"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." -- James Howell

It's too easy nowadays to forget about the busy trap in academia. Frankly speaking, a balanced academic life is not a slogan, but all about what we choose to do. Here I jot down some of my casual pieces accumulated over the years. Feel free to ping me if you spot any broken links or have good suggestions.

Some updates also appear on: Twitter, Blogger, and Linkedin

• Educated (Tara Westover)

• What's On in Helsinki
• Helsinki Central Park
• How to be a Helsinki villager around the year
• Restaurants around Helsinki area

 Digital Libraries

• ACM Digital Library
• IEEE Xplore
• Google Scholar

 Conference Calendar and Stats

• Best Paper List
• USENIX Calendar
• IEEE Computer Society
• Networking Conferences Statistics - by Kevin C. Almeroth
• ACM Conference Portfolio

 Paper Reading, Writing and Publishing

• The Task of the Referee - by Alan Jay Smith
• How to Read an Engineering Research Paper - by William G. Griswold
• How NOT to review a paper: The tools and techniques of the adversarial reviewer - by Graham Cormode
• Writing Technical Articles & Common Bugs in Writing & Good Introduction - by Henning Schulzrinne
• How to Increase the Chances Your Paper is Accepted at ACM SIGCOMM - by Craig Partridge
• How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper - by Roy Levin and David D. Redell
• How to Write an Abstract - by Philip Koopman
• Academic Writing @ UT
• Leone's Page @ CMU
• LaTeX Cambridge

 Research Talk

• Talk Hints - by Henning Schulzrinne
• The Short Talk - by Charles Van Loan
• Giving an Academic Talk - by Jonathan Shewchuk
• Giving a Technical Presentation - by Michael Ernst
• Giving Good Talk - by Simon Peyton-Jones

 Career General

• Getting an Academic Job
• Professional Skills for PhD
• Paul Graham Essays
• Technology and Courage by Ivan Sutherland
• You and Your Research + Video from Richard Hamming
  - Master piece, period

 All about Jobs

• The Job Talk - by Jeff Phillips
• Academic Scientists at Work: The Job Talk - by Jeremy M. Boss and Susan H. Eckert
• The Academic Job Search Process
• Interviewing - Henning's collection
• Academic Job Interviews - from Carleton College

 Hacking Advice

• "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years", by Peter Norvig, Research Director Google Inc.
  - a MUST read if you seriously consider this path
• Coding Conventions - by Henning Schulzrinne
• Eric S. Raymond - UNIX hacker
• How to be a Programmer - by Robert L. Read
• Craftsmanship - by Joel Spolsky
• Programming Paradigms - from Stanford

 Video Streaming Tools (free)

• x264 - a free h264/avc encoder
• MSU Video Quality Measurement Tool (Windows only)
• VLC Video Streamer

 Tools and Guide for Linux and Wireless Networking

• Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control
• Traffic Control HOWTO - by Martin A. Brown
• The Linux Documentation Project
• Open Group Specification
• Beej's Guides
• LXR Linux Cross Reference
• GNU C Library
• BlueZ Stack
• Bluetooth Programming - by Albert Huang
• Fundamentals of Wireless Communication - by David Tse and Pramod Viswanath
• WiFi Tools - by Jean Tourrilhes

• Organizing & Travel hints - Henning Schulzrinne
• Zen and the Art of Research Management - John Naughton, Robert W. Taylor
• Ponder This @ IBM Research - try challenging your mind
• Football Strategy - fun to watch, by an algorithm teacher
• Annual Performance Review for Albert Einstein - amazing review, from Peter Norvig
• The Psychology of Cross Country - inspiring on skill and problem solving, from Bill Buxton
• OCW @ MIT
• Coursera
• TopCoder
• Hacker News @ Y-Combinator
• The Busy Trap - the most read on web in 2012 from nytimes
• The best stats you've ever seen - by Hans Rosling
• Why we are happy - by Dan Gilbert
• How can I be happier at work? - TED Ideas
• How to exercise when it's the last thing you want to do - TED Ideas
• A gentle reminder that you are enough - TED
• How to turn off work thoughts during your free time - TED
• Why you think you are right — even if you are wrong - TED
• Heard about Grit? - TED
• Stress in Research
• Jedi vs Professors