Podcast Update

• I listened to Dr. Moira Gunn interview Robert Kaplan about his book Imperial Grunts. He talked about the experience of doing the research to learn first hand about the experience of American soldiers in the field. He described much of our work as imperialistic. I was surprised until he defended why he applied that definition. In fact, we do spend a lot of time consulting and training troops in other countries. To do otherwise would require us to have to strong of a presence in the host countries. Very interesting interview and I have added his book to my desired reading list.
  
• I listened to a panel moderated by Liza Sabater. The panel included Debi Jones who blogs as mobile jones, Ellen Spertus a computer science professor, and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez who blogs and writes. It was very interesting to listen to this group of women talk about how to manage and react to those who would flame, shame, or blame (this was the title of the panel) others via blogs, email, and such. It was fiery and very interesting. My wife and I listened to this and a few other podcasts while driving on a long trip. This is the only one my wife liked. My wife does find IT as interesting as I do.
• Jeremy Zawodny, Yahoo, led an interesting presentation about the infrastructure of some of the software at Yahoo. He particularly addressed open source used at Yahoo. A good and thorough presentation.