Today’s post is unfortunately a sad one. We lost a very close family member this weekend to a long battle with a number of ailments including Cancer. It was one of those situations where our loved one was taken decades before her time, but at least it was not something that just occurred suddenly.

It’s been a very sad weekend, but at the same time one that reminds me how precious life is. I also came to the personal realization that grief is for the living, not the dead. We have to continue on through this world forever missing a part of ourselves that can never be refilled.

This weekend also reminded me of a commitment I made some time ago to help Stanford University’s Folding@Home project which researches fundamental causes of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. Cancer and Parkinson’s have both impacted my family and I believe that with enough emphasis we can cure these crippling diseases.

And you can help Stanford’s research by simply running a tiny piece of software on your computer that only uses the spare cycles when you don’t need them.
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Folks, I’ve been saying that if you haven’t already, you NEED to see An Inconvenient Truth. If it doesn’t change the way you look at the world, then you probably have no heart. (Grin!)

I also previously reported that Gore had been Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize. This is not just because he made a movie and won an Oscar, it’s because he has devoted his private life to the cause of climate change - and like it or not many, many, many people happen to agree with him and are happy he is carrying out this work.

So, today Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2007 along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

“for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”

It’s too early to see the announcement on video, but Nobel has a YouTube channel which will no doubt post the video of this announcement shortly. View it here.
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I was so amazed at what I’m about to share here that I struggled for some time to come up with the right title. Other titles I considered:

• Florida Man Saves the World
• Man Cures Cancer and Solves Energy Crisis With One Invention
• Accidental Discovery Eliminates Need for Oil
• Saltwater Combustion - The Incredible Energy Solution

In the end, no title seems worthy of this discovery. And I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it changed the world.
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In case you ever lose your dog, your watch, or your mind you can hop on over to The Found Bin and post a message or search for your found item.
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Freedom. It’s nice, right? It ought to be… the freedom we enjoy was paid for with the blood of our forefathers, and is maintained by the blood of our siblings. And no freedom is more precious than that of speech. From it all other freedom flows.

Unfortunately there are still many oppressive regimes that do not offer the luxury of free speech, and people are being tortured and killed for speaking out against injustice. (As I’ve often noted.) This is why I have decided to put my money where my mouth is and provide financial support for the Freenet Project.
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As a result of three Digg homepage appearances over a period of a few weeks bringing my blog to it’s knees I decided to make a few changes. In addition to acquiring a new server and finding someone to optimize the heck out of it for me, I also decided to re-vamp my Wordpress theme.

I’m probably a little pickier than most, but I was looking for the following list of features in the new theme:

• Speed - Along with the rapid growth of traffic on this blog I noticed a decline in page responsiveness. That is not something I want to subject hundreds of thousands of people to monthly. But most of the themes I came across suffer from “PHP bloat”, or the author’s feeling that more is always better.
• Accessibility - being one of the founders of HTMLHelp.com, it’s important to practice what I preach. So themes need to be accessible by any Web browser, on any operating system at any screen resolution - including screen readers for the visually impaired. This is currently very, very hard to find.
• Search Friendly - Although almost every theme claims to be “Search engine friendly”, I found that many could use quite a bit of improvement.
• Extensible - Webmasters have different tastes, so themes need to be flexible. Unfortunately the majority are poorly documented, use illogical naming schemes for CLASSes and IDs, and generally make it hard to modify them.

After having no luck finding an appropriate theme out of the hundreds that are publicly available I decided to just build it myself. The theme is currently in use here on One Man’s Blog, and I’m now making it available to anyone that would like to use it.
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Six months ago I blogged about Gapminder - a non-profit site funded by Google that shows some of the most interesting statistical analysis on the planet. Well, I just discovered that Hans Rosling, founder of Gapminder, gave an awesome demonstration of its use at the TED conference last year.

This discovery was followed by the discovery that all of the speakers from the most recent TED conference were video taped and each of their speeches is now available to be seen by everyone.
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In the past I’ve sent you off to compare your salary with Michael Jordan and Oprah, but now how about using this little site to see how you stack up against the entire population of the planet!

The Global Rich List site will show you how you compare to the rest of the world based on your annual salary. While this is not nearly as important a measurement of your wealth as your net worth, it’ll have to do for now!
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MIT’s OpenCourseWare project aims to offer the complete course material for every class online, free of charge.

President Susan Hockfield offers this explanation:

“OpenCourseWare expresses in an immediate and far-reaching way MIT’s goal of advancing education around the world. Through MIT OCW, educators and students everywhere can benefit from the academic activities of our faculty and join a global learning community in which knowledge and ideas are shared openly and freely for the benefit of all.”

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Did you know there are over 1,000,000 computers chained together across the Internet creating a giant super-computer attempting to break down the building blocks of proteins in order to find a cure for some of the world’s worst diseases. And you can join too!

There seems to be so much confusion out there with regards to the common ritual of tipping that I decided to take the initiative and help clarify the rules when it comes to this long standing practice.

But unlike some other tipping guides I’m not just going to tell you how much to tip, instead we’re going to focus on why people earn the tips you give them, and therefore gain a better understanding as to how much to give.
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Donors Choose is a site which brings together teachers in need of classroom tools and supplies with donors willing to help fulfill those needs.

According to the site:

Donors Choose is a simple way to provide students in need with resources that our public schools often lack. At this not-for-profit web site, teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn. These ideas become classroom reality when concerned individuals, whom we call Citizen Philanthropists, choose projects to fund.
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