The past three seasons have been quite educational in terms of what one could learn from watching. (I brushed up on my culinary skills watching this.) However, this past episode was more entertainment than educational, and the results were quite predictable from the start. Not what I expected from a Food Network program. But then, stranger things have happened on Iron Chef America as well, such as the creation of the infamous Golden Trout Ice Cream from years ago. (I would serve that to my cats.)

Captain Ed's in Michigan City, IN (US) has a large selection of vinyl and CDs in excellent condition. The store also sells rent-to-own furniture, chrome accessories for automobiles, and a large selection of coffee and candy.

I do check out various online radio stations such as Smooth877.com, I Heart Radio.com (operated by Clear Channel), V103 FM, and even the Last.fm service (the premier site for suggestions for new music). Also, Chitown Smooth Jazz has a section for upcoming artists (called New Releases). Accuradio (operator of Chitown Smooth Jazz) is a good source for new music, and you can create your own custom online station. This service has twelve custom channels specific to the Chicago market, and Accuradio is based in Chicago.

Thanks for the rather awesome suggestion. I have this bookmarked now.

Agreed, and just in time for US Congress to vote on a bill that would effectively shut down the Internet as a venue of free exchange. This bill effects EVERYONE, not just US citizens.

On January 18th, Google, Amazon, Reddit and others plan to shut down their websites for twelve hours on that day to make people aware of the effects of Internet censorship. The vote on this bill comes January 29th. What you will see on that day at Reddit is a list of links on what you can do to oppose this bill.
http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/stopped-they-must-...

Dennis Ritchie was one of the people whose works I have studied. It was through the book "The C Programming Language" where I learned and mastered the C programming language, of which became part of the foundation of my applications and web development skills, along side of Pascal, assembly language, Java, C++, (X)HTML and PHP.

One could argue that Dennis Ritchie was in part responsible for the foundation of the Internet as we knew it back in the day, and as we know it now. Though my first hands on experience with computers was on an Apple II+ (the product of another true innovator who also passed away recently, the late Steve Jobs), my real interest was with UNIX, and hence it makes sense for me to use Linux on my home machines.

My first exposure to UNIX was on a Sun 386i running SunOS 4.0 and the NeWS desktop (this was in the late 1980s). That machine was originally part of a local network, and later became the first web server for my alma mater I have since worked with machines running HP/UX (for a collections system), Xenix (as part of a voice mail system) and Solaris (of which I purchased a second hand copy ten years ago) before venturing into FreeBSD and Linux.

My first experience with Linux was with Red Hat 5.2, and that was on a second hand AcerFrame 500, converted from a server running NetWare 3.x to a Linux workstation.

Today, I use PCLinuxOS, and contribute in many ways to that community.

Hence, I could (and will) say that I owe much of my computer experience to Dennis Ritchie.

Rest in Peace.

When we think of "tech savvy" people, we tend to think of them as all-knowing when it comes to technology. This is not necessarily the case.

One can learn to program in several languages such as Java, C, C++, or Python, yet not know a thing on how an MP3 or an Ogg Vorbis file is created. Anyone can use a tablet such as an iPad or Samsung's Galaxy series tablets, yet not know that Android was built on the Linux kernel. You might be able to install a home entertainment system, yet not know how each component is supposed to work.

Do any of these examples make one "tech savvy"? To some, yes. But this is a limited form of what is "tech savvy". To me, this does not make one "tech savvy".

To me, being tech savvy is more than just knowing how something works, or actually using the products. Being tech savvy also means knowing how the technology was developed. Anyone can use a tablet, media player, or a laptop. To truly understand about these devices, one should learn how these devices came to be.

How many of you know who Grace Hopper was? ...or Donald Knuth? ...or Niklaus Wirth?

These were three contributors to the evolution of computer science.

Grace Hopper was an officer in the US Navy who first coined the term "bug" when a moth was found inside the mainframe (which took up an entire room at the time) that caused the running program to fail. Grace also contributed to the development of the FORTRAN language.

Donald Knuth was a professor of computer science at Stanford University. His contributions were the TeX typesetting system for publication, the Web literate programming language, Tangle to produce documentation from source code, the MIX machine for teaching of assembly language (the latter evolved to MMIX as the next generation).

Niklaus Wirth was responsible for the Pascal and Modula 2 programming languages, meant to teach good programming practices and structured programming.

...and then there were others, well before Steve Jobs or Bill Gates who contributed to computer science.

Ken Thompson wrote the first UNIX system back in 1969. Dennis Ritchie wrote the first C compiler and collaborated on UNIX back in 1970.

UNIX is important here as Linux, Mac OS-X (yes today's Macintosh systems), FreeBSD (on which the current Mac OS-X was built), Android, WebOS, Solaris, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Plan 9 (The current project out of Bell Labs) were all derived from UNIX in one way or another.

One who has this knowledge could be called a "Digital Native" (per a previous comment), but then would you travel to another country or province/state without knowing at least some knowledge, or being willing to learn about that place?

This is my definition of "tech savvy".

This is more proof that profits and ethics don't mix.

As long as there is money to be made from personal information, this will continue to be an issue.

When it comes to the issue of what information I give out, I give it out on a need-to-know basis.

For payment information, I give out the necessary information only to companies that have proven themselves worthy of my trust.

Personal information has become a commodity, and the Internet in general has made this commodity easier to buy and sell. Facebook makes sharing of personal information easier for marketers to access detailed information on people simply by granting access to profiles already established without having to create separate mailing lists.

If you are on Facebook, there are some things you can do to control what information you supply. The first, is obviously to supply as little information as possible. The second is to be discreet as to whom you allow your profile to be accessed. Third, clean up your profile at least once a week (I do this almost daily), removing irrelevant, unnecessary, and potentially damaging information.

When it comes to branding, I give out only relevant and supporting information.

As for the image, I typically "google" myself to see what image I have been projecting.

Here is a challenge for you. Without going to Facebook, try to figure out my profile over the past 15 years.

I do record directly from cassette and vinyl using Audacity, and encoding in Ogg Vorbis, FLAC or MP3. The resulting files are either stored directly to my laptop, or sent to my Sansa Fuze.

Among the cassettes I have recorded is Herbie Hancock's 1978 release "Sunlight", of which the tracks "I Thought It Was You" and "Come Running To Me" popularized the use of the vocoder.