In unrelated news, the Netflix version of the Hannah Montana Best of Both Worlds concert is the 2D version despite the fact that they are clearly showing the 3D version of the DVD cover on their site. Boo. Hey, Netflix, there’s a little girl in this house who was pretty bummed out by that.

We finally were able to see The Dark Knight. Very satisfying. It didn’t quite have the impact of the the first one, probably only because my expectations for Begins were so low and my expectations for Dark Knight were so high. The cell-phone/sonar thing with the glowy bat eyes? Hokey. And can’t they use a mask that doesn’t make him sound like he’s got a head cold? But I forgive them. It was a great movie.

Speaking of comic book characters, they showed the Watchmen trailer. It looked cool and all but I think it probably left most of the audience—that is, the majority who never heard of Watchmen before—scratching their heads. I’ve never been a huge fan of comic books or graphic novels, but being a geek and an avid science fiction reader, it was impossible for me never to have at least heard of Watchmen. I decided to pick up a copy and read it through before the movie comes out. I’m on chapter three. It’s good so far. But I predict total disaster for the movie in that it will be impossible for a two hour PG-13 movie to be faithful to the book. You know, in the same kind of way that I, Robot (the movie) was a total, tragic, epic disaster.

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 pencil away and quietly, quietly turn off the light.

From The Boy’s room, a gentle murmur. I stand where he cannot see me, just beyond the light outside his door, and listen. And my heart swells with pride. He is reading.

Read the rest of this entry over at The Blogfathers…

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.

Anyway, it’s an interesting book about remixing and mashing up data from multiple online services via APIs. But one of the coolest things about the book—are you ready for this?—the author, Raymond Yee, and publisher have agreed to release it under a Creative Commons Non-commercial Share-Alike license! In addition, the draft of every chapter is available online right now and the published version will be available shortly. It’s practically an open-source book.

I’ve already been paid for my work on the book but I still feel too close to it to be able to give an unbiased review. But who needs a review? Go check out the book yourself and if you like it please show your support for openness and buy a copy when it hits Amazon.

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 Lit. You can subscribe for free by clicking here. If you’d like to read along with me, subscribe sometime this weekend and ask to receive an installment each weekday.

I plan to post about the book at least 4-5 times during the course of the subscription. Not a review, but rather my impressions of the text, attempts at interpretation, discussion, and questions.

I’ve been wanting to do a web project centered around the book for a couple of years now. At its core, a way to read the book; but also as a place to really explore it and discuss it with other enthusiasts. Well, I’m happy to announce that I’ve finally found some time to work on it and the result is suntzusaid.com:

It might seem strange to be talking about The Art of War but there really is a lot more to it than just military strategy. Certainly the wisdom in this book can be (and is) applied to warfare. But if you allow yourself to think of the business world or even parenting as a form of conflict you find that much of the advice is appropriate in those fields as well.

For example, Sun Tzu says that “All warfare is based on deception.” Anyone with kids old enough to speak can see the truth in that. ;-)

I’m putting the finishing touches on the site, adjusting some content here and there, but I’d love it if you checked it out and shared it with your friends (and let me know if you find anything broken). Most of all, I hope that at least a few of you enjoy it as much as I have. Thanks!

I found a couple but wasn’t happy with any of them. Then I thought, why not PDF? PDF readers like Adobe Reader (Windows) and Evince (Linux) are free and support most of the features I want. And it turns out that creating a PDF book version of a text file is really easy. Here’s how:

1. Get Open Office. It’s a free, open-source office suite similar to Microsoft Office. Technically, you could use any PDF creation tool but I like Open Office because it’s very easy to use.
2. Start Open Office Writer and open your plain text file.
3. Select Format Page and change the following:
   - Paper size: 5×7 inches
   - Margins: 0 all around
   - Header: 0.5 inches
   - Footer: 0.5 inches
   - Background: black
4. Click OK
5. Select all text (Ctrl-A). Change the font and text color to something pleasing that will prevent eye strain. I like a medium dark color on a black background.
6. Export PDF. Choose the option to open the PDF file in full screen mode.

You’re done! When you open the PDF file, it should open in full screen with the text nicely centered. Depending on your reader, you may have some paging controls but if you don’t then the Page Up/Down keys on your keyboard will probably do what you want. It’s perfect.

The only other thing you’ll want to change is the “remember last position” preference in Adobe Reader. Choose “For any PDF document” and it will remember where you were in any book you convert in this way.

This method works well and I only have to do it once per book. I’d still prefer an application that just opens plain text files and reformats them in a pleasing, low-contrast, full-screen mode for reading because it’d save me a step. If anyone knows of such a thing (for Linux, preferably), please let me know.