Friday Varia and Quick Hits

Lots of little things on a sunny but windy Friday before a holiday weekend.

• An interesting, if a bit peculiar article, on the Landscape of Digital Humanities (via Sebastian Heath who offers some technical notes)
• An interesting and FREE book about the design aspects of Obama's Presidential campaign in 2008.
• This is a supercool customizing video based on a good Arcade Fire song.  The power of the intertubes!
• Have you checked out this week's Teaching Thursday (an advertisement for myself!)?  You absolutely MUST follow us on Twitter.  Do it!
• My wife's awesome new content-driven marketing site "Grad Stories" is now up.
• The tech blog Techcrunch claims that 31% of its traffic yesterday was from people using Google's Chrome browser.  For the past month at this blog, Chrome only represents 10% of my traffic.  Firefox produces 37%, IE runs 35% of my visitors, and Safari runs about 12%, Chrome comes in at 4th, with Opera holding strong at just under 4%.  I might need to do a meta data Monday to contextualize these result.
• The blog for the Kent-Berlin Ostia Excavations is one of my favorites.  Their recent post on using remote controlled helicopters to photograph the site from the air should have Scott Moore reaching for the nearest tech grant application especially in light of our less than successful Kite-o-blimp experiment this summer.
• This Esquire article from 1971 on the "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" is really great (via kottke.org).  The language of using blue boxes to hack the phone system reminds me of William Gibson's descriptions of the "jacking in" to his imagined internet.
• If you're a reader in South Florida, you should be excited for the 3rd Annual Surf and Song Festival in Fort Myers.  You can even follow them on Twitter.
• I'm totally bummed that Mohammed Amir, the great young Pakistani bowler, has been caught up in the recent spot fixing scandal and now struck from the ICC awards list.  This is a cat from Taliban controlled areas of Pakistan who was a thing of beauty to watch bowl (even as he was dismantling Australia and being cocky about it!).  I hope that his career and reputation survive.
• What I'm reading: Mark Taylor, Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming out Colleges and Universities (Knopf 2010).
• What I'm listening to: Dinosaur Jr., You're Living All Over Me and Dinosaur.