All posts by Richard

Christian Rock Operas

Northern Life

Happy Easter! Shortly I'll head to church with my family. Unfortunately that seems to be an increasingly rare occurrence in America. Today, our church will be full with Chreasters, but by next weekend the full sanctuary will be a thing of the past.

I wish I knew why the church is losing touch in today's world. Having grown up in the 60's and 70's, it is all the more puzzling. That period was generally considered a time of unrest, protest, and counter-culture … and yet … the two most significant Christian Rock Operas both appeared on the scene in 1970, Jesus Christ, Super Star and Godspell.

Enjoy a few moments listening and watching the signature piece from Jesus Christ, Superstar. I've had this album since high school. Even if you're not Christian, I think you'll enjoy this "rock video". Peace!

BWCA – Quetico – Superior Bike Tour

Northern Life

Today was the first long bike ride as I try to psyche myself up to do the BWCA – Quetico – Superior Bike Tour. The trip is approximately 650 miles through the wilderness of northern Minnesota, the Quetico, and finally returning down the North Shore of Lake Superior to Duluth. Anyhow, I biked 48 miles in high winds and rain which tool 3 hours, 20 minutes.  I need encouragement! Post a comment! At 54 years old it's time to try something new! (click upon image to view full sized).

Bike-Trip

Chem4Word

Uncategorized

All my chemistry friends should take a look at this free new add-in from Microsoft, Chem4Word. Microsoft Research describes the free tool in this manner:

The Chemistry Add-in for Word is a tool for writing and rendering
semantically rich chemistry information in Microsoft Word documents.
This project is a partnership with Peter Murray-Rust of the University
of Cambridge.

In addition, everyone may be interested in the Math Ad-In for MS Word.

Chem4Word

The New Media vs The Old Media (and in between)

Uncategorized

People often like to talk about old vs new media. What are the ramifications?  Are the news stories the same? While I don't pretend to have the answers, I did decide to use a "new age" web tool named Wordl, which takes the content from any web page (or text you submit) and builds a graphical representation. In other words (or in other Wordls), this service turns text into a graphical representation.

Thus, I bring you the news as reported on March 29, 2010 at 6:45 CDT from:

In the case of each media site, I used their "vanilla" United States root page (i.e. no user preferences). I thought it would be intriguing to compare a news service / web site which is built upon an old line newspaper (NY Times), a web based new age media site (CNN), and finally a computer service built news service (Google News). The only comment I'll make is that CNN and the NY Times seem to present less content and stress some items more on their home pages (number and size of graphics). I'll let you draw any other conclusions yourself. Thus, here are the three Wordls: (click upon any image to view full sized)

NY Times

Wordl-NYTimes 

.

CNN

Wordl-CNN
.

Google News

Wordl-Google

Research … Not Just Another Twitter List!

Uncategorized

Although I've been a HUGE advocate of RSS technology over the years via this blog (still am), I realize that Twitter is here to stay. Like many of you, I've experimented with Twitter and am still learning the value proposition. I have found that one Twitter List which I have created, my Research List, has been a great way for me to stay informed about new reports in the knowledge domain of collaboration, systems and technology. I've restricted the membership to high quality research groups. I've included the initial list below along with their Twitter account links. Any like groups I should add, and why?  Thanks. 

NorthstarNerd Twitter Research Group: