John’s Blog

Your typical boy-meets-tiger story. This is a novel that describes an Indian boy’s trek from Pondicherry, India to Canada, with a pretty notable shipwreck in the middle. For most of the book, Pi Patel is stuck on a very small boat with a very large tiger — but it’s a pretty gripping read, nonetheless.
One of [...]

This is a great book! It’s a short book, written by a frequent contributor to NPR, all about candy. He talks about his own candy addiction for a bit (always has between 3 and 8 pounds of candy in his house — actually gives a rundown of the candy in his house when he was [...]

Well, I suppose it goes without saying, but the day after I do a post about
how great it is to have music for long plane rides, I’ve somehow lost my
fancy noise-canceling headphones. Not exactly roughing it, but flights
without them are a lot harder now…

well, i’m a little bit sick of being on airplanes lately, but every once in a while there are some nice perks. we’re getting pretty close to NYC now, and we’ve been racing away from the Sun all day, so it’s getting towards twilight. we’re still up high above the clouds, and there are a [...]

This goes into the obvious file, but I’ve just got to say that the
emergence of digital music is absolutely incredible. I’m currently on a 6
hour flight from SJC -> JFK, and I’ve been working on my laptop and
listening to music the whole way. [Quick aside: I've been flying a bunch of
different airlines this year, but [...]

I’ve read pieces of Naked and Barrel Fever before, but never really been able to get through a whole book of his. Which is weird, because I really enjoy the whole crew from This American Life on NPR — just think they’re all smart, funny, and generally insightful — David Sedaris included.
Well, I made it [...]

I was pretty blown away by The Bourne Supremacy on the big screen a few weeks ago — thought the story was terrific, the acting was fun, and the direction was really great. I knew that the filmmakers had taken some (a lot of) license with the story, really just keeping the character of Jason [...]

Well, sort of like The Bourne Identity, just as long, but a lot more
boring, and a lot more tortured in terms of storyline. I got about halfway
through the book and just decided that I didn’t care much about the
characters or the story, so I quit. Maybe I’ll pick it up again at some
point, but I [...]

I finished this book a couple of weeks ago, and it’s really affected my thinking about the USA and its role in the world. Ferguson makes the basic argument that, apologists to the contrary, America is in fact an empire. [An interesting aside is that he cites a source that claims the US is the [...]

This is a highland cow. Made us laugh. 

Okay, enough screwing around. Time to start blogging in earnest. I’m thinking of a couple different lines: (1) posting at least one entry on every book that I read, and (2) posting some thoughts on the big set of new technology that I’m starting to play around with. (In particular, home network attached storage, new [...]