Clouds

Airmen support space shuttle launch

Members of th 45th Space Wing supported NASA's successful launch of Space Shuttle Discovery Oct. 23 at 11:38 a.m. EDT from Space Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This is the 23rd mission to the International Space Station. Discovery will deliver a connecting module that will increase the space station's interior space.

This image is free and public domain.

Parachute drop

A pararescueman conducts a parachute drop Oct. 19 on Kadena Air Base, Japan. The Airmen train to maintain proficiency for the defense of Japan and to meet U.S. obligations. The pararescuemen are capable of conducting search-and-rescue missions under most conditions and have saved the lives of both U.S. military and Okinawans.

This image is free and public domain.

New Photos

Project: Indiana sounds good

If you are a supporter of free software, you need to check out Project: Indiana. Project: Indiana is an effort by Sun to get OpenSolaris into the hands of users, a lot of users, easily.

Community info.

Military jets

This image is 100% free and in the public domain.

CC photos on Flickr going nuts

The world of Flickr photos just gets neater and neater. There are now, as of today, October 15, 2007, over 5.6 MILLION CC attribution license photos on Flickr. The attribution license is the most liberal of all CC licenses. Here is a link to all of the different kinds of CC-licensed photos on Flickr.

Thunderbird

This image is 100% free and in the public domain.

Image # 108665111

Image # 739828549

Zude Demo

This is Scoble's demo video of Zude, a new way to build content-rich web experiences. Awesome!

Today's interesting fact: birds are dinosaurs

Like most boys, I was always a fan of dinosaurs. The fact they existed was incredible and I read about them, researched them, figured out how to pronounce their latin names, all that stuff. Over the past few years, I have started to get back into researching dinos, and in doing so, I have been reading about how modern birds, birds we see every day, are dinosaurs. I think a lot of people, if you asked, would be very surprised by this. I recall explaining this to my Mom, and she looked at me like I had been drinking.

The bottomline is that the idea that modern birds are dinosaurs is becoming a widely accepted thing. It is not by any means universally accepted. Think about it though: birds are reptiles, their skeletons really do appear to be dino-like. For me, someone with no background in paleo studies, can still accept this as fact. It also gives me more appreciation for nature.

Some neat links:

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/avians.html
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/dinosaur.html
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinosaurs

Image # 099828552

A recent addition to my Flickr stream, and qualifies as a 'free culture' entry since it is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

A topic for present and future

After a fairly long hiatus, I am going back to my blogging roots... starting today, this blog space will be about a very important subject: free culture. When I started blogging back towards the end of 2004, my intent was to blog about all things free culture but things kind of got muddy. From now on, free culture takes priority. Of course, I could have some other items I touch on, but generally, this space will be free culture-oriented.

Robert Scoble and blogging boredom

Robert Scoble is a pretty interesting fellow. I have been following him since he was a Microsoft employee. Over the past year, I have been an avid reader of his blog and viewer of his video series, ScobleShow. Scoble has recently announced that he plans on scaling back his blogging, and I don't blame him at all. I have fallen in and out of love with blogging. If you aren't doing it for money, it's a real drain on your time. I guess it's a drain on your time even if you are doing it for the money, but it's hard to build an audience and then keep them around. I tried to blog consistently since late 2004 and it's tough as hell. Granted, I have never stated I stated I was a pro writer (far from it), but one of the really important aspects of any writing is the actual ability to write and make sense. So, a lot of time can be spent trying to make sense and not to look like an idiot in the process.

Blogging is not for everyone... it's probably not for me, but I am going to keep trying.

HP: Linux is ready for the enterprise

From CNET: "Randy Hergett, HP's director of engineering for open-source and Linux organization, said at the Gelato Itanium Conference & Expo in Singapore on Monday that Linux is ready to be used in some mission-critical applications, despite a perception that there are gaps in areas such as manageability."

This is simply more affirmation that Linux is poised to continue to expand in business.

Please support Creative Commons

Creative Commons has just launched a new fundraising campaign. Their goal is to receive $500,000 by the end of this year. If possible, please help them out. CC is a very important organization.

Find out ways to support CC here.

Interesting clouds

Dawn on the launchpad

This image is free and in the public domain.