Wendy Seltzer’s plain-english explanation of the Microsoft Windows Vista’s EULA was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. There will be no Windows Vista on my next computer. I am sick and tired of worrying about computer viruses and misbehaving software; having the operating system that decides to remove functionalities or sabotage my work otherwise, is just beyond bearable. It barely matters what Operating System I run anyway. My primary applications are Firefox, Open Office, Gmail, WordPress and various Java applications.

What would I do, if I had 3 more hours a day free? I would learn 3D modelling and animation. This used to be the skill that only a limited number of people needed and the tools were difficult and expensive. With computer power not that long ago, even having the skills was not very useful as those skills could only be applied for high-end imaging, movie and computer game making.

David Rothman of the TeleRead fame has written a good background article on the e-books for the Innovate - journal of online education (free registration required). While David’s articles at his blog are frequent and in-depth, any one of them is too tactical for a good overview. The article at the Innovate is a good summary and is rather more strategic. It also utilises the online nature of the journal to provide a comprehensive set of relevant hyperlinks.

A new Borders bookshop opened near me. Just for fun, I decided to look at their Russian books section (in original Russian). I expected to find none. The result was much stranger. There were two books on the shelf. One was something non-memorable. The other one, however, was Nobokov’s translation of Alice in Wonderland. So, what’s the problem? Nabokov is well known and Alice in Wonderland is always a great read in any language.

Couple of interesting things happened recently in the Computational Linguistics related fields that I thought were worth linking to: ACM Queue had an interview with Mike Cohen of Google (previously of Nuance Communications) discussing recent advances and changes in speech recognition technology. Pluggd, with its hotly discussed demo of HearHere, uses speech recognition and some sort of topic clustering to show a time heatmap of your search keyword inside the podcast.