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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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Number 9 Number 9 Number 9
14 Sept Sometime in my junior or senior year of college I came across a book about building my own computer and resolved to do it. My tribulations with my Dell computer were enough to convince me that building computers with generic parts was the way to go. Later experience with my Emachine and the…
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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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Starcraft is Over-Rated
Starcraft 2 recently came out so, naturally, I just installed Starcraft for the first time. A few years ago, I decided to atone for that summer my brothers and I had played Warcraft III from an illicit copy by buying the Warcraft III Batlle Chest. It was a pretty awesome deal – for $20 I…
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The Price of Technology
We all know that technology continues to get cheaper and cheaper every year. But this was brought into sharp relief yesterday when I looked up the invoice for Dave’s computer to see what components it contained. I built Dave’s computer in 2006. It was a graduation present from my parents and meant to be Dave’s…
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Otakon 2010
Just like last year, I went to Otakon, but didn’t pay to get in. Perhaps next year. So, like last year, I mostly photographed people under the the awning of the convention center. Unlike last year, I asked lots of people if I could photograph them. It paid off as I was able to get lots…
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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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Happy Birthday Firefox!
I can’t believe Firefox has been around for five years! I remember first being introduced to tabs and it totally changing the way I surf the web. Back then it was a plucky upstart and didn’t even work with many websites that had been coded specifically for Internet Explorer. Now it has around 20% market…
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Tetris: An Introspective Review
Tetris is the first video game I was unable to shut off on command. Players of Sid Meier’s Civilization are familiar with the problem of “one more turn”, similar to the bookworm’s “one more page”. Tetris was my first “one more turn” game. I first played Tetris when I was five or six and received…
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Getting into Geo-Tagging
(I originally wrote most of this on Thursday, 21 May) I can’t explain to you the thrill and excitement I get from geo-tagging my photos. I don’t mean that the thrill is so large as to defy explanation; rather that I can’t articulate what it is about geo-tagging my photos that excites me so much. …
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The Domo Meme
There’s something about this little, brown, cube monster that people love. I first came across Domo when chatting on AIM with my high school friend, Lawrence Kwan. He had it as his buddy icon. I asked him what the brown square with the mouth was and he directed me to a website with an animation. …
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Review: Roku Box
I’ve had the Roku Box for a few months now. It costs $99 and I bought it for one simple reason: my wife and I object to having to use Windows and Internet Explorer to watch Netflix’s Instant Programs. As a secondary reason, we’re not in college anymore and we object to having to watch…
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Why there are over 2 dozen music players
People often groan when they hear of someone making another game of Tetris, Window Manager, or audio program. After all, people ask, “Do we really need another? Why can’t you just contribute to fixing annoying bug X in gTetris/KDE/xmms?” I’ve always been on the side of the argument that said – “So what! They’re doing…