What I’m reading
Geek stuff: A while back I posted about a problem with Nautilus’ handling of audio CD copies. In today’s news, that looks to be fixed in the upcoming GNOME release, which should by all rights make it easily into Fedora 8. More geek stuff: Today also saw the arrival of …
OK, so the trip from Dulles to San Diego was more of a leg-cramping, neck-cricking journey, courtesy of United. But did have the following observations. An older, married couple were sitting a few rows up from me on the plane. When the wife (center seat) returned from the rear lavatory, …
I had intended to write a post this week about the pathetic fumblings of Congress this year — only in session for 103 days, even fewer than the 110 of Truman’s “Do-Nothing” 80th Congress — or the exceptional performance of Red Hat on the CIO Insight 2006 Vendor Value study, …
Mark Danielewski’s first novel House of Leaves is largely an empty shell — albeit cleverly ornamented with many onion-layers of allegory, wordplay, text ciphers, typographic ingenuity, Wallace-esque footnotes, postmodernist fourth-wall conceits, and a suffocating sense of dread — which asks reader to imprint their own paranoid musings and fantasies to …
Wait Tom, I’d like to make a list including a few more of the more heinous crimes against humanity perpetrated in the name of strengthening a dead writer’s estate: After the Ring: Stories in Honor of J. R. R. Tolkein Total Recall Extensions to “Dune” by Brian Herbert and Kevin …
No rambling, poorly-connected rambling lately, so here goes. Over the last couple of months, I have been reading The Chronicles of Narnia to my daughter, who is a very precocious girl of almost five. I have been reading them to her not in the chronological order of the stories themselves, …
My hell week at work ended on Thursday night, but I spent pretty much the whole day Friday with a couple of my friends who were attending. We went sightseeing down the Civil War Trails, visiting the battlefields of Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Courthouse, with a side trip to downtown …
Chris sent me a link to Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, a marginally science-fiction dystopian novel that predates both 1984 and Brave New World. I haven’t read it, but it looks fascinating, especially considering that Zamyatin’s work was filtered through his experience of Communism’s rise in his own land.