WIJFR: 11/22/63

Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine. His friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

Today I finished Stephen King’s “11/22/63.” I’m always a sucker for a good time travel story and while this one doesn’t break any new ground in the genre I enjoyed it.

Jake Epping is shown the “rabbit hole” by his friend Al, the owner of a local diner that connects to September 1958 through the storeroom. Al has been using the rabbit hole for years to buy supplies for the diner at 1958 prices, keeping his own costs down. Every trip into the past is a “reset” … it’s always the same day when you arrive, and when you get back to the present only two minutes has passed.

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The odds are apparently in favor of “The Hunger Games”

The film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” has now spent three consecutive weeks at #1 and this past Easter weekend I finally took my daughter to see it. She had wanted to see it immediately on opening weekend (like a lot of her friends did), but the PG-13 rating concerned me and I wanted to read a few reviews first and see how the graphic violence was being portrayed before exposing her to it. As I told her, reading the book is one thing, seeing those things “for real” on the big screen is another. As it turned out, though, my fears were mostly unfounded and she really enjoyed the movie.

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Spring Training 2012: Day One

It’s (almost the end of) March, which means it’s time for my annual trip out west to Arizona. My brother and I are going a little later in the season this year and also bringing some other people along: his wife, our sister, and my daughter.

The tech arsenal for this trip is pretty much the same as past years: my iPhone (the new 4S instead of the old 3GS), iPad (no Bluetooth keyboard this time), Garmin nüvi (loaded with pertinent waypoints), and new camera. I also ditched the iPad camera connection kit since I now have the Eye-Fi card to wirelessly offload photos from my camera to the iPad.

Anyway, it’s time to see some Cactus League baseball!

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Apple iPhone 4S

I got a brand new iOS device this week, but it wasn’t the one everyone else was getting. I couldn’t hold out any longer: after getting my first iPhone 3GS back in 2009, I finally upgraded to the 4S. There was nothing physically wrong with my old iPhone, but after upgrading and jailbreaking iOS 5.01 back in January my old phone continued to get slower and slower and more frustrating to use.

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Windows 8 Consumer Preview

When Microsoft released the Developer Preview of Windows 8 last fall, I played around with it a briefly in a virtual machine but tired of it quickly. Well, now that the Consumer Preview is available for download I decided to give it a serious shot and get a jump on learning my way around Microsoft’s upcoming OS. For the past week I’ve been using it as my main OS at work and here are some of my observations.

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Sunspot 1429

March has been a good telescope month so far. The past few evenings have seen Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and the moon all gracing the night sky. And during the day, sunspot 1429 has been visible on the surface of the sun. I took my telescope out in the back yard this afternoon and got a decent shot of the latest sunspot.

I know it looks like dust on the lens, but those dark splotches on the lower left side of the sun are actually an active sunspot. Check out Phil Plait’s version that puts the size of the sunspot into perspective!

WIJFR: In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks

 In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks is Adam’s comedic gospel of modern America. He rips into the absurdity of the culture that demonized the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, turned the nation’s bathrooms into a lawless free-for-all of urine and fecal matter, and put its citizens at the mercy of a bunch of minimum wagers with axes to grind.

Continuing my break from fiction, after finishing Chris Hardwick I moved on to Adam Carolla and his first book, “In 50 Years We’ll All Be Chicks … and Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy.”

If, like me, you listen to the Adam Carolla podcast (I’ve done so since the first episode), you’ve probably already heard a lot of the ideas, stories, and rants Adam writes about in the book. That doesn’t make it any less entertaining though (if anything it was funnier since as I read, I could hear Adam’s voice in my head).

If you’ve never heard his podcast, or listened to Loveline (back in the day), or seen Adam on “The Man Show,” “Dancing with the Stars,” or, currently, on “The Celebrity Apprentice” (I’m rooting for him to win!) you might still enjoy the book. It’s a humorous look at today’s society that you just might find yourself agreeing with.

Mahalo!