A monk walking across a snowy field in Vermont Weekends 24 February 2006 14:45 EST Some friends and I recently spent a few days snowboarding at Tremblant, near Montreal. Vieve's pictures, Christine's pictures, my pictures.

In a few minutes I'm driving to Vermont to spend the weekend with the monks and nuns at Maple Forest Monastery. The Long Now 23 February 2006 18:13 EST Lately while working on various projects I have been listening to the downloadable lectures from the Long Now Foundation.

The Long Now Foundation's mission is to get humanity to think bigger: to have a "here" that's bigger than the four walls of your apartment and a "now" that's longer than this evening or this week or this year.

The lectures are superb background material for flying on airplanes or tinkering at home. The Long Now foundation is best known for the 10,000 year clock, but personally I like the lectures that make you think on a timescale of hundreds of thousands of years.

Don't miss former astronaut Rusty Schweickart's lecture, The Asteroid Threat Over The Next 100,000 Years. Did you know that a 10km asteroid striking the earth — like the one that extincted the dinosaurs — would not only cause a tremendous seismic event for thousands of miles in every direction but would also shoot thousands of massive obelisk-like rocks into the air which would within two hours rain down over every part of the planet, burning white hot on reentry and raising the air temperature to 1500 degrees Celsius?

The top three meters of all the oceans would boil off.

Yeah. Good stuff.

Novell Podcast 23 February 2006 17:30 EST

Ted Haeger has recently launched Novell Open Audio, a weekly podcast about development happening at Novell.

The first show features Brady Anderson and Calvin Gaisford discussing iFolder and my Brainshare keynote buddy Guy Lunardi giving a quick update on the next version of the Novell Linux Desktop. This week's show will star Aaron Bockover, the indefatigable author of Banshee. Dan Winship on design by committee 7 February 2006 12:53 EST Today Dan Winship wrote a wonderful mail about the perils of designing software by community process.

One of his footnotes is a link to a set of paintings designed by committtee; residents of various countries were polled using professional market research techniques to discover what characteristics they would most like to see in an ideal painting (ballerinas, the seaside, water, refrigerator-sized) and then the paintings were created, without any regard for coherence. The results are wonderfully bad.