I found this book to be useful. I usually use Common Lisp, Ruby and Java for my work but I have had a long term interest in Clojure. Recently I have seen an uptick in customer demand for Clojure development so I have revisited Stuart's book and two MEAP work in progress Clojure books.

One issue that I am having with Clojure is the relatively poor stack trace information, even with the clojure-contrib ST utility. That said, I bet improvement comes quickly.

BTW, Stuart's Clojure in the Wild web cast is pretty good.

I do a lot of writing. When I use LateX instead of OO.org or Pages, I save a lot of time and effort. Lots of time and effort, actually. There is a learning curve for LateX but IMO it is well worth it.

I have to disagree with you:

Google performs statistical NLP on your data, and automatically finds good ads, etc.

As per Google turning over your data to the government: we are probably close to total government access to everything we do, so I would chill out about stuff that we are helpless to do anything about (unless you are going to stop using the Internet).

I have used OO.org to write several books, and it is what I recommend to people.

That said, I prefer Latex :-)

I think that the prediction that there needs to be more content before mass market success of tablets is right on.

At breakfast this morning, one of my non-tech friends was talking about the TED talk on wearable computers where spacial glasses would create virtual keyboards and displays on walls, tables, etc. That is what I would to see available soon :-)

For now, the Android platform is looking good: easy to develop apps for, mobile devices support voice commands, etc.

I keep a small reserve instance running 24x7 and the cost is very low. I also have a EBS bootable large instance that I run for a few hours at a time as needed. It has been a while since I used it, but Elastic MapReduce also works well and is fairly inexpensive for what you get.

About half of my customers also use EC2s.

(Note: Amazon gave me a large grant to use EC2 for free for work on my last book, but my comments are my honest opinions.)

I think that what you are seeing with AppEngine (and same effect with Heroku, which is EC2 based) is this: if your web application has not processed any requests for several seconds (or longer?), then it needs to be rolled back online.

Try an experiment: assuming that you have a private (non-advertised) AppEngine app, time the first request with ab (Apache benchmark tool). Then time requests that are sent every second. I bet that you see the 20 second page load time vanish if you are making frequent requests.

After building and running it locally yesterday morning, I started studying the code. I am not to interested in deploying it right now, but I might set it up in the future for use by family, friends, and customers.

I've had a Wave account for about 6 months (sandbox and beta) and I am more interested in building applications on top of Wave rather than hacking on the EtherPad code base. I am interested in learnng from the codebase however :-)

I was just saying that I enjoy target shooting, but not hunting.

I thought the same thing. Nintendo products have long lasting value.

I still on occasion use my U64 and I bet I am still playing at least a few Wii games 5 or 10 years from now. The US market is saturated with Wii consoles but I expect Nintendo still gets fairly good revenue from new game sales.

Gaming is about having *fun*, not technology. Nintendo's chief game designer came to Angel Studios (where I worked) and I think that I can paraphrase his philosophy as fun first, technology second.