Archive for January, 2006

Just finished Charles Sheffield’s Cold as Ice. Really, really, really good modern hard science fiction – highly recommended. In a similar vein, I finished Planets of Adventure – old, almost antique science fiction by Murray Lienster. Definitely a little long in the tooth here and there, but the stories are pure gold. Can’t find...
Read more »

Was interesting to google my name and see a link to this page on egoSurf just 5-6 items down. Looks like egoSurf is making all past searches part of their website content, probably in static spider-able pages. Very, very smart. Now amazingly, incredibly, their site’s content from a search engine’s point of view is...
Read more »

Note: This is not a review; this is an almost stream-of-consciousness pouring out of emotion that I wrote immediately after reading Night. . . . . . . I just finished reading Night, by Elie Wiesel. It was, as Goethe says, like an axe to a frozen lake. Not that I’ve never read about...
Read more »

I am getting a little envious. How can this guy be so good – virtually every single one of his posts is gold. Here’s a piece of a recent one: Judge others by their intentions and yourself by your results. If you want to be at peace with the world, here’s what you should...
Read more »

The DEA and US Customs found a tunnel between Mexico and the US on Wednesday night. Thursday morning, it’s on the news. Umm … not smart. Not smart at all. Watch the tunnel. See who comes through it. Follow them. Contact Mexican police and do the same on the south side. Wrap up a...
Read more »

OK, everyone knows: Google is selling out. China is big, China is profitable, China wants control over communication and transmission of ideas. Google is big. Google is profitable. Google, whose original purpose was to enable easy access to all the world’s information, is helping China censor communication and transmission of ideas. And the rather...
Read more »

I’m sort of in the market for a design tool that will let me have some fun with home design and architecture, and there are two tools that appear interesting right now. One is Microspot Interiors. Looks very cool – you see it in action via a demo movie. A bit pricy, perhaps, at...
Read more »

My wife Teresa saw this on a website yesterday: Nice!
Read more »

So it wasn’t a stupid question after all. So many of us have wanted to go with a digital SLR camera for better quality on fast-action shots, but hated to give up the live LCD preview that we’ve gotten used to. Now we won’t have to ask why digital SLRs can’t do that anymore....
Read more »

I’m building another calendar and wanted something annoying out of a picture of my daughter Gabrielle. Here’s what 30 minutes of photoshopping bought me: Not too shabby, although far from professional. As is usually the case, poor composition is the problem; I should never have taken the shot with that buoy in the background....
Read more »

I recently posted a tribute to Henk Berends, the retiring chairman of our company. Today I actually delivered the speech, after making some changes, and I’m really, really, really relieved to say it went over extremely well. The difficult thing about this particular speech is that I wanted to imitate his fairly inimitable speaking...
Read more »

I just found out via drupal.org that there’s an open source content management system summit in Vancouver, BC, February 9-10. Very cool! They’ll be talking about WordPress and Drupal (see my recent article comparing them on a very shallow level) among other things. And it looks like Rasmus Lerdorf is going to be there....
Read more »

I’m looking for a way to manage several blogs at once, so I’ve been investigating Drupal just a little. I wouldn’t need to manage the blogs within Drupal, although that could be done, but I would like to aggregate their posts on one page, which would then become my home online. Since my web...
Read more »

We had an election today and nobody came. Sorry, I just wanted to use that line for no particular reason. That’s what you can do when you have your own blog. Actually, what happened, of course, is that we elected a lame-duck minority Conservative government that will have to battle every step of the...
Read more »

Vancouver Web 2.0 forum has started a weekly blogger interview series … all featuring bloggers from Vancouver, of course. This week, they’re featuring Jeffery Simpson, who writes at a variety of personal and multi-author blogs. Jeffery needs a new pic for his site and should apparently never venture into another elevator ever again. (Well,...
Read more »