Month: October 2006

I spent 90 minutes doing my civic duty with the absentee ballot this evening, and I’m not quite done. While I’m not going to share my votes, I will say that the lingering indecision is on Proposition 87 (the tax on California oil production to spur alternative energy sources) and on the competing (?) flood…

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On Monday morning, I had finished my previous book and was “stranded” on the plane without anything else to read, I raided the boy’s backpack for one of his new birthday gifts: The Twenty-One Balloons. What a fun tale. Written in 1947 by William Pène du Bois, Twenty-One Balloons won a Newberry Medal the following…

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Daniel Silva wrote The Mark of the Assassin in 1998. This book is pretty much your standard terrorist/spy thriller, but not crafted like Robert Ludlum at his best. Reminder: ignore Ludlum’s current re-incarnation (literally, since he’s dead) as a “brand” for new novels. Mark of the Assassin was Silva’s second novel. If you followed that…

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When I switched WordPress themes many moons ago, I “lost” the comments link at the end of each post as it appears on the home page. It was a simple theme edit, which I just resolved now. If you’re curious, the missing line of code was: < ?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '%…

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Last week, the local CBS affiliate followed up on Allison’s suggestion that they cover PhishTank as part of their Consumer Watch program. David was out of town. So, while Mike did the bulk of the coding, Aaron brought the design together to make PhishTank easy on the eyes and mouse clicks, Allison reached out (with…

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At work, I need to pick the right forum software to run on OpenDNS.com. We’ve discussed the possibilities informally a few times, but the burst of activity — and resulting customer support — triggered by two print articles made this project more important. I’m going to share my research and the final decision in a…

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The Departed is a worthy big-screen drama. Utterly violent, very funny, certainly Boston, The Departed is mostly set in the present, but a few early scenes play in the era just after Bag Men (nice coincidence for me). The almost parallel characters played by Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio draw you in, and the usual…

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These aren’t new, but it is Saturday, and I’m sick of staring at them in my inbox. +++ I thought all The Economist content was invisible on the web, but not this September 7, 2006 opinion piece, “Welcome aboard,” which asks “In-flight announcements are not entirely truthful. What might an honest one sound like?” An…

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Flux is book two of Maps in a Mirror, the collected volume of short stories by Orson Scott Card. Of the seven stories, I found the last one, “The Originist,” the most compelling. Set in the Isaac Asimov’s Foundation world of Trantor, “The Originist” imagines some of the hinted-at creation of the Second Foundation. More…

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I bought Gold Mine for a bus ride home last week, and it barely lasted longer than that. Yes, another Wilbur Smith book (my previous mention), although this one is (for him) practically a short story, at only 263 pages. Only now am I noticing that this one was originally written in 1970, making it…

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