2006


20
Nov 06

iWoz, by Steve Wozniak & Gina Smith

You know. Fluffy. Probably not really worth reading. I did find out that Woz basically funded the Children’s Discovery Museum in San Jose, which Sam loves. So thanks for that, man. Oh, and the Apple IIc. That was cool. BJR still has his in a box in his loft, I’m pretty sure.


20
Nov 06

Dragon Rising, by Jasper Becker

As I’m anticipating my trip to China in January, I’m going to start doing a lot more reading about the contemporary landscape, the hugely diverse culture, and the history of a country that’s existed in one form or another for thousands of years. This was a super-easy-to-read survey of all three of those things — and as it’s a National Geographic book, it has lots of great pictures to give you a feel for what he’s talking about. Makes me want to pick up his book The Chinese. This book does a great job going through 6ish main regions (Beijing, Shanghai, South of Shanghai, Pearl River Delta, Manchuria, Central China & Yunan Region) and talking about each. Good read.

[As an aside, I think I’m going to try ordering my books from Powell’s for a while. I’ve been an Amazon customer for a long time now — since 1996 — but just think that in spite of the high quality of service, I don’t have much alignment with them as a company. Powell’s is harder to order from — they don’t have “one-click”, for example, due to Amazon’s heinous patent strategy — but maybe that just proves the point for me. I also like the idea of making used books as easy to buy as new books, which Powell’s clearly has a stronger commitment to than Amazon. I’ll let you know how it goes. If anyone has experience with them already, let me know.]


15
Nov 06

OJ

um, what? among the weirdest things ever.


15
Nov 06

High School Confidential, by Jeremy Iversen

I was pretty excited to read this book — it just showed up near me at my house one day (Kathy had ordered it on the recommendation of her dad). It’s a non-fiction account of a 25 year old Stanford grad posing for a whole year as a high school senior in Southern California. It’s a fine book, but I think the idea is a little better than the execution (sort of like “Heroes” on NBC). Lots of party drugs, steroids & hooking up. Not quite like my own high school experience, but close enough to what I imagine it’s like today. Punch line seems to be that high school’s tough & full of drama, educators are winging it a little bit in an environment of too-much-influence by school districts and politicians, and lots of things happen for lots of random reasons.


15
Nov 06

typepad

i’m finding typepad harder & harder to love lately. the web-based UI seems like it’s always slow, the photo uploading for sam’s blog is about 2 years behind anyone else, and it costs money every month to run as well. starting to think about moving, but it’s a little stickier than i want, to be honest. i’ve got about 3 years of posts in typepad now, not to mention nearly a year and a half of videos & pictures of the little guy. but it’s still just hard to stay on typepad. i’m taking a bit of time off next week; think i’m going to do the evaluation. any ideas? (and if you’ve got suggestions, would really like suggestions on how to move the mass of content that i’ve got, too.)

basic requirements, though, are this:

– want to be able to run my own blog, plus sam’s blog

– want to have a feature-rich, easy to use + gallery-ize picture capability — with easy integration to iphoto

– want to make it as easy as possible to put up video from our DV camera — videoegg currently is the easiest to do importing; it also has integration with typepad

and free would be nice. 🙂

thoughts?