Faust, originally uploaded by dstout.

A friend writes, “I am looking for some good books to read—have any suggestions?” Below were a couple of suggestions I made off the top of my head. What books would you recommend?

If you’re looking for some (serious) French fiction, here’s a good book that I recommend:
Michel Houellebecq: The Elementary Particles

For something light and British, try:
Anything by Nick Hornby (About A Boy or High Fidelity esp.)

Something edgier and American:
You might try Chuck Palahniuk: Lullaby

Looking for hip, young writers? Try:
Zadie Smith: White Teeth
Dave Eggers: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (nonfiction)
Po Bronson: What Should I Do with My Life? The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question (nonfiction)

Socially responsible choices (nonfiction):
Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less
Barbara Ehrenreich: Nickel and Dimed: on (not) getting by in America

A few books on my list to read include (nonfiction):
James Frey: A Million Little Pieces
Dan Gillmor: We The Media
Tom Wolfe: Hooking Up

A portrait of me in Tunisia, originally uploaded by dstout.

I’m trying out flickr. Looks to be pretty cool so far. At any rate, here’s a photo of me taken with my Yashica-Mat by Webb when we were in Tunisia.

I’ve been getting my travel itinerary ready for the spring. Things are starting out with a trip to Washington DC next week, St. Louis in April, and Austin TX in June. Time permitting, I may go to SXSW again in March. I had a great time at that conference last year. We’ll see.

At any rate, I’m sure to have a camera along, so expect more updates on the fotos pages. I’m still working to CMSify my fotos area—that is, move all the foto content into MovableType. I’ve seen a few plugins that supposedly help with that process, though I think the only thing I would need created for me is something that could generate an index/thumbnail page of all the shots in a particular category.

You may have noticed the light posting lately—besides moving into a new building at work and getting ready for the start of the semester, I’m serving on a few boards including an executive board for a statewide non-profit agency and local non-profit boards as well. At any rate, it’s good to be busy.

Pardon our mess as we integrate our non-blog website content into the body of the blog. Now that everything will be part of the blog, I suppose the name The Daniel R Stout Website is even more (intentionally) anachronistic. Any suggestions? How about The Daniel R Stout Electron Snowdrift.

I hit upon a good idea yesterday. I had noticed that the work involved in doing a site-wide redesign was getting to be pretty arduous. I had the blog content, which is where I’d start a redesign. This was easy. But changing all the templates for the rest of the site was a pain in the ass. So I’m simplifying and streamlining. What were once separate sections of the website are now being melded into the blog. Hence, in the future when I want to do a redesign, it’ll be a lot easier.

The other big change going on under the hood is that my foto area is going to be redesigned as a separate blog. Instead of using static pages I’m considering integrating my photos into a galleries-as-categories blog in MovableType. Anyone had experience doing photoblogs with MT? The other option is to use Flickr. I see there’s an MT plugin to integrate with the Flickr API.

Take care, good people.

Sincerely,
The Mgmt.

At about a quarter to eight (yesterday) the sea became strangely agitated. Thinking of the earthquake which had occurred some three hours before, one was inclined to conclude that the convulsion of the earth had been submarine and not far distant from us.

The seabed appeared to be casting violently off the superincumbent mass of water and driving it to the shore. The Grand Harbour is protected by the breakwater; the tidal wave rushed unchecked into the Marsamuscetto harbour.

In the creeks the agitation was great. In Misida creek the waters dashed right over the confining barriers and rushed up to, and into, the houses and shops by the shores.

From the early morning it continued until after 4 p.m. People trembled at first to witness that which was taking place. After rising over the land, the waters receded and left the seabed bare near the shore, fish was picked up wriggling in the sand seeking to get back to their own element.

So read The Daily Malta Chronicle on Decemeber 29, 1908, after an earthquake hit the Straits of Messina between Sicily and mainland Italy. The resulting tsunami killed 200,000 people and was a 7.5 quake on the Richter scale. [Article here]

Jm writes:

Click the link below for satellite photos of tsunami disaster.
http://homepage.mac.com/demark/tsunami/
You can toggle between “after” / “before” to see the difference in each of the Satellite Photos.

Some of these photos are mind blowing. Total destruction.

The latest word is that the number of people reading blogs rose 58% last year, and 32 million Americans are reading blogs now. 6 million people are using RSS readers of some form. And 8 million people have created a blog. Here’s a quote: “Blog creators were likely to be young, well-educated, net-savvy males with good incomes and college educations, the survey found. This was also true of the average blog reader, although the survey found there was a greater than average growth in blog readership among women and those in minorities. “

Article from the BBC.

Since it’s now 2005, I decided to have a look at some statistics culled from the DanielStout.com/ManufacturedEnvironments.com enterprise over the past year. This is more for my records than anything else, but I thought I’d share.

Top 10 Search Engine Searches for 2004 (in order)

1. free itunes songs
2. trip shakespeare
3. bats
4. daniel stout
5. show desktop icon
6. problems with the patriot act
7. soy latte
8. website hacking
9. haunting desire
10. cairo, egypt

Top 5 Browsers for 2004

1. Internet Explorer (6.0/Win) 59.3%
2. Firefox (all versions) 12.3%
3. Internet Explorer (all other) 9.8%
4. Netscape (all versions) 4.9%
5. Safari (all versions) 4.1%
6. All other browsers 9.6%

Top 5 Operating Systems for 2004

1. Windows XP 37.3%
2. [unknown] 25.5%
3. Windows 98 14.2%
4. Windows 2000 9.7%
5. Macintosh 6.7%
6. All other Operating Systems 6.6%

ANALYSIS:
[SEARCHES] There are a few new entries this year: lots of iTunes searches, also “problems with the Patriot Act” entered the list. The surprise of the list is “haunting desire.” I wrote a blog entry in June 2000 titled “Haunting Desire” and for some reason it is currently the #1 hit in Google for those words.

[Browsers] IE6.0 showed a noticeable decline from 65% last year to about 59% this year. Firefox went from basically nothing to capture over 12% market share. Safari share also noticeably increased this year. Diversity seems to be the keyword this year. A much stronger variety of browsers were hitting my site in 2004 compared to 2003.

[OS] Windows XP continues to dominate. Very marked rise in “unknown” traffic from 13% last year to over 25%. I attribute this to the massive rise in people reading my RSS feeds this year. The Macintosh showed a slight increase from about 5% to 6.7%.

Have a great 2005!

Hi, folks —

If you’re reading this blog on the web or via RSS than you may have already noticed that ManufacturedEnvironments.com is being phased out. Links to ManuEnvi are already being redirected at this point. So update your bookmarks to our new home in the electrons:

http://manufacturedenvironments.com/

If you subscribe to my RSS feeds, update your links as follows:

RSS 2.0: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ManufacturedEnvironments

Click the button to subscribe with Bloglines:

The contact email address remains unchanged on the contact page.

Cory has some interesting points posted over on bOINGbOING refuting arguments that are being made in the DRM space. I especially liked his lead:

For starters, any market-correction for DRM will surely involve informed customers making good purchase decisions about the DRM in their devices. That’s what this debate is all about. The implicit, “Stop complaining and let the market sort it out” in these comments ignores the fact that complaints about DRM are vital to the market sorting it out.

If you’ve been abroad recently, then you’re aware that world opinion of the U.S. continues to worsen. The U.S. is no longer attracting the best foreign students. And people are taking every opportunity to show their disdain for the policies of the current president, which reflect on every American. In Malta, a country near and dear to my heart, two teenagers were charged with attempting to throw paint at a U.S. warship docked in the main harbor.

I know people who voted for Bush, and I will leave no opportunity wasted to remind them of their decision to keep us in this disastrous war.

Happy New Year! I hope your 2004 was a pleasant and fruitful one. Here’s looking to a great 2005!

In other news, HAWKS WIN! Wow. That was a close one. Good going, guys!