This afternoon we caught a matinee showing of Pixar’s latest film, “Cars 2.” My random thoughts (as usual, no spoilers): there were some great “cameos” like Sig Hansen and the Northwestern from “Deadliest Catch” as Crabby, and Bruce Campbell as American spy-car Rod “Torque” Redline (an obvious nod to Campbell’s character Sam Axe on “Burn [...]
Archive of posts filed under the reviews category.
Amazon Kindle (2nd gen)
Back in May I spotted a woot! deal for Amazon’s second-generation Kindle e-reader and jumped on it, not for myself (I do my reading on my iOS devices), but as an end-of-the-school-year present for my daughter. We gave it to her on the last day of school in celebration of her straight As report card [...]
WIJFR: The Hunger Games
In a not-too-distant future, the United States of America has collapsed, weakened by drought, fire, famine, and war, to be replaced by Panem, a country divided into the Capitol and 12 districts. Each year, two young representatives from each district are selected by lottery to participate in The Hunger Games. Part entertainment, part brutal intimidation [...]
WIJFR: The Girl Who Played with Fire
Mikael Blomkvist, crusading publisher of the magazine Millennium, has decided to run a story that will expose an extensive sex trafficking operation. On the eve of its publication, the two reporters responsible for the article are murdered, and the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to his friend, the troubled genius hacker Lisbeth Salander. [...]
WIJFR: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Mikael Blomkvist, a once-respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him. Prospects appear bleak until an unexpected (and unsettling) offer to resurrect his name is extended by an old-school titan of Swedish industry. The catch – and there’s always a catch – is that Blomkvist must first spend a year researching a [...]
TiVo Slide remote
I guess I didn’t write about the TiVo Slide remote when I first got it last October but after going without it for a few days recently I realized how much I like it. The Slide is a combination infrared and Bluetooth remote that works with the TiVo Premiere, TiVo HD, and TiVo Series 3 [...]
WIJFR: FreedomTM
The computer program Daemon has taken over the Internet, and millions have joined its virtual world. Now the effect is spilling into the real world as Daemon assumes control of financial institutions, and the program’s real-life converts flock to small towns to re-create a sustainable lifestyle amid the agribusiness monoculture of the Midwest. During my [...]
WIJFR: Flashforward
Nobel-hungry physicists conducting an unimaginably high-energy experiment accidentally induce a global consciousness shift: in an instant, everyone on Earth is “flashed forward” 21 years, experiencing several minutes of the future. But while everyone is, literally, out of their minds, their bodies drop unconscious; when the world reawakens, car wrecks, botched surgeries, falls, and other mishaps [...]
WIJFR: The Foundation Trilogy
For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future—to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save mankind, Seldon gathers the best minds [...]
A year of using Mint
After using Microsoft Money for almost 14 years, last January I started using mint.com to keep track of our personal finances. I wasn’t looking to move my money management into the cloud but was forced to when Microsoft decided to discontinue the online banking portion of Money in February 2010. That pretty much forced me [...]
