Blogs

I read this book as an Audible audio book. I enjoyed listening to this book, Tom Weiner does a great job narrating it and bringing a lot of emotion and depth. Depth that I am not sure exists in the book’s written form. This is not a spy novel nor is it the memoirs of a spy; it is more of a collection of events as seen from the author’s perspective arranged in a chronological order. There are plenty of passages that let us see deeper into the person that is “Fred Burton” and we get to learn some of what makes him tick, but I do not feel like I got the whole picture at any point. Part of that is the fact that most of the events the book covers have many elements that cannot be shared and part of it is the format of narration chosen by the author. ...

I read this book on Safari Books Online using Firefox on a MacBook. I am updating the Football Pool app that I built last year and want to make the database side of it more sophisticated and optimized so I searched Safari Books for some insight. After reading the overview of a handful of books I decided on Head First PHP & MySQL because it appeared to cover everything I was looking for. ...

I received this book while attending a workshop with Whitney Quesenbery and Steve Krug. It was a great seminar with lots of hands-on training in a two-day format. If you read a lot of books on design and usability there may not be much in this book you have not read before, even so it can be a great resource for sharing with others and as a meta-reference for looking up more information on studies, experiments, and papers. ...

I read this book as an ebook on an iPhone using eReader Pro. In the second book of the series we get some more time with Thaddeus, Gloria and the new magician nicknamed Houdini. My favorite part of this story is when Ahazuerus, talking about himself and Thaddeus, explains to Houdini “We are two sides of a coin. He lacks empathy and tact, although he is slowly acquiring both. I lack drive and ambition, though I too am learning. We complement each other perfectly.” This really speaks to me; the two of them are growing together as a team and as individuals. It increases my desire to learn more about both characters and the characters that surround them. ...

Like the first book of the series I read this book on a Kindle and listened to it on an iPhone switching back and forth as needed. Wow, these books are long. It took me a few weeks to make it through this one. But it was a great ride. The story goes on and on with no end in sight. The characters are holding my attention and I look forward to reading the third book, although that will have to wait until June or so as I am in non-fiction book mode now. ...

This story is a first for me; I both listened to the audiobook and read the ebook interchangeably. The audiobook is narrated by Roy Dotrice who does an amazing job performing all of the characters in this novel. This is not normally a book I would read; I consider this to be ‘hard fantasy’ and my tastes lean more towards ‘humorous fantasy’ or ‘light fantasy,’ I think the last hard fantasy book I read was a Terry Brooks something or other back when I went to a friends house every weekend to play Dungeons and Dragons (actually that sounds kind of fun, hmmm.) ...

I played this game using a MacBook Pro and OnLive. It took me 33 hours to play it through on the medium setting; I earned 2,050 of 5,000 points and 28 of 49 achievements. I really enjoyed the original Deus Ex back in the day, at the time the idea of “augments” that allowed you to update your player as you went along was pretty unique feature of the game. In Human Revolution the augments are brought to a new level. ...

I listened to this as an audiobook. Narrated by Malcolm Hillgartner the unabridged book is a glorious 38 hours and 34 minutes. I have read many of Neal Stephenson’s books and have liked them all, a few of them I have really loved, and this is one of the best. The story is full of characters, but the time is taken with each one in turn to make them memorable and to draw you into their lives. By then end of the book I cared about the fate of each and every one of them. But this is not some slow moving drama, it is a rip-roaring fast paced action adventure that takes you around the world. ...

I bought the entire Galactic Midway series many years ago to read on my PalmPilot. This is probably my 5th time reading them. Sideshow is the first book in a series of 4 novels following a most unusual carnival. From Mike Resnick’s web site: Carny owner Thaddeus Flint kidnaps a rival carnival’ freak show, only to learn that the “freaks” are alien tourists visiting Earth in the one disguise they thought was safe from discovery. As they fall sick and go into fits of depression, Flint must work to keep them healthy and on display, which leads to a most unlilkely bond between captor and captives. ...

Recently Onlive had a special offer to play Red Faction: Armageddon and Homefront for the 4 day Thanksgiving weekend. I didn’t like Homefront very much, the violence was a to much for me, but Red Faction: Armageddon was more to my liking. Unlike Red Faction: Guerrilla, this version of the game is pretty much on rails with very little chances for the player to choose his own path. This is partly explained by the change in location, Armageddon takes place mostly underground instead of on the surface. ...