Mark Watson's opinions on Java, Ruby, Lisp, AI, and the Semantic Web

For both personal growth (and fun!) and to stay current as a consultant I find myself spending about 10 to 12 hours a week in general learning activities. I addition to good books, ACM Portal papers, etc., one of the most enjoyable sources of new and/or interesting ideas are the Google Video Lectures. If you have not already done so, install the Google video player; higher resolution viewing than in-browser viewing that makes it easier to read view-graphs and live demos. On OS X, the video player stores downloads in ~/Movies where I keep a text file of notes on what I found most useful/interesting in the videos, and approximate time locations.