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I’ve been spending a lot of time at the Connecticut State Library recently. If you are a resident you can get a state library card for free and this entitles you to access their databases at no charge. Two databases that are especially neat are the Oxford English Dictionary online and Safari Bookshelf. OED Online normally costs $295 a year and is the most comprehensive source of information on the English language. Safari Bookshelf has a subset of about 78 titles from O’Reilly Media. If you were looking for some books on programming, blogging, or twittering its the place to go!

If you have not yet done so you should check out the Planet Money reports on job creation. There is an episode of This American Life and an issue of WIRED magazine. What I found interesting were the graphics that noted Hartford as an epicenter of jobs for the aerospace, automotive, communications, and electrical equipment industries.

I finished finals yesterday and so my first summer project (besides finding an internship) is learning how to process and visualize raw data using tools on my computer. I bought the O’Reilly Data Bootcamp video from their Strata Conference and hope to learn some new things with it over the next day or two. The first pitfall I encountered was setting up my Macbook Pro with the proper tools. The bootcamp requirements are here and they include use of Python. The version that comes pre-installed did not appear to function well so I had to download the latest one from Python.org. I also had to install XCode (included on the Mac OS X install CD) before I could get all the modules installed. I plan on doing the course tomorrow and will post a review and results.

Recently I’ve been having a back and fourth conversation with Zachary Janowski on twitter about unpaid internships. It was spurred from my comment on a tweet by Daniel Schwartz announcing the sixth circuit tossed out the Department of Labor’s internship test. 140 characters is cramping my style so I am expanding my thoughts in this blog post.