Don't Wait Too Long

For the past few days I've been adoring this laid back tune from Madeleine Peyroux, "Don't Wait Too Long." She has one of those voices and styles that make you sure every song you hear is something you've known all your life. I think she would be fantastic at the folk festival! Here's the video.

What new songs do you feel like you've known forever?

So That's What You Do With an Aerospace Engineering Degree

Last week, I jumped out of a perfectly good airplane...and I loved it! I've always thought I'd go skydiving some day, so when a group of coworkers decided to go I was excited. I expected that at some point I'd be terrified but it didn't happen. The toughest thing would be jumping out of the plane, but the instructor takes care of that for you. It was a blast!

If you ever get the chance to do this, I highly recommend it!

I Write Like...

Today I stumbled across I Write Like, a website which lets you paste in some of the text you've written and find out which famous author you write like. I tried three of my recent blog posts and was told I write like either J.K. Rowling (yes!), Margaret Atwood (superb!), and someone whose name I've already forgotten (my brain only has so much space). I didn't think much of it further than something to amuse myself while I was bored until I saw this on Paper Cuts:

I entered my last blog post and was told I write like Edgar Allan Poe. (Judging from the Twitter traffic, so do a lot of other people.)

Pretty neat. But then a colleague plugged in a paragraph from Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” and was told it sounded like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Now THAT made me laugh!

Jobless Recovery

If you have been watching, reading, or listening to the news lately you've probably heard the term "jobless recovery." On the one hand, I can understand how some economic indicators are improving, thus the recovery. On the other hand, with unemployment at 10% and rising (consider how many people have just stopped looking for jobs) it's hard to call it recovery. Sometimes it's easy to just take these terms at face value, but I liked the way Cory Doctorow questioned it and summed the problem up perfectly:
If the thing you use to measure the health of your economy has gone up, but no one has a job, then surely you are measuring the wrong thing to gauge the health of your nation.

Go here to read the full article.