Category: reading

  • e-Reader – Beginning to Cave

    I am an avid reader. I started in high school, voraciously reading science fiction. I can get through 3 or more Sci Fi novels in a week. I used to be a frequent visitor to the used book stores. The advent of eBooks was a godsend. Instead of raiding the used book stores, and carrying…

  • I thought I was done… The Baroque Cycle

    I am a huge SciFi fan, been reading it since I was in high school. I have lately become a fan of Neal Stephenson (ok, not so recently, I read Snow Crash shortly after it was published), but it has taken me forever to read the the books in the Baroque Cycle. Today, I finished…

  • Some thoughts

    I have been doing a lot of reading of history, deep into European history from the middle ages to present, as well as a pretty deep dive into US history. Sparked by a conversation with a colleague in Europe who was showing me where many historical events happened in Frankfurt-Mainz during a day of sightseeing…

  • What I am reading: 1984

    With all the buzz lately about the NSA revelations by Edward Snowden, and the surveillance state, I thought I would pick up my copy of 1984 and re-read it. Set in the year 1984, it is a masterful piece of fiction that is remarkably prescient in many of its predictions, given that it was published…

  • Fixing ebooks with errors – A personal challenge

    I have wholly embraced the eBook revolution. As a long time traveler, and SciFi aficionado, I have assembled a large collection of books that I continue to read to mark them off my to do list. Being a fan of science fiction, I have been forced to acquire some of my books by extra-legal means.…

  • What I am reading – Catcher in the Rye

    I had read it a long time ago.  I think I bought a used copy at one of my trips to Powells in Portland, but a recent re-run of a South Park episode, “Scrotty McBoogerballs” caused me to pick it up again. I am talking of course about Catcher in the Rye by J. D.…

  • Refresher: Set theory and logic

    Yesterday, while I was waiting for my computer to be reimaged due to some serious funk happening with my outlook mail, I had a couple hours to burn. After I killed a longer than normal walk at lunch, I sat down in the lobby with a good book. Background: my products are reliant on a…

  • What I am reading: Stranger in a Strange Land

    (Well, re-reading really) My memory is foggy, but I think this is the book that someone tossed at me in my sophomore year of high school. Written by Robert Heinlein, and originally published in 1961, it is one of the “must reads” in the SciFi genre. The premise is fairly simple. A manned expedition to…

  • What I am reading: History of Modern Europe

    I am an avid reader, have been since I was in my early teens.  While most of my reading tends to favor the SciFi genre, I have developed a taste for history. When I was in High School I had the usual US history, and with it a smattering of world history. Of course, my…