Sorry, not impressed. 99% of long takes are just directors showing off. They drive me nuts, because in the vain attempt to demonstrate skill, the director winds up calling attention to himself and either robbing the audience of reaction shots, or swinging the camera wildly as if an earthquake had hit the set. Spare me the artsy "look at me, I'm so talented and trendy" crap and give me a movie that actually tells a story in the best way possible instead of trying to wow the brainless "in" crowd.

As someone who has been trying for some time to offer BitTorrent as a download option, I think a big part of the problem is that the server software is lousy. Many of the trackers out there are slow, flaky, fragile, and horribly documented. You also need a seeder, and again the server-side seeder software is consistently poor.

If you could go to bittorrent.org, download a couple of programs, and set up bittorrent distribution in an hour or two, that would make a huge difference in adoption rates. As it is, you have to REALLY want to set up a site because of the crappy distributions you have to wade through.

> In general, if you think you know the material better than Khan, why don't you teach your own kid?

I do. I teach for a living, and I supplement my kid's schoolwork with lots of extra lessons. And yes, she knows what "perpendicular" means.

What I object to is that Khan obviously didn't bother to prepare before he turned on the camera, and didn't bother to rewind and try again when he got himself into trouble because of his lack of preparation. That's an amazingly amateurish stunt. But even more, I object to the fact that Bill Gates is lionizing this guy. At best, he's merely OK. There are thousands of better teachers out there. And the TRULY best are making outstanding videos that actually teach math well. Of course, most of those cost money, and Khan's are free. But I think that Gates can probably afford the good ones. Even better, he could easily subsidize their production so that everybody could see them for free, instead of having to suffer through Khan's second-rate stuff.

I stand by what I said.

I'm looking for a solution to let my daughter study geometry at a distance, so Khan Academy sounded intriguing. I watched about half of the first video before puking.

It's not just that the videos are non-interactive lectures. It's not that they're so unpolished, full of hemming and hawing. It's that this guy can't even get his facts right. He tries to define "perpendicular," stumbles ("I wanted to say that they're perpendicular"), and eventually defines them as a horizontal line intersecting a vertical one. Um, yeah.

I suppose the stuff might be useful as a review. But it's diastrous as a substitute for a real--and competent--teacher.

http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/digicam/camcomment

The key is that you use your favorite viewer to look at photos, and your favorite editor to edit the embedded EXIF comment information. All the data is stored inside the photos themselves. Simple tools like exiftool can then extract the data and put it into a database or wherever you want. Editor abbreviations can make tagging quick and easy; I even have simple "next photo" commands in my editor (emacs) so I don't have to move my cursor between windows.

Me too.

I started feeling funny one day about 18 months ago. Long story short, I typed "heart attack symptoms" into Google; what I found led me to call 911 immediately.

They tell me that I didn't have the actual heart attack (which they called "massive") until I was already in the ER. Google might not have saved my life, but it certainly meant that there was very little permanent damage.