Archive for January, 2006
- Making Choices • January 30, 2006
Here’s something I wrote several years ago while facing the most difficult decision of my life. I felt crushed by the burden of choosing between two alternatives that seemed equally horrible at the time. So I sat and scribbled this on a yellow legal pad. It seemed to flow like a Socratic dialogue, building from [...]
- Bruce Springsteen’s “Meeting Across the River” • January 21, 2006
Bruce Springsteen's "Meeting Across the River" is a song about a transformative night in the lives of two characters. Boundaries will be crossed. Dark deeds await.
- “Infoquake” Full Website Launched • January 16, 2006
It's now six months until the publication of my science fiction novel "Infoquake." As promised, I've revamped the website at www.infoquake.net with lots of new goodies.
- Writing Has Killed My Desire to Read • January 12, 2006
I can’t tell you whether I prefer Ian McEwan’s recent novel Saturday to his prior effort, Atonement. I can’t comment on whether John Banville’s The Sea deserved the Booker Prize (though I can tell you that his older work The Book of Evidence was certainly Bookerworthy). I don’t know if The Plot Against America continues [...]
- Progress Bars and Technological Progress • January 6, 2006
There’s a dialog box that appears in certain Microsoft products which caught my attention recently. It’s a progress indicator, one of those long horizontal bars that fills up as the computer gets closer to completing a task. The label underneath this particular bar comes straight out of Monty Python: This may take up to 1 [...]
