http://blog.billerickson.net Wed, 21 May 2008 00:05:30 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I recently read Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman, which is this fantastic collection of stories from Richard Feynman's life, a physicist who's always curious and a bit mischevious. In one story he discussed how appalled he was at a university he visited in Brazil. The students were great ... http://blog.billerickson.net/index.php/2008/05/20/thoughts-on-education/ I've been playing around with the free forum hosting by lefora and I'm impressed. It looks great, has some amazing features, and best of all it's free. We're in the process of figuring out how we're going to manage the BIL Community for the BIL Conference and I'm going to ... http://blog.billerickson.net/index.php/2008/05/07/lefora-great-new-forum-software/ How's that for a sensational headline. For one of my classes (FINC 421) we started our own hedge funds. We were given $30M in a program called StockTrak with the ability to buy 50% on margin, access to Bloomberg, and a few basic QUANT rules. Over 3 months we were able ... http://blog.billerickson.net/index.php/2008/04/22/my-hedge-fund-earns-115-annually/ | View | Upload your own Today I'm giving a talk on the moral issues associated with Aubrey de Grey's research into "curing" aging. He's approaching aging as a disease that needs to be cured, and while the science behind his work is relatively uncontroversial, many people are fundamentally opposed ... http://blog.billerickson.net/index.php/2008/04/21/the-morality-of-ending-aging/ I spend the majority of my time working with Wordpress, and I've come across a few plugins that are pretty helpful. This post is more for me, as a place to keep a list of all the Wordpress plugins I might need to install when setting up a new site. Wordpress ... http://blog.billerickson.net/index.php/2008/02/05/wordpress-plugins/ I'm feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment. Everything was working out great over Christmas break, but now that school has started up I feel like I'm doing a little too much. There's just so many interesting opportunities I want to take advantage of, but I'm learning to restrain myself. ... http://blog.billerickson.net/index.php/2008/01/25/busy-busy-busy/ BIL is an open, self-organizing, and emergent science and technology conference. The best way to describe it is that BIL is to TED what BarCamp is to FooCamp. Find out more on the website: http://bilconference.com How did it get started? Cody and I wanted to go out to Monterey while TED was ... http://blog.billerickson.net/index.php/2008/01/14/announcing-bil/ I have two Windows pc's that run Snapstream's BeyondTV and are connected to my TV's. It works great...when it works. The weak link here isn't Snapstream, their software is amazing; it's Windows. We got a virus or something about a month ago, which had been getting progressively worse. It got to ... http://blog.billerickson.net/index.php/2008/01/05/ongoing-problems-with-windows/ About two months ago I switched from Wordpress to Tumblr. I had seen it as a different blogging platform with some additional features. But after a while I realized that Tumblr can't be a replacement for Wordpress - it's a completely different service. Tumblr works best as an aggregator of ... http://blog.billerickson.net/index.php/2008/01/04/more-changes-to-billericksonnet/ This Thursday we'll be having Amazon come and talk about their Web Services. If you're a developer or interested in building scalable web applications, you don't want to miss this. We're doing it at Mays Business School, Room 182, 7 P.M. on Thursday. Seating is limited to about 70 people so ... http://blog.billerickson.net/index.php/2007/09/10/amazon-at-refresh-bcs/