I thought I’d take a moment and explain my picks for the Blogroll section of this blog. These are some of the blogs that I regularly read. They appear in alphabetic order in the list.
Bad Astronomy – Phil Plait is my hero. I love astronomy and I can think of no one better suited to explain the topic than the Bad Astronomer himself. He’s a doctorate decorated real astronomer doing real science and he’s a staunch advocate for reality. I love him. If anyone can channel the spirit of Carl Sagan – it’s Phil. Check out his weekly video installments Q and BA where he answers viewers questions about astronomy. He has a real presence and his friendly face loves the web camera.
Creating Passionate Users – This blog is written by the author of those fun and easy to learn from Head First books from O’reilly Press. The blog focuses on the users and how to please them. A rarity in software related blogs. Kathy Sierra makes very thoughtful and artistic posts about all manner of user related topics. Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.
Fiction – I ran across Crawford Killian’s blog by accident and have hung around for a while now, reading and learning from the author of Writing For The Web 3.0. He also writes and comments about Sci-Fi, a topic near and dear to my writer’s heart.
Life Is Better – This is the blog of programmer and now Microsoft employee, John Lam. John is best known as the talented Ruby developer who created the RubyCLR. I’m hoping John can make some good changes inside the fortress so that Ruby works better on Windows. In an alternate reality, I see Microsoft becoming a good corporate citizen and porting the Windows desktop to a *nix kernel similar to how Apple did it with OSX. I can dream can’t I?
The {Buckblogs: here} – If you know Ruby syntax, you know that this blog is about Ruby in some way. Actually, it’s written by one of the inside guys at 37Signals, the folks who brought us Ruby on Rails. Jamis is a fellow Boise denizen and he regularly attends our local Ruby User Group, which is how I met him. A nicer and more intelligent programmer you will be hard pressed to find. His blog is chocked full of incredibly useful and easy to understand nuggets of RoR info.
Whatever – This is the blog of author John Scalzi. John is a professional writer, something that I can only dream about being. But his blog is a daily journal of what its like to be a working writer and a novelist. Very interesting for fellow writers. I have yet to read any of his novels – I suspect he has not read mine either, but I do intend to read Old Man’s War soon.
WWdN: In Exile – Huh? That’s Wil Wheaten Dot Net In Exile. In the rare case you are not a Trekie, Wil was the kid on the bridge of the Enterprise during the first few years of Star Trek The Next Generation. But to me and I suspect to many of his loyal readers, he’s Just a Geek. Wil and I have very similar interests and I love reading his observations about life and tech.
So there you have it, the blogroll as it stands now. It will change, I’m sure as my interests change and as I find new blogs to read.