Monthly Archives: August 2009

Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard Work, But Lots Are

Lev Grossman’s post on the renaissance of storytelling in the WSJ is a good read.  I love a good story.  The other day I was talking with a friend who told me he loved spy novels, and then went on to say that he’d never read the “Sherlock Holmes” stories.  “I wish I could read [...]
Posted in Reading | Comments closed

Not in the credits, but…

I finally got a chance to go and see District 9 tonight, and it was really good.  I wasn’t totally sure what to expect, beyond what I’d seen in the trailers, and it was different, and good different. It was made even more interesting by the fact that I’m currently reading Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in [...]
Posted in Idea Factory, Reading | Comments closed

TD Canada Trust and Greentec rock

Today my father-in-law and I loaded a pick-up truck full of old monitors, computers, and old cell phone equipment in order to take it all to a free “electronic waste day” held in our community.  The event was generously funded by TD Canada Trust and Greentec, who literally unloaded our entire vehicle for us, smiling [...]
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How to teach children about computers

This Saturday a local company is hosting an event to allow residences to dump old computer and telephone equipment, and have it get properly recycled or disposed of for free.  I pretty much only have old computer equipment, some of which I use, some of which I store for the day when I’ll need it [...]
Posted in Mozilla Education, family | Comments closed

Of Birds’ Nests

I want to speak of birds’ nests.  I have very little that can properly relate these ideas, other than the fact that everything I will say is about birds nests; and so I will place them all here, under this title, much as Sparrows will build nests beside one another in the rafters [...]
Posted in Nature, Reading, family | Comments closed

“end of story”

I have a hard time taking Brad Pitt seriously.  I’m sure that means there’s something lacking in me, that I’ve committed some sort of sin against the contemporary world.  I’m just not sure what other response I can have to a man who says things like this: The Second World War could still deliver more stories [...]
Posted in Come on! | Comments closed

Not by sight

A list of birds I heard but did not see while weeding the garden: Belted Kingfisher Cedar Waxwing Hummingbird Pileated Woodpecker American Goldfinch Blue Jay Eastern Kingbird Osprey
Posted in Nature | Comments closed

Looking for the ‘Old’ link

The web is infatuated with what is new.  You want an example, do you?  How about this.  When I got to Hacker News, I land on http://news.ycombinator.com/news.  At the top of the page, beside the obligatory “link back to the front page” is this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/newest.  It’s not just that I can get the news, [...]
Posted in Digital Swag, Idea Factory | Comments closed

On the call, and the invitation to friendship

I’ve been reflecting on the verb to call for the past two weeks.  It started (and continues) with my reading of Heidegger’s lecture series, What is called thinking? and was brought up again in a conversation with Luke last night, and in a series of blog posts he made.  Luke has long struggled with the [...]
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Blogging and Friendship

I sent an email to three friends the other day, and asked them to join me in an experiment.  It was something of a risk, and I wasn’t sure whether they would agree.  The theme of my email was blogging. I take blogging very seriously.  My blog is one of the main ways in which I [...]
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