Raymond Johnson @ downclimb.com

I think my main modus operandi is to interact with as much information as possible. I read for school, keep track of a couple hundred news feeds in Google Reader, watch documenaries, and follow really smart people on social networks who share good things. It's a full-time job, and I love it. Now that the semester is over, I can try to stay more up-to-date with a growing number of podcasts I follow. Being a PhD student is a very immersive experience, but podcasts are one way I keep myself stretched in more than just one direction. Here's a list of what I watch or listen to on a regular basis: TWiT.tv : I keep up with a ton of technology news and debate by following Leo Laporte and others on his podcasting network. Here are the podcasts I prefer to watch: This Week in Tech  (This is roughly the tech equivalent of "Meet the Press," but far, far less formal) Tech News Today  (Today's their 500th show, and I'm sure I've never missed one) Security Now  (St...

And why Google+ won't be replacing Twitter or Facebook for most of us anytime soon "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." -- Eleanor Roosevelt I know too much already has been written about Google+ and its place in the world of social networking, but I've recently developed a new perspective which might help some of you who are trying to decide how and when to use Google+ versus Twitter or Facebook. Eleanor might have said "small minds discuss people," but there's more than one way to discuss people and none of us are consistently small-minded. People are important, and the people who are most important to us are those with which we have mutual friendships or family relationships. This is why Facebook is best at people : it enforces (if we ignore fan pages) a symmetric follower model, ensuring that we are connected to people who want to also be connected to us. Those connections, often with people wh...

I'm pretty thorough about backing up my data. Here's my typical routine: Any school-related files are in Dropbox, so they're available everywhere and backed up. A rsync script cron job makes a new "snapshot" of all my data to an internal 2TB drive inside my computer. The script runs every 8 hours and keeps the 3 most recent snapshots. The same rsync script run manually copies to an external, encrypted 2TB drive that I take to my office. So that's three copies of data in two different physical locations. Good strategy, right? But here's where things go wrong: Remove original boot drive and replace with SSD and fresh Ubuntu installation. Copy old files into /home on new drive. (Now I have 4 copies of data!) Instead of copying everything, directories are moved one-by-one to avoid importing cruft and unnecessary hidden files. Set up rsync script cron job again. (In 24 hours, all the old snapshots are gone. Now I'm down to 3 copies of data again.) ...

When your engineers have 20% of their time to use on projects of their choosing, you get a lot of interesting product ideas. If nothing else, Google is amazingly unshy about pushing these products and services to their users, even if some start out somewhat incomplete and poorly integrated. Enter Google's newest offering, Google Buzz. Unlike some previous Google attempts at social media, this one is going to work in a big way. First, Google integrated Buzz right into Gmail, the reason most of us have Google accounts in the first place. There are plenty of seats at the Google Labs table, but not many projects get to sit at the front with Gmail. Second, your contact list pre-establishes a social network. Third, if you use Google Profile, you already had established information about yourself and the content you create. Fourth, if you create content with Blogger or Reader, your Buzz account is pre-primed with content. Who else could have done this? Nobody. (Even though Buzz is more ...