Cold Turkey in Heidelberg: Audio Story
Posted on December 17, 2009
Heidelberg Castle ©Russell Johnson
What do you do when you are alone during a holiday, stuck in a place that doesn’t celebrate it? A few years ago I flew to Germany the day before Thanksgiving for a 1/2 hour business meeting. The meeting was a bust and alone, in a foul mood on a bone-chilling afternoon, I boarded a train for Heidelberg where the Student Prince was alive and quite drunk. This is excerpt from an audio book of my stories that will be released by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange on iTunes and on CD early next year.
» Filed Under Audio, Germany, Holiday | Leave a Comment
Go Do It With Goby
Posted on November 21, 2009
Sometimes I feel like a little kid on weekend: “Mom, I’m bored, what can I do?” Often my wife and I pore over the broadsheets or dive into our dogeared hiking guides. Sometimes we sail off into the uncharted bitstreams of Google, clicking through page after page of irrelevant links. Point is, we sometimes waste so much time looking for something to do that it becomes too late to do it.
Goby is not so much a search engine as a “do” engine. It works on the forehead-slapping premise that people often go to the net to make decisions not just to access a pile of poorly-sorted data. With Goby, you simply type in what you want to do, where and when. I keyed in “hike” and my location and immediately got eleven pages of nearby treks, complete with maps.
Too nice a day to be at a computer. I’m outta here. http://www.goby.com
» Filed Under Misc., Tech & Science | Leave a Comment
Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age
Posted on November 14, 2009
Here is an interview we did with our friend author Kurt Beyer, who has just published “Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age” (MIT Press www.admiralgracehopper.com). It is the story of a woman who broke the glass ceiling in the 1940s as second in charge of the room-sized top secret computer at Harvard that designed the atom bomb while establishing the notion that computers weren’t single-purpose devices for calculating weapons trajectories, but could be taught languages to do everything from accounting to predicting election returns. She proved the latter at Remington Rand in the 50s when UNIVAC predicted the 1952 presidential election. Hopper retired, then returned to the Navy and became a minor celebrity in the 1980s after appearances on 60 Minutes and the David Letterman Show as the cranky/brilliant world’s oldest Admiral.
Grace Hopper broke through gender and corporate barriers and inspired a new generation of technology developers and entrepreneurs.
» Filed Under Video, Tech & Science | Leave a Comment
WikiReader: Travel Guide for the Curious
Posted on October 29, 2009
In this age of smart cards, smartphones and “i” this-n-that, you might wonder what value an electronic gizmo not linked by satellite, Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, GPRS, GSM, WMD, or even a string connected to a soup can would be to a traveler. I wondered too, when I first eyed the WikiReader, which crams the entire text of Wikipedia, 3 million-plus articles, into a palm-sized device. (A journalist acquaintance came up with the ultimate pickup line to describe it: “I’ve got the knowledge of the world in my pants…wanna see it?”)
» Filed Under Gadgets & Cameras | Leave a Comment
Sustainable Tourism: Video Demo of our Intro to Travel and Tourism Course
Posted on October 27, 2009
Take a look at a demo (with a short piece on sustainable tourism) of our new edition of “Travel and Tourism: Opening Doors for Your Future,” an interactive course that introduces the Travel and Tourism industry as a serious career path to high school or entry-level college students, people who are about to enter the workforce or those who may be seeking a new career. We have added a Library/Personal Edition on DVD and a Flash video-based e-Learning Edition that can be found online at http://learntravelandtourism.com. The course is both educational and motivational, loaded with timely information about how vast and important the travel industry is, its history, sustainable tourism, future trends, its various sectors and how they work together, and the wide variety of career opportunities it offers.
It is the successor to the “World of Many Faces” video/workbook that my good friend Renton De Alwis put together in 1994, which was used in universities, schools and companies around the world and still is in many libraries
» Filed Under Video, Sustainable Tourism, Travel Biz | 1 Comment
