 80th birthday. He was an original. He will be missed."

Earl Shaffer On Amazon: Walking With Spring: First Solo Thru-Hike of App Trail and The Appalachian Trail: Calling Me Back to the Hills.  

[aka obituaries a la blog]

Simon Fell >

Read a bunch of good books recently, Ken MacLeod's The Sky Road, Cosmonaut Keep and The Cassini Division, Eric Nylund's Signal to Noise, Vernor Vinge A Deepness in the Sky, Greg Bear The Forge of God and John Barnes The Merchants of Souls. I'll probably switch tracks, and start reading Ingo's .NET Remoting book this week.

I tend to read a bunch of books in parallel, novels and non-fiction. Q1 was slow for me; my speed is getting back up to normal.

btw, Simon's picks are pretty good. I want sequels to Cassini Division. Signal to Noise have made a Nylund fan of me. Always been a Bear fan.

Johnny A Go Go remembers moments of television loss that brought tears. Dr. Green dying on ER, a cadet dying on Star Trek: TNG, Peter dying on thirtysomething, My So-called Life, Buffy's mother, any time Buffy's Willow cries, Felicity's graduation, Glasgow Kiss, and the last Golden Girls.

We connect with the virtual. I have spent more time as an adult with Dr. Green than with any of my neighbors, possibly more than with my father (though I'm trying to rectify that). We get piqued over TV news deaths, but our connections with the dead are just soundbites. It is when characters are developed over many years, sometimes for dozens or hundreds of hours, that something resembling a human connection takes place.

Walk away from your computer. Now. Find someone real to give a shit about.

Thanks.

[aka obituaries a la blog]

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,
by Malcolm Gladwell, is out in paperback. $10 and change. So you can give it to libertarians and republicans who rant about throwing good money after bad. He shows the math, the economics, the science of committing to a result. Big police budgets don't cut crime but, well invested, just a little more than a big budget drives it way down. Same with public health, education, and other ways we think of community.

Profound, readable, The Tipping Point helped me become more mature in my public policy thinking. 

Or give it to your sexually insecure boyfriend. Just for the title.

The em-bed Examiner, covering the embedded systems world,  says Howdy, adding dijest to their Fascinating Links Page. In good company with familiar folk like Andrea and blackholebrain and a many others new to me. I'll struggle to stay "interesting and unusual," folks.

I have to go back five years and reality check the five-year technology scenarios I drew for LSI Logic. Some projections have come true, no doubt, and other not. Eager to see where I went right and wrong.