David Brooks is one of my favorite columnists. Like Thomas Sowell, Brooks use simple yet robust reasoning in his columns. One that I am particularly found of is a piece he wrote last fall about Robert Kennedy's "classical education." Simply brilliant stuff. The closing paragraph from that piece:
And the lesson, of course, is about the need to step outside your own immediate experience into the past, to learn about the problems that never change, and bring back some of that inheritance. The leaders who founded the country were steeped in the classics, Kennedy found them in crisis, and today's students are lucky if they stumble on them by happenstance.
Luckily for me, I have had a couple of excellent professors who still place value on such material.
Looking at Brooks' Wikipedia entry, it's interesting to see that he was initially a liberal after graduating from the University of Chicago in 1983. It was only after being intellectually demolished by Milton Friedman in a televised debate did he start the process of switching sides. Brooks on the experience:
The show was essentially
me making a point, and he making a two-sentence rebuttal which totally
devastated my point, and then me sitting there with my mouth hanging
open, trying to think what to say. That didn't immediately
turn me into a conservative, but....
Talk about the power of rhetoric. And they say that debates will never convince anyone of anything.
On a side point, it's needless to say that I was quite excited last week to watch the New York Times Select pay wall disappear. Now I can share of Mr. Brooks and Thomas Friedman on a regular basis. Exciting times (pun intended) lay ahead my friends.
Yesterday, I tested the online photo editing application Picnik. Let me say first that it was truly a delight to use and it allowed me accomplish my task (making a photo black and white) in less than five minutes. In addition, as an aspiring web and user interface designer, the application's interface was both intuitive and impressive. The abundance of features did not seem overwhelming, and in fact, I was surprised at how much Picnik allowed me to do with my photo. From the basic resize and color change, to adding it to my Flickr and Facebook accounts, Picnik had everything I could possibly want to do available in a couple of clicks.
So if you haven't already given Picnik a look, you should. And if you are one of the Facebook application types - they have one of those as well.
UPDATE - So it turns out that they also have a number of other cool mini-apps for Picnik. Firefox/IE extensions, a bookmarklet, and even a Yahoo widget. Talk about easy access.
Here is are some I see at least once a month (if not weekly or daily):
- GOOGLE PHONE!!! Or for the more refined audiences/fanboys, Gphone.
- iPhone hacked!!!
- Another (meaningless) Facebook app hits 10 million users!
- A new Twitter mashup! (that does the same thing
- Will Facebook be bigger than Google?
- Will Google be bigger than Microsoft?
- ACME Advertising bought by {Google, MSFT, or some old media company} for billions and billions
- Rails vs. Django
- Ruby vs. Python
- Best wiki software?
- Is Wikipedia reliable?
- Y Combinator is awesome!
- Y Combinator is wicked awesome! (Boston people)
- OMG!!! Apple is developing {insert ridiculous product} - Note: this one is not always far fetched. Just usually two or three yeas premature.
- Wii/Xbox 360/PS3 is better than Wii/Xbox 360/PS3.
And that's just a small sampling. I haven't even touched the whole GTD/Lifehacking crowd. Although, I have to come clean: I always read anything on Lifehacker dealing with working on improving sleep and getting up early. I guess we all have weaknesses.
So I haven't posted for a exactly one month. That's a bad thing. But I guess moving back to college and trying to launch a large-scale consumer website will do that to a man (make him forget to post to the blog that is).
So anyways I figured I would give a fairly long update my favorite form of prose - a list.
- Coupon DJ - So this is the big news: we have officially launched. Check out the site and let me know what you think. A lot of time and energy has been put into this site by a lot of different people. Remix people, remix. And if you find any IE 6 bugs, let me know as well. I like to think of my self as an exterminator of such things, but alas, they always seem to find their way back into the code.
- Back at Duke - Moved back in on the 17th (of August) and have been loving it ever since. This place really does grow on you after a while. Not to mention the fact that my room is an iPhone's throw away from my room. If you are wondering why I would mention such an outrageous idea, it is due to the fact that my iPhone will not work in my room. After two months of use, this remains as my top complaint - horrible coverage. Fewest drop calls? I think not.
- Duke startup scene - So this summer has been a little coming out party for a number of Duke tech entrepreneurs. I have mentioned them before, but Shoeboxed was the big hit of the summer in terms of sheer publicity. They have been on Rocketboom, Mashable, and more recently, Lifehacker. Taylor has some great people working with him and its encouraging to see them move back to Durham (rather than Silicon Valley) after their summer in Berlin. Breck Yunits started SeeMeWin, an Internet entertainment network with an initial focus on scratching lottery tickets. They are doing some pretty cool things with Ustream.tv and are also donating a decent amount of money to charity. Finally, Sterling Cross has put together (along with a friend from the University of Michigan) an interesting spin on a college-centric start page, Daily Devils.
- Other notes - I would also like to mention two other interesting Duke students. Jeremy Welch and Robert Goodlatte. Both have some great ideas and are pretty darn good at what they do. Both are pretty active bloggers as well. I also recently purchased the Adobe Master Suite. $2500?!?! Nope - $500 with the student discount. As you can see, I am pretty excited.
