Current and recent inputs: music

I covered books last time, so now here are some recent music purchases:

• James Blunt "All The Lost Souls" - I enjoyed his first big release, and like this second one as well, though I think it lost some of the naivety and simpleness that made the first good. I definitely need to listen more before judgment, but it also has a bit of the "every song sounds the same" syndrome to me.
• Queens of the Stone Age "Era Vulgaris" - I think QOTSA continues to produce solid rock albums that are consistently good and consistently evolving. I never quite know what the style and theme will be, but I'm pleasantly surprised, as I was with this one.
• Linkin Park "Minutes to Midnight" - I used to be a big Linkin Park fan, and I definitely think this is a good CD, but it just doesn't capture my attention like their older albums did. It is definitely a more mature album, and there are some nice touches in style.
• Shiny Toy Guns "We Are Pilots" - This is a fun one; some discotheque beats and synthesizers, with some wailing lyrics and voices. I like the combination of the great male and female lead vocalists.
  

Current and recent inputs: books

Thought I'd go over some recent things I'm reading:

Books:

• The Fourth Bear is the second book in the "Nursery Crimes" series (and I'm currently reading it). It is good literary based humor about a detective agency that investigates crimes by nursery rhyme characters. So far it seems a little more busy and chaotic than its predecessor, The Big Over Easy (about Humpty Dumpty's murder).
• The Surrogates is an interesting graphic novel set 50 years in the future, where most people stay home and conduct their life through a robotic 'avatar' (like Second Life in a physical world). The main plot is a pretty simple detective story, but the book does a good job fleshing out the social and judicial aspects of a Surrogates based world.
• The Futurist is about a popular futurist that "comes clean" about how his work is all a guessing game, and it plunges him into turmoil and adventure. It's definitely not one of the best books I've read, but it provides some thinking material.
• Snow Crash is a classic cyberpunk sci-fi book that introduced a lot of concepts (like avatars, Second Life and The Surrogates owes it for this). While in the virtual world, hackers are getting infected with the Snow Crash virus, turning them into babbling fools or comatose victims. This is a rich and creative vision of the future, and I really enjoyed the out of the box portrayal.
  

Changed the blog template

Changed the look of the blog. A friend pointed out that it was all messed up in Internet Explorer 7.0 (looks like that LibraryThing badge wasn't rendering right), and I noticed other odd spaces show up there in IE and Firefox. So, I decided to just use one of the Blogger templates to keep it easier from now on. Hope you like! I think it is much simpler and clean.

Misery, email comprehension, year 2000, einstein

Hi there! Here's a random variety of things:

• 7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable - an article from Cracked.com that has some nice insights and food for thought (and some not suitable for work/rated R language).
• From that article, I also linked over to this one about why emails are so easily misunderstood. Another interesting one that puts a pretty low rate of actually comprehending emails correctly.
• Paleo-Future has another good find with these 1910 French postcards that depicted what life in the year 2000 would be like.
• Check out this amazing speedpainting of Albert Einstein (4 hours condensed to 3.5 minutes).