Due to the tremendous response we've gotten, we've decided to give The Rugged Elegance Inspiration Network site room to grow by moving it to a new, improved location:

http://www.ruggedelegantliving.com

Please re-set your bookmarks as all new posts will occur on the new site.

As part of the move we are also transitioning to a Moveable Type content management system, which will allow us to add more editors while providing better search and categorization capabilities.

Thank you your continued support. Growth is good.

-Tim
1:41:54 PM    

San Francisco Chroncicle:

Coming to you soon from the Pentagon: the diary to end all diaries -- a multimedia, digital record of everywhere you go and everything you see, hear, read, say and touch.

Known as LifeLog, the project has been put out for contractor bids by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the agency that helped build the Internet and that is now developing the next generation of anti-terrorism tools.

Sounds like the ultimate weblog -- in a 1984 kind of way.

-Tim

5:17:45 PM    

Mercury News:

The Bay Area's largest cable TV provider will begin offering high-definition programming to 800,000 subscribers Tuesday, in one of the nation's largest rollouts of the emerging television format.

... Nearly all the region's 1.6 million Comcast subscribers will receive high-definition programming by the end of next year, the cable operator said, as it completes equipment upgrades.

4:20:59 PM    

Technology Review:

Cheap computer power and high-tech observation systems mean precise forecasts, offering consumers personalized reports and saving weather-sensitive businesses millions

Quite an advance from the days when 24-hour weather forecast models took more than 24 hours to run on the supercomputers of that time!

-Tim
3:34:20 PM    

The New York Times:

MADELINE NELSON of Steubenville, Ohio, has been in the third grade since last fall but has met her teacher only a few times. She has plenty of schoolwork to do, including book reports and her favorite, art projects.

She gets her assignments online through the Ohio Virtual Academy, which she attends along with her sister Therese, 7, and brother Gabriel, 5, from the dining room table at home.

If Madeline, 9, were a traditional home-schooled student, her mother, Gretchen, would be instructing her (her father, Mark, works full time outside the home). But even though Mrs. Nelson believes home schooling is best for her children, she does not feel capable of teaching them.

For those friends who have chosen to homeschool their children, I hope you find this article inspiring.

-Jen

Keywords: Computers and the Internet, Teachers and School Employees, Children and Youth, Equal Educational Opportunities
11:26:36 AM    

New York Times:

Apple Computer seems to have the future of online music in its hands for the moment. Its new service, iTunes Music Store, has been the first real success story in the long effort to sell music over the Internet. In just its first month of operation the service, by the company's estimate, has sold three million songs online, at 99 cents each. This is an impressive figure considering the limited access that music fans now have to the service.

7:43:55 PM    

BBC NEWS:

The cost of downloading songs from the internet has been cut in the first round of a price war. Listen.com, which provides internet radio broadcasts for $9.95 a month, is slashing the price for burning music onto CDs from 99 cents to 79 cents. This comes just a month after Apple Computers launched its online iTunes music store, which allowing Mac users to download songs for 99 cents with no monthly subscription fee. The Apple service has been far more popular than expected, with two million songs downloaded in its first 16 days.

This is obviously good for all of us who are consumers.

-Tim
3:58:18 PM    

New York Times

Like most mobile audio players, the Kenwood KTC-H2A1 Here2Anywhere is small enough to carry in one hand. But the Here2Anywhere is a satellite radio tuner that works only when it is resting in a somewhat less portable docking station. When it is plugged in, the Here2Anywhere becomes a broadcast node for the Sirius satellite radio service, which for $13 a month gives subscribers access to 100 streaming stations.

9:53:23 PM    

New York Times:

Photo blogs are the colorful offspring of blogs, or Web logs, written diaries posted and updated regularly on the Internet. For a half-dozen years people have been posting text blogs to rant and to ponder the events of the day and the dust beneath their feet. Then, sometime in 2000, people started posting photographs to go with the text. The photo blog was born. Now photo blogs often are posted with no text at all. And there are thousands of them.

9:51:57 PM    

Mercury News:

The personal computer is overtaking the television, stereo and other home entertainment devices, now that digital content -- MP3 music tracks, digital photos and digital video -- has become mainstream, according to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive for Microsoft.

10:49:15 PM    

MarsToday.com

Have you ever wondered what you would see if you were on Mars looking at the Earth through a small telescope? Now you can find out, thanks to a unique view of our world recently captured by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft currently orbiting the Red Planet.

7:20:28 PM