My First Time

Earlier this week, for the first time ever, I threw a book in the trash.

I was standing on the platform at the Mt. Vernon Square Metro station, reading Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. I'd been reading it for the last four days, and for those four days, the book had been pissing me off. But when I got to the point where Dubois, Heinlein's stand-in, began to deride the decadencies of twentieth century democracy--for more than 10 pages--I gave up.

Turns out, I could take the endless philosophical debates. I could take the fascistic utopia crap. And I could (barely) stomach the straw men arguments he used to prop up his militaristic house of cards. But all three? C'mon. I'm 44 years old. I don't have time to waste.

Besides, I've never had the patience for the brittle libertarianism common among the most devoted SF fans.

Survey says: Mean, boring, and wrong. Verdict: Compost.

Go to MIT

I'm reading a book on collaborative economics called Wikinomics, and the authors turned me onto the coolest thing: MIT now puts all of it's course materials online for free, for anyone to use. The website calls MIT OpenCourseWare

a free and open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.

There's no degree and you can't use faculty office hours. But you do get access to reading lists, lecture notes, assignments, etc. Sounds like a great resource for a knowledge junkie, and a great example of how opening an organization's assets to the world can move their mission forward.

GoodReads

I've been doing a lot of research into Web 2.0 and social media for work in the last few months. I have to admit that, while there are many very cool things out there, I don't get a lot of it. Maybe I've crossed that "your heart dies when you grow up" threshold they mentioned in The Breakfast Club. Nonetheless, one site that has become a nutty obssession is GoodReads, a combination of Amazon, NetFlix, and Match.com.

I've just added the GoodReads widget to Everything Ecstatic. Now you can see what I'm reading and what I've read. (I know, I know--start the parade.) If you join and become my friend, though, you can also read my reviews, join discussion groups, and pick up other book nerds across the country.

It's not for everyone. But this nerd loves it.