I was just browsing through the MIT OpenCourseWare, and the amount of freely available information available is quite impressive. The courses span many departments, although I mainly checked out the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science section. They have lecture notes on many different classes, both undergraduate and graduate, covering pretty much all aspects of the Computer Science field. Some of the courses also come with full video presentations. This is definitely well worth keeping in mind as a source of information....

Apparently the Japanese version of the Nintendo Wii ships with an insane Safety Guide. Who would have thought that it is not a good idea to stick four leaf clovers into the Wii? Of course, the community was quick to respond with a spoof: Wii Safety: The Missing Pages

Last week, I was finally able to get a hold of a Nintendo Wii. Somehow the Wii resonated with me since details about it were first announced (and when it was still codenamed “Revolution”), and for the past few months I’ve been eager to try it out first hand. Traditionally, I’m a PC gamer, and the types of games that I tend to enjoy most are RPGs and first person shooters....

Joel Spolsky recently posted an excellent series of articles about hiring software engineers. I don’t always agree with Joel’s opinions (particularly on topics like Ruby on Rails or agile development), but he definitely has a strong perspective on hiring software engineers. Click on the headings below to get to the original articles on the Joel on Software website. Joel convincingly argues that the great developers are never on the market, whereas the bad programmers are always looking for new jobs....

Richard Dawkins has posted a video of his October 23 speech at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. The speech contains excerpts of his latest book “The Good Delusion”, but what makes this video particularly interesting is how Dawkins answers questions from several students from Liberty University, a conservative Christian university that shamelessly teaches young earth creationism (and apparently displays dinosaur fossils dated approx. 3000 years ago…). I haven’t seen the entire video (113GB quicktime), but the following website contains some great excerpts: