Nerdmonkey.com

Ex-military dictator of Sierra Leone lives with mom.

FOXNews.com: Former head of state heads back home to live with mom.

Gone are the crisp military fatigues, new suits and wraparound sunglasses. In their place: A baseball hat worn backward, a Bob Marley T-shirt, dark green shorts and a pair of 'Air' Nike sneakers. ... Charismatic, muscle-bound and six-foot-two, he's the dominant figure at the bar he often frequents, which stands tenuously together with bamboo poles and plastic sheeting somehow obtained from the U.N. World Food Program.

The web knows all about you.

New York Times: Net Users Try to Elude the Google Grasp:

These days, people are seeing their privacy punctured in intimate ways as their personal, professional and online identities become transparent to one another. Twenty-somethings are going to search engines to check out people they meet at parties. Neighbors are profiling neighbors. Amateur genealogists are researching distant family members. Workers are screening co-workers.

In other words, it is becoming more difficult to keep one's past hidden, or even to reinvent oneself in the American tradition. "The net result is going to be a return to the village, where everyone knew everyone else," said David Brin, author of a book called "The Transparent Society" (Perseus, 1998). "The anonymity of urban life will be seen as a temporary and rather weird thing."

Living in the Yellow Barn, part 2.

Here are some photos taken over the last year or so in my humble abode which we affectionately call the Yellow Barn.

I am too lazy to add captions to them all, but I know many of these pics deserve some inspired prose. Feel free to post comments here with your ideas and the image number.

More Apple Switch Ads.

The Happiest Geek on Earth has an interesting take on the latest Apple Switch ad. You make the call.

Finally a cure for hangovers?

Yahoo News: "Salvation for hung-over drinkers may have arrived in an unlikely new form -- volcanic rock."

Tim O'Reilly on web services.

Tim O'Reilly on the advantage of creating web services platforms and the new Amazon API: The lesson of the dot-com boom is actually the opposite of the one that people are taking. It's not "figure out your business model first," it's "don't get greedy; give the market time to mature before you rush to cash in."

Bush administration's distraction technique.

New York Times: Failures of the Bush Administration. "Where his father's rhetoric gave us a thousand points of light, his lopped a thousand points off the Dow." [from Aarsonsw]

Back from Hawaii.

Aloha! I just got back from a trip to the big island of Hawaii and had a great time. I spent my first bit of time there with Nikki and Ara on the west side of the island in Kona (thanks for the place to stay, Grandma Alvstead!), then went to the east side of the island to stay with my old roommate Ryan and his girlfriend Maribell in Pahoa (thanks to you guys, too!).

The big island has an amazingly diverse landscape -- the west side consists of almost a deserty landscape in parts and contains most of the islands few sandy beaches. This seemed to be the more touristy side of the island, as well. The east side qualifies as a tropical rainforest with the immense amount of rainfall they get. It also appeared to be much more geared to locals (one local lady there told me how they should cut off "white people immigrating to Hawaii" and how Hawaii should become it's own sovereign nation). In between the two sides are two massive Volcanoes, one of which is actively spewing lava which makes Hawaii the only state in the nation that grows in size every year.

I really had a lot of fun. Photos are available here: Hawaii West Side Photos and Hawaii East Side Photos.