Well, another one bites the dust. One more venerable magazine that started back when you needed to actually know something to build and use a computer has ceased its print operation and gone to a scaled-back digital version. It started with an e-mail a few months ago:

As a valued reader, we regret to inform you that Dr. Dobb’s Journal ceased its standalone monthly magazine with the February 2009 issue. The quality editorial coverage you have come to expect from Dr. Dobb’s Journal continues in its sister publication. InformationWeek will now include Dr. Dobb’s Report once a month.

Today, I received another e-mail that reads:

You may have noticed that you stopped receiving your print issues of Dr. Dobb’s Journal as of February this year. Well we are proud to announce that Dr. Dobb’s has gone Green! Going forward, Dr. Dobb’s will be available exclusively in digital format as Dr. Dobb’s Digest! Subscribe Now for your FREE digital subscription!

I still fondly recall the days of BYTE, Creative Computing, and Kilobaud. The personal computer grew up at the same time that I did, and I was happy to be a part of it. I was entering programs into a simple computer one byte at a time in binary using nothing but switches and lights when I was in middle school. My next computer ran BASIC, but the interface was an noisy, mechanical teletype machine with paper tape storage. FORTRAN on punch cards, batch processed on the downtown mainframe was the norm in high school. I was always the most popular guy in my college dorm on snowy, windy nights when people could access the school’s mainframe using my Apple ][ and 300-baud modem from my room instead of trudging down to the computing center to hunt out a terminal.

I know everything, including magazines and newspapers, is going digital these days. I’m the first to sign up for on-line bill delivery and payment so I can stop all that paper from invading our mailbox. But there will always be a place in my heart for page after page of program listings that you had to hand type into your PC, and those back-of-the-book ads showing all the newest gadgets and toys and endless lists of prices.

There are some incredibly powerful and beautiful photos that came from 2008’s world events over at Boston.com that I’ve really enjoyed viewing. Go check it out. (Also Part 2 and Part 3.)

http://view.break.com/534959 – Watch more free videos

My jaw dropped when I saw this one. Just way too funny. More details about how it happened and the results can be found here.

As most people with busy families, I rely on my calendar to try to make sense of all of our daily activities. I used to keep everything in a single Outlook calendar on my work laptop, but if I wanted to quickly check a date while at home and the computer was off, it was most inconvenient, to say the least.

Then I changed jobs and the laptop went away. That’s when I started using Google Calendar in a big way. Now I use it for everything, and create separate calendars for different types of activities. For example, I’ve created public calendars for the UConn men’s and women’s basketball schedules, the upcoming Stafford Motor Speedway racing season, and even my son’s Boy Scout troop and daughter’s Venturing crew. Since they are public, others can benefit by including them in their own calendar display.

So it was with mixed feelings that I saw the announcement that Google Calendar could finally be synced with Outlook. It’s something I would have killed for about six months ago, but now that I’ve weaned off Outlook, it’s something I’m not particularly excited about. I toyed around with using Plaxo to sync Google Calendar, Outlook, and Thunderbird, but as the various pieces have evolved over the past few months, Plaxo has been getting more and more broken.

I’ll probably give it a shot, because I’m now using Outlook 2007 on my new laptop, but I’m not straying far from the basic Google Calendar interface. What I really want is two-way syncing between Thunderbird and Gmail contacts. Oh well…

Hurray! A Hartford Superior Court judge sided with AT&T last week, overturning a DPUC ruling that U-Verse is a cable service and therefore needs a cable franchise license. This is good news for those of us who want an alternative to Comcast that doesn’t involved putting up a satellite dish. I wrote last December that I was looking forward to having service in our area, and I’m still waiting anxiously. VRADs are popping up all over Manchester, and I’m hoping they continue to move eastward toward Tolland. Fortunately, it doesn’t look like our attorney general is going to appeal the ruling, so we may be out of the woods.

I wrote a blog entry a while ago about a USB thumb drive that can be worn as a bracelet. Skullcandy does this one better with their Bully watch. This thing has a built-in 1-GB MP3 player. It’s even durable and attractive. I still prefer to use my phone for my podcast listening, but it’s nice to see some alternatives out there.

Here is a wonderful essay detailing the first-hand experience of a person observing Tisha B’Av with the traditional walk around the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem. The Tisha B’Av commemorates the destruction of the first and second temples on the Temple Mount. As you might expect, the Jerusalem chief of police announced several days ago that the Temple Mount would be closed to all non-Muslims as well as Muslim males under the age of 45 on Tisha B’Av. It was a visit by Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount back in 2000 that is often cited as the straw that broke the camel’s back in starting the current intifada.

Having spent 10 days in Israel in December 1999, I could picture the procession and its sights in my mind as I read Judy’s wonderful prose. The event so typifies the Jewish mentality I experienced while in Israel. Peaceful observation of holy days by huge numbers of people who just want to be left alone to live their lives according to the laws set forth by God. No rowdy chants, flag burnings, rock throwing, or other civil disobedience. I have never understood the centuries-old persecution of the Jewish people. Why can’t people just let them live in peace?

Here’s a post about some nice tools for geotagging photos and for linking Google Earth to geotagged photos. A geotagged photo has latitude and longitude coordinates of exactly where it was taken attached to it. Until we have digital cameras with built-in GPS receivers, we have to take a few extra steps to do the tagging, but the latest round of tools is making that process a bit easier.

Yes, I stole the title from the Genealogue blog, but the title made me laugh as much as the photo. Kinda looks like a Capital One commercial. Haven’t you always wondered if this sort of thing really could happen?