Dan Lipka Web Log

Recently, I finished listening to the Pulitzer wining book, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Díaz. Normally, I think reading a book is more enjoyable than a book on tape, but I don’t think this was the case for this book. There was a good amount of Spanish slang that was used and without the context of the person’s voice, I don’t think I could have understood what they were talking about. Anyway, the book was an astounding work of literature; every sentence was beautiful and impactful. It was not written in any type of stream of consciousness, it seems that each word was carefully analyzed and constructed. This made for great reading (well, listening); however, the plot was just average. In reminds me of “The World According to Garp”, in that the writing was great, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. The real reason I wanted to post was not actually about Oscar Wao, but about the CIA. It seems like every time I read about the recent foreign po

At my school, we were trying to play the live inauguration of President Obama this morning, unfortunately, the streaming videos were skippy and almost unwatchable. For the kids, their attention and focus was lost and thus a moment to connect with a historic event was also lost. I thought that after it was over, the video would be all over the internet, available for download within minutes. To my amazement, there was nothing available, nothing of poor quality, nothing at all. Why is this, who would stop us from sharing or downloading this video. Surely, our free media would post it for the people to listen to, but no, there was nothing. Although I'm sure I will get in trouble for this, I found a way of accessing a high quality network copy of the video. Go to... http://ht.cdn.turner.com/cnn/big/politics/2009/01/20/sot.obama.inauguration.duty.cnn_576x324_dl.flv Save the file to your desktop. Windows Media Player cannot play with file type, but other media players can. I high

At the end of 2004, I made some predictions about the upcoming year and I thought it was time to try again. I predict the following for 2009… Getting Online: Google finally reveals a 10 year plan to provide free wireless internet service to every city in the US . From a business perspective, the financial benefits of having a captive online audience (Google would be the required homepage and search engine) are going to quickly exceed the costs of building a wireless network. Personally, I think this is something the government should do as access to the internet increases commerce, education, and equality. Energy: This is more of a hope, but 2009 could start the beginning of a new age of energy production. I don’t expect too much this year, but if the United States whole-heartily invests in the research, production, and implementation of natural sources of energy (solar, winds, tidal, etc), it would fundamentally change the underlying economics and plan