I was happy  to be interviewed for Fedora Magazine about How [I] Fedora and I mentioned that there was a Fedora book that led me to pick Fedora. ( I also mentioned that on this blog here) Recently I’ve been cleaning up my bookshelves as I have run out of space for physical books. While I’ve mostly gone digital, Goodread’s Advanced Reading Copies are currently only distributed as physical books and sometimes it’s nice to have printed deluxe copies of comics. I decided it was probably time to get rid of this incredibly heavy book (that’s moved 3 times with me), but before doing so I’d document some of the contents for historical purposes.  What follows are some of the pages I had bookmarked or highlighted.

I can’t believe in 2006 I was excited about the new possibilities of an nVidia card with 128 MB of RAM. Today we’re talking about 4GB+ of DDR5!

More snow? Ugh!

Some folks (especially Americans) seem to think that their AR-15s are a guarantor that they can resist tyranny. But guns are an 18th century response to 18th century threats to democracy. Capital doesn’t need to point a gun at you to remove your democratic rights: it just needs more cameras, more cops, and a legal system that is fair and just and bankrupts you if you are ever charged with public disorder and don’t plead guilty.

[caption id="" align=“alignleft” width=“180”] Photo by Chris247[/caption]

Happy Lunar New Year! Happy Year of the Goat! Hopefully snow doesn’t mess up your festivities. You can use my Vietnamese Zodiac program to find out what animal you are!

Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James K. Morrow

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

That is definitely not what I thought it was going to be. I was sure that somehow this actor would be transformed into a monster.

What we got instead was a short, witty, and fun book that posited an alternate World War 2 strategy to win the war - (view spoiler)[ create Godzilla (hide spoiler)]. The book’s main character is great, especially when trading verbal barbs with an anti-semetic FBI agent.

There’s a lot that’s gotten to feel old with my Acer Aspire One. I hate the pitifully low screen resolution and it doesn’t even have enough oomph to run KDE netbook. But one thing I DO like about it - it has lots of USB ports. I hear many of the newer computers are aping apple and reducing ports.

So, this paper in Nature reveals that sex is much more complex than just having XX or XY. I think an awesome followup would see if trans and/or gay/lesbian people had more of these chimeric conditions. Although, everything has potential for evil, I think this would be super helpful to parents of kids who were going to end up trans to educate themselves in order to be more supportive.

Listening to Jim Gaffigan talking about raising 5 kids in a NYC apartment and suddenly found myself thinking - I could have 5 kids! I have a whole house!

Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In my Homeland review, I mentioned that many of Doctorow’s novels post-Eastern Standard Tribe are depressing reads; especially Little Brother, Homeland, and For the Win. Since he’s trying to spur people to action by making them realize how the world works, they can be pretty dark. Thankfully, while Pirate Cinema did have some moments of depression, there was some hope. While Homeland describes the world as it is - the dirty tactics used to arrest protestors and keep us from expressing ourselves as outlined in our constitution/Bill of Rights - Pirate Cinema describes the world as it could be. So it’s possible that, with some work, we can prevent Trent’s world from coming about.