Four more

In the last few weeks, I finished a few more books. Here’s a brief review of each.
How to Blog – Tony Pierce
Not so much a instruction manual, but a retrospective on Tony Pierce’s writings. Tony is a blogger in Los Angeles. He’s young, witty, handsome, and all the fly women are making a fuss…
Part poetry, part prose, Tony writes about whatever flutters through his mind, women, baseball, politics, even his digital camera. I found his book a refreshing and funny break from my usual sci-fi or history book diet.
Help the guy out and buy a copy, it’s worth it.
The Zenith Angle – Bruce Sterling
Amazingly, I saw this book before it was published in Bruce’s office, in his house at last year’s SXSW party. Sterling’s work has ranged from future sci-fi to steampunk to cyberpunk over the years. In The Zenith Angle he gives us his take on America’s spooks and the role of cyberspace in national security, and a taste of space warfare.
The book was a tasty treat that I consumed rapidly. You don’t always know where the author is taking you, but the road is great. Scenes of the different worlds that Bollywood actors, dotcom billionaires, and government agents occupy are tantalizing glipses of lifestyles we mere mortals don’t encounter often.
The book is a good thriller with enough tech tossed in to differentiate it from the typical DaVinci Code style book.
Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief – Bill Mason
I heard about this book from Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-gram newsletter as a good lesson in security. The basic idea -> “Nothing works more in a thief’s favor than people feeling secure. That’s why places that are heavily alarmed and guarded can sometimes be the easiest targets.”
The book is the story of Bill Mason, a noted jewel thief in the 70s and 80s. This is the story of his criminal career from start to finish. Fairly well written, you begin to feel for the guy as he breaks into places and steals pillowcase after pillowcase of jewels from the rich.
At one point however, he does lose my sympathy as he describes his antics in Florida as he was on trial from one of his crimes as he continually taunted the police and judges. I really couldn’t relate to this. I could relate to his problem solving methods and the way he concieved solving the security issues, but acting like a jackass and treating his family badly was disconcerting.
Worth a borrow from the library, but not worth a new hardcopy purchase.
The French Admiral – Dewey Lambdin
This is the second book in the Alan Lewrie storyline, another Age of Sail hero in the tradition of Horatio Hornblower. I read the first book and thought it was promising. I stumbled into this book at the library and checked it out on a whim.I’d like to say I found the novel fantastic, but it was just OK. The continual use of endless anutical jargon about staysails and other details really doesn’t do much for the tale.
It was interesting to ready about the American Revolution from the British side as Alan meets up with loyalists from North Carolina and tries to escape the Battle of Yorktown. Not many sea battles, but and few good descriptions of land battles and skirmishes.
The book does clear up quite a bit of Alan’s history and the reasons behind his banishment to sea by his father. The look into Britsh marriage law and inheritance rights is fun and makes me glad not to live under the British system of family property.

Daytripping

In about a hour I’ll get in a car, head to the airport, fly to New York, arrive at 6:30 AM, wait for a meeting that runs 9-6, get back on a plane and fly back to LA, arrving at Midnight.
There is a meeting I ‘must’ attend, or so I am told. I fear it will be powerpoint hell.
Modern business travel is amazing, silly, and tiring all at the same time.

Budweiser Extra

When time permits, I try to take Michele for coffee in the mornings after the kids are off to school. She likes 7-Eleven coffee, so that’s where we go.
I’ve taken a break from caffeine for a bit and today I was wandering around while she made her coffee/hot chocolate concoction. Scanning the fridges, I saw this:


Yep, you read it right. Beer with caffeine, ginseng, guarana extract, and natural flavor.
Yes, Budweiser Extra has hit the market. Why? I have no idea, but someone at Anheuser-Busch thinks America needs caffienated beer.
Of course, you can count on the Cruft Labs to test this out for you.

I poured a tall glass of ‘B to the E’ and took a nice swig.
In a word, it is foul.
Truly a triumph of conceptual marketing over common sense. Bud Extra tastes something akin to beer with a Flintstone’s vitamin ground up in it. An amazingly terrible taste that is nothing like beer.
Avoid this product at all costs, except if you want to play a practical joke on someone.

Speed up Firefox

A fraternity brother sent me this tip. It may be old news, but for me, it worked great to speed up the already fast Firefox browser if you have broadband.
1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.
3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0”. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.
Sites that loaded slowly in the past pop up quickly now.

Off-air

Here you can see HDTV being recieved the way it was meant to be, with rabbit ears antenna.


Yes, the picture that good.
Yes, regular TV sucks in compairison.
Yes, I’ll have more to say once I get the DirecTV HD setup running.

Oops



In a sling, originally uploaded by Argyle.

Zoe slipped a fell on the sidewalk. Looks like a minor fracture in her forearm. We’ll know more tomorrow when she goes to the ortho doctor.

Always look on the bright side

My brother Matt, who quit his weblog last year, made a nice little “Post-Inaugural e-greeting…”

Hi all…
Ok, so this started out as my holiday e-greeting, but December was
kind of rough for me, so it got bumped to being a “New Years”
e-greeting, but that didn’t happen either… So I ultimately turned
this into my post-Inaugural-blues e-greeting…
https://mattmedia.net/bright.html
Hope you get a smile out of it… Feel free to pass it along to any
bitter, jaded, or depressed progressives out there…
Best wishes…
– Matt

Take a look and I’m sure you’ll get a laugh out of it.

Inaugural

I would have preferred that the President took a cue from his predcessors.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Woke up to a war

I turned on the computer today and an instant message popped up to tell me I was the center of a war.
Now, my mother likes to see my name in print, but this is a little silly. We make decisions to switch vendors all the time with no fanfare. Those deals are hundreds of thousands of dollars and nary a peep.
We make a change where the cost is less than I spend on soda pop for the office and it’s a war. I don’t think so.
The point isn’t what software we are using, but can we get people to use wikis at work? I tell ya folks, it ain’t easy to wean people off of email…