Year: 2004
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Unplugged
I think I’ll be unplugged a few days of the next week. Wish me luck! And Merry Christmas.
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Book: Xenocide
What comes around, goes around. I introduced Vin to the Orson Scott Card bolt of lightning known as Ender’s Game, and I shared my copies of Speaker for the Dead and Ender’s Shadow with him. But I didn’t know there are even more Ender novels, so I was pleasantly surprised to borrow Xenocide, which I…
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Book: Blue at the Mizzen
Now that I’ve finished Blue at the Mizzen, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin have sailed off into the sunset. Yes, Norton decided to publish three chapters from the unfinished 21st book which O’Brian was working on before he died in 2000, but a score of novels feels like a tidy sum. I also have lots…
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Movie: The War Room
From one documentary to the next, it seems. We watched The War Room last night. Though it felt topical with one presidential election recently finished, the documentary film was made in 1993 about the 1992 campaign of then Governor Bill Clinton. What little I knew about the film boiled down to the idea that there…
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Movie: Control Room
At home last weekend, thanks to my wife’s juggling of the DVD queue, we watched Control Room. An eighty-minute documentary about Al Jazeera in the build-up to the Gulf War (2003 version), Control Room did show me things I knew little about, but it wasn’t riveting. Or maybe I was just too tired to keep…
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Movie: After the Sunset
Saw the movie After the Sunset a few weeks ago. Wait for the video. This film feels like a re-make of The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), which itself was a re-make of a 1968 movie by the same name. After the Sunset has Salma Hayek going for it, but otherwise it’s not as crisp or…
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Power outage this morning in San Francisco
I woke up early (5:30am) this morning, and noticed the clock was dark. After a moment’s dullness, I realized the power must be out. Short story shorter… the power came back on about 15 minutes ago (~6:30am). I’m curious how widespread this was in San Francisco, but nothing at SFGate and nothing at PG&E. If…
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The problem with Christmas
I love Christmas. I’m part of a large family, so all through my childhood, the chaos and excitement compounded. It’s hard to repeat that vibrant experience as you get older, but having kids of your own gets you back in the mood quite quickly. The boy is overdoing it with Feliz Navidad and O Tanenbaum…
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Book: The System of the World
When it takes me a few weeks to write up a book I’ve read, there’s little chance I’m going to do more than the minimum when it comes time to note thoughts here. Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World is the third and final volume in The Baroque Cycle. I pity those who wade…
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Making linking more enjoyable
Randy Charles Morin on The RSS Blog notes: “I’ve noticed that I enjoy linking more to people w/ trackbacks enabled than those who do not have trackbacks enabled.” (We’ll see if my TrackBack link to Randy’s post succeeds.) That was certainly a part of supportingTrackBack on CNET News.com. Since posting about the public introduction, I’ve…