Posted in Uncategorized on March 30, 2008 | 11 Comments »
Yesterday I discovered Playa Cofi Jukebox, an Internet radio station that lets listeners time travel back to any year from 1950-1982 to hear a rotation of the top 100 songs from that year. I immediately jumped to 1965 and was transported to my all-time favorite musical year. Go look at that link and see if [...]
Posted in Writing on March 28, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Back in the eighth grade my English teacher loved all us brats and did her best to teach grammar. She even saw the wisdom of forcing us wildcats to diagram sentences - a concept so useless and inane I thought at the time, that I could never imagined wanting to know or need. Forty-five years [...]
Posted in Science Fiction on March 25, 2008 | 6 Comments »
I have already worked out a way to define the Classics of Science Fiction by collecting lists from science fiction fans and critics, but this morning I got to wondering which science fiction books, if any, are recognized as classics by people who normally do not read science fiction. Over the years I’ve encountered a [...]
Posted in Going Paperless, Kindle, Magazines on March 24, 2008 | 5 Comments »
I’m learning a lot about myself through this simple experiment of trying to go paperless. I buy probably 100 times as many words as I actually read - and that guess might even need to go as high as a 1,000 times. After buying my Kindle I decided to only purchase Kindle reading in a [...]
Posted in Robots, Science Fiction on March 20, 2008 | No Comments »
Of all the great ideas of science fiction our society seems to be working the fastest towards making stories about robots come true. How soon will it be before we have a Commander Data? We are still in the early stages of engineering a SF robot but yesterday I saw a film that made me [...]
Posted in Audio Books, DRM on March 19, 2008 | 1 Comment »
DRM (digital rights management also called copy protection) has been a big topic among music fans for years. It’s the software that tries to keep users from illegally copying songs from iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster and other download services. The same technology is used for audio books that come from download sites like Audible.com, iTunes and [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on March 16, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Although I’m a lifelong atheist, I love movies about angels. Last night I saw a humdinger of an angel movie, Angel-A, a French film by Luc Besson, the guy who gave us The Fifth Element, The Messenger and Le Femme Nikita. Angel-A is a stunningly beautiful black and white film set in Paris. The cinematography [...]
Posted in Battle of the Sexes, Men and Women, Science Fiction on March 16, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Awhile back I wrote “What is Your Science Fiction Fantasy?” and I had a couple long and well thought out replies from my blogger friend Carl V of Stainless Steel Droppings that make me want to return to this subject. I’ve been a life-long science fiction fan, and my adolescence was filled with fantasies of [...]
Posted in Internet, Memory on March 12, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Let me start out by saying I don’t want this essay to be doom and gloom. Also let me just remind you about the Yin and Yang nature of the world. Creation also means something gets destroyed. Old folks are always crying about how things aren’t the way they were when they were growing up [...]
Posted in Audio Books, Going Paperless, Kindle on March 11, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I’m starting to learn just what I’ve got myself into since I had the bright idea of Going Paperless. After I wrote that post I decided I’d focus on giving up newspapers and magazines and justified that the paper in books is different because books are meant to last and not be disposable. Going cold [...]
