Daily Archives: August 29, 2006


Interesting Podcast

I just listened to a very interesting podcast of a presentation from this years Pop!Tech Conference by Susan Blackmore on Memes called The Future of Ideas. Here is the description of the talk from the IT conversations site

Memetics is an intellectually rich but controversial field which seeks to explain how our minds and cultures are designed by natural selection acting on replicating information, just as organisms evolve by natural selection acting on genes. Sue Blackmore, one of the field’s leading thinkers, skillfully unfolds the major arguments for a meme’s-eye view of the world, and explores the implications for humanity. Are our brains best seen as machines invented by and for propagation of selfish memes?

It’s definitely worth a listen. Another podcast that you should check out is The Show with Ze Frank. Ze Frank does a daily 2 minute video podcast. Each day he talks about a different idea and has some very good insights. Finally don’t forget the MewzikCast. Show #13 went up this past weekend, featuring podsafe music from Sophia Ramos, Planet of Women, George Thorogood, and Sunspot.


Ypsilanti School Calendar 2

The Ypsi School District has put up their Calendar for the 2006-7 school year. The district website only has it as a pdf file. I added all the dates from the calendar to a Google Calendar and made it publicly accessible. If you are using any calendar program that can read .ics calendar files like Apple iCal, Evolution, Mozilla Calendar, or others you can subscribe to the calendar by putting this address in the field for the remote calendar to subscribe to in your calendar program http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/school.abuelsamid@gmail.com/public/basic.ics . If you already use Google Calendar you can just click this button to add the school calendar to your calendar . If you prefer to just see a quick web-view of the calendar you can just click on this link to see the calendar in your browser. If you like you can also subscribe to an RSS feed of the calendar here 2006-7 YPSD Calendar Feed

If you haven’t tried out Google Calendar you should definitely check it out. It’s free and has some really nice features and is easy to use. You can manage multiple calendars such as work, home, school, etc. You can also set sharing preferences for each of your calendars and subscribe to public calendars. For sharing you can set each calendar to private, share with specific users or make it public like I did with this calendar. If you use gmail and you get a message with a date in it, you can click on the message and quickly add it your calendar. If an event includes a location, when you click on the event in the calendar it will include a link to the google map showing the location. You can import calendars from iCal or any other program that can generate .ics calendar files. The only downside is that you can’t manage your calendar offline and sync it to GCal. But apparently they are working on this. I would like to be able to sync my palm treo to my google calendar.

If you have any additional school events you’d like added to the calendar, just send me a message with the info using the contact form at the top of the page and I’ll put it in.