Reuters covers a move by some to cut down on obesity in Ireland. Cutting Irish alcohol and happy hours seems like a very dangerous endeavour for any politician.

Washington Post covers the molding of campus curriculum by Microsoft. Any language where the IDE is not free or relatively cheap to students will stifle learning. In one of my econometrics classes at UCLA students were offered scaled down versions of Stata for $50. I do not know one person who purchased the program for use at home. The professors were bound by lab hours and available workstations and their curriculum suffered as a result. Visual Studio .Net 2003 Academic is $100 at the UCLA Store. Visual C# .Net is $60. Yes, you could have students write in Notepad, vi, or Emacs, but I have yet to it happen on a college campus.

Philip Brittan writes that Java is a language, .NET is not.

I just bought Sigi Schmid‘s book on soccer conditioning. Looks like I will have to wait until October 25 until I get it autographed. It should come in handy as a refresher as I work towards my coaching license.

Business Week interview with Chris Forsythe of Sandia about cognitive machines. The Sandia news release is pretty interesting as well.

There is a local San Francisco project where people can share books and videos. “The Distributed Library Project is an experiment in sharing information and building community in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Seems interesting and worth checking out. I posted most of my books online tonight. It was pretty simple to enter a ISBN and have the author, genre, and even a review from Amazon filled out for you.

Today’s New York Times covers the use of wireless technology to improve retail experiences.

Toyota plans to release an optional feature for its Prius cars sold in Japan, according to Wired coverage. “A car will probably always require a driver for liability reasons.” A lot of people are uncomfortable with parallel parking, especially in tight spots, or a spot on the driver’s side. Although the article mentions the price tag as a downfall, I know some people who pay for a parking spot just so they do not have to parallel park.

ExtremeTech reviewed 6 RSS readers and gave FeedDemon the top mark (8 out of 10). “the Cadillac of RSS readers.” Congrats Nick! I am a regular user and even mentioned the product in Spider Hacks. I should participate more in the newsgroups to make this a really good app.

James Gosling : One of the nice things about developing in Java on the MAC is that you get to develop on a lovely machine. I thought James would be using something like the SPARCLE.