There's a right way, a wrong way, and...
This novel would appear to be a fixup of two short stories previously published. The sections covering those short stories are the best parts, but the beginning drags a bit in actually getting us there. The pacing is weird (I suspect it s due to the fixup) with long sections which are flashbacks or quotes and Continue reading A Talent for War (MacDevitt, 1989)
One of the moments I remember well from the early aughts was a conversation I had with my dad about an article he d written for the popular astronomy publication Sky Telescope. The conversation I remember was about the reader response to his article: environmentalists up in arms about the deforestation of a Connecticut mountainside Continue reading A Cutting Commentary of one s own
Where Hartford County intrudes into Litchfield County, that s where I m from. Just into the intrusion actually. Like, if we gave it to New Hartford as part of a grand rectification to repatriate the Southwick Jog, it s difficult to say if we d be part of the deal or not without squinting. We lived high on a Continue reading The Face Of Connecticut (Bell, 1985)
Dot Con was good but I felt it was lacking a lot of color, what it was like to experience the the bubble from the inside. Burn Rate has it in spades. This is the story of a single CEO in the midst of the dot com boom running around and trying to secure enough Continue reading Burn Rate (Wolff, 1998)
This post marks ten years since I started this blog. Kinda wild. It s been intermittent for most of those years and I d say about half of the material is just notes I took because (back in the day) the easiest way to find a how-to later was to google it even if you were finding Continue reading May / June 26 Web Links
The first chapter contains some factual errors which, while superficial, hurt the credibility of the text. Later, we see Paul Allen s name mangled. The author was a New Yorker writer, but the New Yorker s famous fact checkers didn t get their hands on this one. This didn t diminish my enjoyment too much however; I was looking Continue reading dot.con (Cassidy, 2002)
This book seems largely constructed out of interviews rather than following people doing field work around. This is understandable to some extent, we can t expect the author to fly to mars. I really like the summary of Mars geology here, a lot more color than Wikipedia and also a better sense of what s settled and Continue reading Supervolcanoes (Andrews, 2021, audio)
Like the story of a plane crash or bridge collapse you know what s going to happen. Gravity is going to win in the end, and so it is with Enron. A company that tried to defy the laws of thermodynamics and conjure money from thin air with a sort of accounting perpetual motion machine. It s Continue reading The Smartest Guys in the Room (2003)
booksalefinder.com Since 1994 sort of says it all? This old school HTML Gem (think Craigslist) lists book sales. Book sales are an important resource if you like to read and also don t like buying books at sticker price. You can often find old stuff you never would have seen shelved, as long as you re willing Continue reading March / April 26 Web Links
Before people could ask a chatbot their programming questions, they asked living breathing humans. If you re stuck setting up Linux or want to talk to someone about a new programming language you re learning, chat applications still exist. Discord is the obvious choice for a lot of projects and offers plenty of features. However owing to Continue reading Finally, Mobile IRC