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Doctorow Review: Eastern Standard Tribe & A Place So Foreign and Eight More
On my trip to the Grand Canyon I read Cory Doctorow’s second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. The book begins in media res with the main character informing us that he’s in an insane asylum and that he is deciding whether to give himself a lobotomy with a pencil. We also quickly learn he believes himself…
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Review: Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Today I just finished Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It’s the first epub book I’ve ever read and the first ebook I’ve read that I hadn’t previously read as a physical book. I’d been wanting to read the book for a long time, but the idea of sitting at my desk…
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Rethinking Ebooks
Until now I’ve been quite against ebooks. Back when I was in college I had an iPaq and I downloaded the Microsoft reader to it. I bought about 3 – 5 books for it and, at first, I thought it was great. It would allow you to annotate the book and highlight passages. And it…
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Stephenson Post CyberPunk
I read somewhere, maybe even Wikipedia, that the reason Bud dies so early in the The Diamond Age is that his character represents a stereotypical cyber-punk character and Stephenson is signaling that cyber-punk is over – this work of fiction is going beyond that. Stephenson then does a 90 degree turn genre-wise and does a…
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Another Crack at the Same Idea
Last weekend Danielle and I went to Borders so Danielle could check out the Buffy graphic novels and I could pick up Watchmen. While in the graphic novel section I started looking around to see what new books were out in this space and I came across Beyond Wonderland and Return to Wonderland, two comics…
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New Revenue Models
While listening to The Command Line Podcast a few weeks ago, they started talking about how digital distribution allows for innovations in publishing. I don’t remember what they mentioned exactly, but the prior link should take you to the show notes. The talk started a series of synapses firing in my grey matter culminating in…
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Review: The Discworld Series
Last week I finished the Discworld Series. I started with a few books early in 2008. From the first book, The Color of Magic, I fell in love with the series. Although I have found British television and movies to be hit or miss, I have loved all of the geek genre British books. So…
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Trudging through Lord of the Rings Part 4
I am now done with the entire story of the hobbits. Overall, I have enjoyed the books more than the movie. Here’s what I have to say about The Return of the King: I found the characters in the book seem a lot more hopeless than in the movie. I mean, the movie does a…
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Trudging through the Lord of the Rings Part 3
I finished up The Two Towers a week or so ago and I have to say that “Trudging” no longer describes my experience (for the most part). While I preferred the first movie to the first book, I mostly feel exactly the opposite about the second book/movie. The only annoying thing was that we didn’t…
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Trudging Through Lord of the Rings Part 2
A few days ago I finished The Fellowship of the Rings. Things picked up in the second half of the book and they accelerated in the last quarter. I’m enjoying The Lord of the Rings a lot more now that Tolkien has gotten Tom Bombadil out of his system. In the Wikipedia article, even Tolkien…
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Trudging Through Lord of the Rings
I’ve read time and again that the Lord of the Rings Trilogy (which is actually not a trilogy, but one massive book published in 3 parts) has all kinds of allegorical content and contains a lot of stuff Peter Jackson had to leave out of the movies. Well, they’re certainly right about Mr Jackson leaving…
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Spiderman Predicts the future
It’s interesting how Science Fiction often predicts future technologies and trends. For example, this morning on CNN they were talking about a research group that is trying to switch on the gene in humans that would cause limbs to regrow. Apparently they haven’t seen what happens when you do that (I say tongue-in-cheek). Peter Parker’s…
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Children’s Book to teach them about DRM
Paradigms are a battle of the mind that take place when we prepare our children with certain expectations about the world. Don’t let them grow up thinking there’s something right about Digital Restrictions Management! Have them read The Pig and the Box and let them learn about why software and culture need to be libre.…
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My first published book of photography!
Today I received my copy of the photography book I’ve published, Eric Mesa’s Top 40 flickr Images. It’s a great feeling to finally have the book published after having worked on it since April. There were a few false starts with the publishing process as I figured out how to make sure my final PDF…