I watched the first half of "The Art and Science of Nested Loops", by Dr. Richard Bandler today. It's great, though it could use more professional editing. You just don't get the same level of insights as by directly training with him. They use 2 fixed view cameras (perfect for a seminar recording) and the sound is quite good, but the editing feels amateurish. :-/

I enjoyed it anyway. The recording shows the part he does on the last day of a NLP Practitioner training, when he explains an integral part of his teaching technique, namely the stories he tells and how they connect. He explains exactly what states they elicit and if you saw Richard work personally, you can follow along great. He's a genius at what he does and it shows.

The first DVD ends at the point where the audience leaves to do the inevitable exercise, which is an integral part of the learning experience. So you don't get that, but I don't think it can get much better than this. I have yet to watch the second part. I hope he explains the rest of his unique storytelling style: marking the start of phrases auditorily, anchoring responses visually and so on.

All in all, the DVD is not the training and it requires a certain level of knowledge about NLP to get the most from it, but it's certainly worth it. I'm sooo looking forward to train with him again in April. Even though he clearly demonstrates during the seminar that he has no clue about rocket science ;-).

...finally. I'm really ready to move on. Christmas was great, the holidays were fine, now it's time for something new and a new year is coming and so far it looks great: new projects, new understandings, another series of great opportunities. I think that's what it comes down to, so there's just one new year's resolution this year: turn every opportunity into a success.

All of them.

I also went and bought a load of great wines to help with the transition :-)

Go now and watch this and this. While you're at it, also watch this.

It's hilarious.

While you may or may not agree with the White House's policy of rewarding unprecedented idiocy... that the christian right in the US have the balls to claim that HIV can even be transmitted "via sweat and tears" and that 31% of all homosexual teens have AIDS... it just makes me sick.

If you want to become disillusioned with the European Union, you just have to realize that the pro-patent lobby, after loosing their majority in the parliament has now scheduled their directive for adoption by, and get this, the agriculture and fishery council.

As an so-called uncontroversial A-List item, they actually can do that...

This might even be illegal, as, with the revised votes, the directive doesn't have a majority anymore. Also, the German Bundestag and others seem to have withdrawn their support. In my mind, the pro-patent lobby are bad loosers, nothing more.

Everybody has a RSS feed now. The US department of state has RSS feeds on foreign policy, the CBC opens its news channels, podcasting is now being done by the BBC.

All this happens with RSS as the underlying format, XML as the underlying technology. No RDF in sight. I, hereby, declare RDF as a failed technology and while I never liked RDF anyway (and this announcement is like declaring the disintegration of the democratic party, pathetic bullshit), there's nevertheless a grain of truth to be found here.

In fact, there's also no ATOM in sight, because no one outside of the tech-geek-group cares for it.

XML is tough and RSS is even harder to do right. The underlying technology has obscure difficulties that create problems that cannot be reliably fixed in the layers and layers of abstraction we piled on top of it. But in a world where my university neglects to tell people what a character set is ("just don't use German Umlaute in C, they don't work" (that's stupid on so many levels, I have to laugh every time I think about it)), it's no wonder that even tech savvy people like Dave don't care if their technology works outside of North America. Unless we (computer scientists and especially information scientists) learn to create technology for all people, not just for the few who "speak Latin1", we don't even deserve the term "scientist", because, unfortunately, our experiments cannot be replicated outside of the western world.

That's the problem with the format wars. RSS works for everyone currently involved and when the first glitches with feeds from India show up ("Hey, has this feed just been updated, or not, I can't tell... is this a date???") it'll be much to late to fix anything about it. The world will move on regardless.

I updated the rather technical feed page to be a bit less technical. Doing my part to help RSS and ATOM conquer the world.

Chris Justus has reverse engineered Google Suggest. Great work!

Btw, I finally got around to fix the feeds. They now contain HTML and the full text of a post, not just an excerpt.