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The Magpie Developer
Jeff Atwood is one of the best programmer/writers around. I love reading his stuff, some I agree wholeheartedly with, other stuff we disagree, but this post is about a dead-on as they come. This idea has been floating in my head for a long time, but it is hard for me to conceptualize it in words, Atwood does a brilliant job at it. Must read for any developer. |
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Andy Olmsted's Last Blog Entry.
(Warning: Pretty rough) No matter how you feel politically about the war, this reminds you that each number people throw around as statistics is a human life. This is extremely well written, and pretty rough on your soul towards the end, but something everyone should read. Its a shitty situation all around, but there is always a human face behind the statistics and I want to make sure I never forget that. |
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Drinking stories that put yours to shame
Via Keith
To preserve his body during the voyage home, the second-in-command stored Nelson's body in the ship's vat of rum and halted all liquor rations to the crew. Not a bad idea, but when the ship reached port, officials went to retrieve Nelson's body and found the vat dry.
Disregarding good taste (in every sense), the crew had been secretly drinking from it the entire way home. After that, naval rum was referred to as Nelson's Blood. |
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making vodka pills in 24 hours
Recently, Chef Fabian was experimenting further with the Adria/Torreblanca technique of making 'vodka pills.' I use this word to describe the process of making liquid-filled candies by pouring flavored alcohol syrups into cornstarch and letting it set until a hard outer shell forms. |
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Strategy Letter VI - joelonsoftware.com
As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.
Entire Article is Dead On. A must read for anyone in the software biz. |
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(Monday, November 26)
Who Watches The Watchmen?
(click for full size)
I read a decent amount of comic books as a kid. I didn't live necessarily in the middle of no where, but there were very few places that I could ride my bike too. One of these fortunately was downtown Loganville, I would meet a friend named JR and we would ride down to the center of town to an antique shop that happen to sell comics. The funny thing was that I think they made more money off the comics so over the 2 or so years it was in business the comic inventory grew substantially. Since the owners were not really into comics (they were catering to all the kids who shopped there) they really didn't know too much about what they ordered. A lot of times we would just tell them how many we wanted and they would order ours plus a few extras. "Special orders" cost more of course, but since we didn't have the "comic shop guy" we missed out on a lot of the more in depth comic books/graphic novels that those type people would suggest or we would notice being read on the counter. We were regulated to more of the main stream comic selection (Marvel/DC/Image/Valiant etc). Which in looking back, I really wish we had our own Jeff Albertson to help us discover some of these odder more fringe novels and comics that barely got a mention in the monthly Wizard. Most of the odder stuff we would hear about on BBS and such, but were never really available to purchase and Amazon (and the majority of the net) was just a twinkle in someones eye.
Once a week my mom took me to Galactic Quest for art lessons (which rocked) and I would get to see the full swath of a comic store selection. Very rarely did I ever purchase any graphic novels, the ones that come to mind that I did was Sin City and some of Neil Gaimen's Sandman collection. Being around 12 or 13 and about as far from the gothesque scene of comic books as possible I freely admit I didn't understand shit about them. I read them, but they didn't hold my interest like my favorite Rai or WildC.A.T.S. any of the others I followed. I wouldn't say I shunned graphic novels in any sense, I just kept up with more of the mainstream superhero reads.
About 4 or 5 months ago I was talking with a friend at work and he had brought up that he was in the middle of reading The Watchmen. I had heard passing mentions on some boards about a movie for it, but I didn't really know too much about it. I checked into the price on Amazon and decided to pick it up, and I started it for "throne reading" about 2 months ago (I poop quick -- hence 2 months). I finished it up today, and man what an amazing read. I NEVER thought that someone could create such an amazing and somewhat emotionally bizarre storyline, and the 'scenes' and their overlay to other stories (you need to read it to understand) was just brilliant.
The story centers around a group of "superheros" and their interactions between themselves, society, the government and one technically "real" superhero (again hard to explain). The story deals with emotions from the past between each of them, and the story on how they deal with the way they were treated when they were superheroes, and the way they were treated after they "retired". It really is a pretty neat introspective into these people, who by the end of the novel you really feel emotions about. The writer and artist just do a fantastic job in presenting information about each of them and their pasts in pseudo-flashbacks from themselves or other characters (not necessarily the other heroes either) in really creative ways (dossier, past records, newspaper clippings etc). By the end of the novel, you really are debating if these guys should be celebrated or committed or killed by the greater society, and you will feel different about each one.
It is probably one of the best pieces of fiction I have read in a long time and then you add in this amazing art and it really deserves to be read even if you don't think you could ever be a fan of comic books/graphic novels.
The above picture is from some pics of they released the other day from the movies website. It looks amazingly good and dreary and very close to the drawings. One thing that was interesting as I read the novel was that since I knew a movie was being made about it I was thinking the entire time how tough it must be to do this movie, because you are not taking just a story and creating your vision of it (a la batman/spidey etc) but you are taking an exact vision of someone else (writer and artist) and then trying to add your touches without impeding on their art, or maybe you are just trying your damndest to replicate their visuals and making your mark by edits in the screen play. It is a tough job regardless.
Do you self a favor and pick it up if you can, certainly worth the read. Before I read it I had seen that Time magazine had named it one of the 100 best novels of all time, so I had very high expectations, but as you can see I do think it deserves a place on that list.
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Travis - The Boy With No Name
Travis is back. I wouldn't say I hated 12 memories, it was meant to be very political, I just thought it went a little overboard and was somewhat preachy. Then when the greatest hits CD came out to be honest I was really hoping it didn't mean the end to one of my favorite brit bands. Boy With No Name is everything they were capable of. Supurb CD all the way through. Every song is brilliant. Big Chair is probably my favorite song and the opening to the CD on 3 Times is as good as it gets in music imho. |
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Pop! Why Bubbles are Great For The Economys (Gross)
One of the better economic books I have read in while, where the author gets their premise across in a well written, clear and concise manner. Basically Gross believes that the infrastructure left over after economic bubbles, provides companies with the ability to move forward (maybe more than the original bubble did). Not a hard read, I would definitely suggest it for a day and the beach/lake. |
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Feist - The Reminder
I CANNOT GET "I feel it all" OUT OF MY HEAD. Period. Great album, angelic voice. |
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Catan - Xbox Live Arcade
I am hopelessly addicted to this board-turned-video game on the xbox360. I had never played the board game but had seen it being played in some comic shops growing up. Click the Pick and play the demo, it isn't the 360 interface, but same game. |
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Arctic Monkeys - Favorite Worse Nightmare
No Sophomore slump here. Just as good (if not better) than Whatever they Say. |
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Beautiful Evidence (Tufte)
Tufte reads like a text book, most people would say bleh, but the information about "information" that he can deliver is top notch. My first Tufte book was "A Visual Display To Quantitative Information" and it was extremely well done, albeit confusing at time. I think beautiful Evidence is a little easier of a read (I am still only half way through it) and a little easier for myself to understand the ideas he is presenting.. |
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Fountains of Wayne - Traffic and Weather
Fountains of Wayne are the Gods of pop music. If Welcome Interstate Managers was a collection of short stories in song form, then Traffic and Weather is an even better collection with more humor. I already feel like CNN has the hottest female anchors, imagining them throwing their lust around like the Title track to the CD makes it even better. |
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Game of Thrones (Martin)
I started this book assuming it was going to be a high fantasy novel. Elfs, Dragons, Magic and the like. It isn't. It IS fantasy but more surrounding the politics and cunning of a few high ranking families. Incest, Murder, Intrigue, unscrupulous midgets. It has it all and more. |
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway.
© Copyright 2003-2007, Eric Thompson |
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