Monday, June 12, 2006

Imba in the outdoors


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Originally uploaded by rvelez127.


Cherith, Dave, and I went out for a ride in the Kinnelon outback. Lots of deer, turkey and a tree stump that looked like a bear:). Afterwards we stopped by Villa Bosefski and hung out with the twins.

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

sydney harbor bridge


sydney harbor bridge
Originally uploaded by rvelez127.
I had a work trip to Sydney, Australia last week. A four day trip with 40 odd hours of flights. The flights weren't all that bad and I got to do a lot of reading and work on my laptop. I definitely recommend getting one of the power converters for the plane seats, especially for the 14 hour leg of the flight from la to sydney. On saturday morning we got to do the Sydney Harbor Bridget climb which was a ton of fun and a great way to learn all about the city.

Monday, May 15, 2006

wikipedia and authenticity

Wikipedia continues to amaze me, especially the debate around the 'authenticity' of it's content. I've aggregated a series of articles that I've found that discuss the topic.

This wired article is an interesting description of wikipedia contributors and how they contribute and 'own' content areas. Wikipedia'’s premise is that a crowd of interested and diverse people will produce better content than a small group of experts. Some interesting quotes from the article include

"“Wikipedia offers 500,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica's 80,000 and Encarta's 4,500 - fashioned by more than 16,000 contributors."

After reading those statistics people wonder wikipedia handles slander or sloppy content and this quote tries to answer that.

"When MIT's Fernanda Vargas and IBM's Martin Wattenberg and Kushal Dave studied Wikipedia, they found that cases of mass deletions, a common form of vandalism, were corrected in a median time of 2.8 minutes. When an obscenity accompanied the mass deletion, the median time dropped to 1.7 minutes."

Of course, a series of folks have already aggregated this information and created a topic page on wikipedia covering the wikipedia peer review and authenticity topic.This wikipedia page provides links to the nature magazine article as well as lots of other third party peer reviews of wikipedia and Britannica.

This is the original article that compares Wikipedia and Britannica, followed by Nature responded and on and on:). The BBC also published a series of articles on the topic.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Biiig turkey


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Originally uploaded by rvelez127.
I guess the turkey's hang out in the car port when we aren't around. It was rainy out and the turkey's were running all over the place last weekend. We bumped into a lot of turkey's mountain biking on Saturday too. When Imba lazily ran after one of them it flew away. Pretty neat to see such a large bird fly.

Great moose sitings weekend


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Originally uploaded by rvelez127.
Cherith, Imba, and I finally got to see lots of moose this weekend. About 5 of them both night time and day. Here's a big moose and a baby moose picture we took from the car. Imba barked a little, but that didn't seem to bother the big moose. He or she actually walked closer to the car as the dog started barking. Not sure how to tell the difference, but since it looked like a mama moose and a baby moose I think it was a she:). Now I need to work on my photography skills:). Check out lots of moose photos.

Monday, March 27, 2006

work

Well, I've been posting more to my work blog than my personal blog.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

First post

I thought I would start practicing blogging on my own before I ventured into some work blogging. lifeworkskimtb pretty much sums up my thoughts on a daily basis. Other than loved ones of course.