An Evening with Leonard Cohen and Philip Glass

Thanks Meghan

Tonight I went to see a conversation with Philip Glass and Leonard as a part of the Stanford Lively Arts series. It was great to see one of the best living composers who I’ve listened to for years (thanks Matt and Kristin).

It turns out the photoblog “a daily dose of imagery” from Toronto covered the same event held there at the premier of the new collaboration between Philip Glass and Leonard Cohen.

Jan Chipchase Design Lecture

Last week I went to a great lecture by Jan Chipchase, a design researcher for Nokia. His blog has a picture of the audience, look on the left side.

He brought up some very intersting points on cultural relations and design. For example, how do you design a phone for someone who can’t read? Even though his talk was at a very high level, I think he made some strong points and gave a talk in a style I enjoyed. The great photos certainly made the time go even faster.

Google Book Search, My Library

Ryan’s Library

While I was looking for information on R, the statistics program we’re using in my data analysis/ data mining class, I came across a book in Google Book Search which lets you look at certain pages, depending on the copyright. I saw a link for add to my library, so I tried it. After a short while I had a selection of the books I’ve read over the past few years, sorted, tagged, and stored. While I like my spreadsheet for remembering them, it’s pretty nice to have the a set of covers many with search-able text.

Skype – from today to tomorrow

Last night for me and this morning for Matt we had a video chat using the free service Skype and the cameras built into our Macs. It was pretty much the coolest thing ever. I don’t have much experience with video conferencing or video chat, so I’m still amazed to be able to see and talk to someone an ocean away.