Blogs

I bought this audiobook from Audible. I got this book because Wil Wheaton narrates it and it is rated extremely high on the Audible.com web site; there are not many books that are rated so high, 4.5 stars in “Overall,” “Performance,” and “Story,” with around 500 total reviews. I like that Wil Wheaton narrated this story. I was surprised to learn how many books he has narrated, 18 of them currently listed on Audible. But I feel that his performance did not really bring the story to life, it left me kind of flat. ...

I bought this book from Amazon after reading a blog post by Jeff Atwood. Jeff does not mention this book in his post; he talks about the book “How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk” by Adele Faber; which is based upon the research and lessons taught in the P.E.T book. So after reading the post I bought copies of both books and the P.E.T. book is the one I chose to read first. ...

I read this book as a PDF bought from O’Reily Media’s Safari Books Online mostly using an iPad and iBooks but also using the Preview app on a MacBook Pro. I really dislike showing any photographs without the minimum of rotate, crop, exposure correct, color correct, and export at the needed sizes and Lightroom allows me to do that very quickly. ...

I played this game on a MacBook Pro using OnLive and had no technical difficulties. This first person shooter has a lot of problems, it starts out slow, takes a long time to get going, and then at the very end throws some odd control issues at you. It is definitely “on a rail” and appears to only offer one pretty flat story to tell. Maybe its biggest problem is that it is trying to tell a story. It may have been a better game if there was more than one way to get to the end and something in all the dialog that let me know that the end was coming. ...

I read this audiobook written by Thomas Sowell and narrated by Tom Weiner from Audible. “Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses.” Read that sentence above a couple of times, it took me awhile to realize just how true and important it is. I learned from this book that government interference in a free and open market is the source of most of the world’s economic pain. I believe the world would be a much better place if everyone understood the lessons contained in this book. ...

I bought this game on Steam and played it in Windows 7 in Bootcamp on a MacBook Pro. There were a lot of crashing with the game initially; apparently the default install is a horrible experience full of crashes and blue screens for many, many players. It took a lot of searching and a lot of fiddling around to get the game to play for more than 10 minutes without crashing but eventually I found the right combination of settings and the game played great. ...

Bobbie and I traveled to Las Vegas in June and had a great time. Part of the trip was the Usability Professional’s Association conference, which was really cool, and the other part was pure vacation. We spent 4 days at the [M Resort](http://www.themresort.com/" title=“The M Resort) well South of the strip. The M is an interesting casino; they focus on the locals while catering to conferences. We ate at Anthony’s where we had an amazing steak and at Anthony’s Burgers and Brews, which was just ok. Their buffet is award winning and a couple of locals highly recommended it to us, but we did not eat there. ...

I listened to this story as an audiobook and it took a very long time, like 3 weeks. I made the mistake of reading reviews of this book on Amazon before listening to it, for the most part they were very negative, and they tainted my expectations. What I expected was an even slower telling with even less forward momentum. But what I got was a bit different, it is true that this book and the following book do move slower. Mr. Martin decided to make the individual chapters longer and cover fewer characters in the 4th and 5th books. So it does slow the story down considerably, and I have to say that I do not like it, but the plot does move forward and the events that take place held my interest. ...

I have watched the Walking Dead TV show for a while now, it is a guilty pleasure that neither my wife nor child will to watch, kind of a “dad’s time” thing. I am not a “zombie” or horror film/book fan. I do not like gory movies or detailed gore filled descriptions in books. But after hearing friends talk about how much they liked The Walking Dead I decided to give the TV show a try. I was hooked right from the first episode. The acting is good, the location is my hometown of Atlanta, and the gore is usually not over the top. ...

I bought this book used from Powell’s Book Store in Portland, it is a bit beat up but I think that is fitting condition for this story. I was lucky enough to meet Rudy Rucker at a DragonCon years ago. At the time I did not know who he was but he was on a panel with William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Anton Wilson talking about the future of the future. Out of all the panelist what he had to say the most interesting. Shortly after that panel I made my way through his Software, Wetware, Hardware books, along with a horror story that gave me a week of nightmares. ...