Day 3 of the Clean Living Room Experiment is well under way. Our children are spending their last precious days of Summer vacation with their aunt at the beach. She has them for a week and, yes, we’ve already sent in her application for sainthood. I thoroughly cleaned our living room the morning after they [...]

The kids are in bed. The Girl is having trouble sleeping. The neighbor’s dog is barking beneath her window. She’s reading and drawing with the light on. I’ll check on her in a few minutes and tuck her in and slide the paper out from under her arm and admire her drawings and put her [...]

Received my copy today of the Pro Web 2.0 Mashups book I did the technical review for. Always neat to see something you’ve worked on become real. Also, I hate writing bios like this.

I just finished technical review on a new book due out next month from Apress called Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services. (A technical reviewer basically just makes sure all of the examples work and that the technical stuff the author writes is correct and provides evaluations of the text from a [...]

National Novel Writing Month is here.

I’m planning to read the Tao Te Ching over the next couple of weeks. Why? Curiosity. And I’m interested in eastern philosophy and philosophy generally. Oh, and it’s short. I’m going to read the book in 14 installments starting Monday which are going to be emailed to me for free by a site called Daily [...]

“Of course, it’s not really a question anymore, is it? In the current state of Potter mania, it’s an invitation to recite the loyalty oath. And you’d better answer correctly. Start carrying on like Moaning Myrtle about the repetitive plots, the static characters, the pedestrian prose, the wit-free tone, the derivative themes, and you’ll wish [...]

I’ve been a fan of The Art of War—the famous Chinese military treatise written in the 6th century B.C.—for a long time. Particularly, the Lionel Giles translation which was originally published in 1910 and is now in the public domain (and in digital e-book form thanks to Project Gutenberg). I’ve been wanting to do a [...]

I’ve been looking around for a good text reading application for my desktop computer so that I can comfortably read books. All I wanted was an application that would open plain text files, show them to me with nice margins and easy to read type, allow me to customize the font, background, and foreground colors, [...]

The Lovely and Talented Wife was browsing through iTunes today to find some audiobooks for the kids to listen to and she came across a great site called Storynory.com. They add a new story each week and podcast them so it’s easy to keep current. I listened to Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, one of the more recent additions [...]