Commiseration to all those cruelly deprived of an additional day's invoicing by a tyrannical monarch. On the bright side, it gives you plenty of time to enjoy this little lot:
Happy invoicing!
- Bonus link for music lovers today; you can think of it as a Jubilee Link if you like that sort of thing:
- MusOpen - "Put simply, our mission is to set music free." MusOpen aims to do this by providing recordings, textbooks, and sheet music for free. The recordings are by world-class orchestras, and aim to cover the canon of Western classical music, at least to start with. They are currently hosted at the Internet Archive in raw, unmixed form. They will of course be professionally mixed and made available in finished form for free, but if sound engineering is your thing and you've ever fancied the idea of working with the raw recordings of a symphony orchestra, now's your chance
If you just want to listen, you can whet your appetite with:
- Open Goldberg Variations - "The Open Goldberg Variations by Kimiko Ishizaka are free to download and share. They are governed by the Creative Commons Zero license, which means that they are a part of the public domain." Lots of lovely Bach; there's also a free iPad app so you can follow along with the score, and you can get a double CD of the recordings, also free, by writing and publishing a review
- MusOpen - "Put simply, our mission is to set music free." MusOpen aims to do this by providing recordings, textbooks, and sheet music for free. The recordings are by world-class orchestras, and aim to cover the canon of Western classical music, at least to start with. They are currently hosted at the Internet Archive in raw, unmixed form. They will of course be professionally mixed and made available in finished form for free, but if sound engineering is your thing and you've ever fancied the idea of working with the raw recordings of a symphony orchestra, now's your chance
- A quick note on Markov chains, or “where does spam come from?” - "Have you ever wondered why spam has all those hilarious nonsensical strings of words in it? They’re pretty odd constructions… not as random as if you picked words randomly out of a hat, almost grammatical much of the time, but still clearly gibberish." Good succinct explanation of the maths behind garbage.
- Taking Your Talent to the Web - This was Jeffrey Zeldman's original book of advice to designers moving to the new medium, lost to view in the wreckage of the dotcom crash and superseded by his classic Designing with Web Standards; but now here's a piece of web history, re-implemented on the modern web: "Now, in 2012, this wonderful book lives again. Sure, some contents may have settled in shipment, but take a peek under the hood. View the source code and you'll see the latest and greatest HTML5, CSS3, great looking fonts, and so much more."
- ‘Do you feel more Arab or more American?’: Two women’s story of being detained and interrogated at Ben Gurion - "I am an American citizen. I went to American schools my entire life, graduated from an American university and work as an architect in New York City. Why was this happening to me? It all started with a simple question. 'What is your father’s name?'" Welcome to Israel, indeed.
- "Can you solve this problem for me on the whiteboard?" - Great satire on crap technical interviews: "Jim is a great chef... Jim is a bit dumbfounded, both by the request and being asked to demonstrate his cooking ability on a whiteboard."
- DEC PDP-11/35 Restoration - "On Sunday, April 28 2012, I picked up a PDP-11/35 from a friend who had been storing it in a shed for many years. The system has been home to generations of spiders and mice, and needs more than just a little bit of TLC." Seth Morabito's ongoing diary about the restoration. (Many years ago I had a PDP-11/34a, but it took up too much room in a one-bed flat.)
- How the planet got its spots - "Earth has grown in fits and starts. Its oceans, products of giant, moisture-spewing volcanoes, formed quickly, but its continents took hundreds of millions of years to surface—and billions more to acquire a thin layer of green. For eons, the planet veered wildly between extremes, impersonating a range of celestial bodies." Interview with geophysicist Robert Hazen on how life has shaped the geology of our home.
- To Get To The Root Of A Hard Problem, Just Ask “Why” Five Times - Excerpt from Eric Ries's book The Lean Startup: "The core idea of Five Whys is to tie investments directly to the prevention of the most problematic symptoms. The system takes its name from the investigative method of asking the question “Why?” five times to understand what has happened (the root cause)."
- The Overthinking Person’s Drinking Game - Leigh Alexander offers something to do of an evening now that the end of The Apprentice means you can't play the "Yes Lord Sugar" drinking game: "If you spend a long time mulling the nature of ‘deserving’ and what it actually means, and if you can’t really resolve the question of whether anyone specifically ‘deserves’ anything and come to an impasse about chaos and the innate unfairness of life, drink."
- Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic - The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Centers for Disease Control and Prevention present a series of comics on dealing with a Zombie Attack
(N.B. For you NoScripters, it requires JavaScript; it doesn't attempt to display ads or whizz up your fans by doing stupid crap, so it's safe to whitelist this one.)
Happy invoicing!
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