Borrowed Time by Keith Hughes

Ness Relevant is living on borrowed time. Molecular implosion, cellular degeneration, and dangerous men are but a few of the perils faced by the friendly and unassuming forensic photographer. His quiet bachelorhood is interrupted when he receives an innocent looking device in the mail from a friend and former college professor. Ness unexpectedly finds himself embroiled in events driven by his friend’s success. This device is the focal point of a struggle that could overturn the whole world should Ness or his friend’s invention fall prey to greedy men. Before his time runs out Ness must travel back to an uncomfortable past to prevent an unthinkable future.

Editing Reality by Micah Dubinko

Editing Reality is both the name of a novel-in-progress and a podcast about the reality of editing. Host Micah Dubinko tackles a new editing topic each week, and puts it into practice against an installment of his novel. If you’re curious about the process of editing fiction, or just in the mood for a satirical story about a mad scientist, a mentally unbalanced gangster, a superhero wannabe, and a gang of cyberpirates, come have a listen.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by A Square (Edwin Abbott Abbott)

Math. Geometry. Physics. Violence? Is this the same book I read in school? Yep. One of the joys of rediscovering old books is that they still have the ability to surprise, even shock…

Roadworks by Gerard Readett

Traffic Jam Buster! Come to Brussels, a congestion-free city in 2022, but avoid the day of ‘Roadworks’, when Akila Kama, an African terrorist takes the city and many foreign heads of state hostage. His demands are simple, either the greatest humanitarian aid package is sent to Africa by the nations of the West, or their leaders die. In a city where all rail, road and underground traffic is computerised, Hugh Ryan, a Transport Authority controller, realises that while all traffic inside the city is at a standstill, Wellens, a local crimelord who helped the Africans, has embarked on his own traitorous plans which he hatches with a mole in the Transport Authority.

Singularity by Bill DeSmedt

What if the cataclysmic Tunguska explosion of 1908 was caused, not by a meteor or a comet, but by a microscopic black hole? What if that fantastic object – smaller than an atom, older than the stars, heavier than a mountain – is still down there, orbiting deep inside the earth, slowly consuming the planet? What if only a rookie government agent and an uncannily-insightful consultant stand between a renegade Russian billionaire and his plans to use the black hole to change history – or end it? What if it’s all true?

Singularity is one of my all time favorite books, but I haven’t listened to it in a while.

“When I became the NASA administrator — or before I became the NASA administrator — he [Obama] charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.“

– NASA Administrator Charles Bolden

Hmmm… there’s something missing there. Something about – oh yeah, that’s right = SPACE!

Here he is saying that line (and a lot more) on Al Jazeera:

So when I realized how to see just messages with attachments it was like a light went off in my head. Know you search operators!

To see messages with attachments search for has:attachment. You can search for specific file types like this: filename:pdf. That will give you a list of all the messages with pdfs attached.

There are a bunch of other operators such as in (in:inbox, in:trash, in:spam), is (is:starred, is:unread, is:read), and date operators (after:2004/04/16, before:2004/04/18).

See the complete list in Gmail Help.

3 Dooms of America by Eugene Fairfield – I have no idea what happened with this. It’s not on my ipod. I think I started listening but it didn’t grab me. I’m not even sure.

The Servant and Soothsayer by Michael Brownstein – Another one I don’t remember, but I did make a note about it. “Just under 4 hours. Good enough to listen to.” Wow.

The Gearheart by Alex White – I couldn’t get in to the theatrics. I felt like they were asking me to give them a lot of room because it’s labeled Steampunk.
And they asked the audience weird, irrelevant questions in each episode and read the answers on the next one. This let in the worst of all fictions – fan fiction.

Must Not Sleep by Michael Brownstein – Shades of Carlos Castaneda. Gave up halfway through as the story just got stranger and stranger for no apparent reason.

Vatican Assassin and Vatican Ambassador by Mike Luoma – This is good stuff. I have a few chapters of Vatican Ambassador left. It’s not at all what I expected – it’s better. I’m looking forward to Vatican Abdicator and Alibi Jones.

It’s in Beta, but whatever, it’s Google.

Ordinarily you’re sending your search requests out in the clear.  This way your request (the term you search on) is sent to google via a secure channel, and the results from google are returned on that same channel.

I could have just said it ain’t broke, so don’t fix it. But two things happened - I got a Nexus One, and I saw people raving about LastPass. LastPass doesn’t do the bookmark syncing, but it does offer an Android app with the paid version. And bookmarks are so 90s. They’re rarely useful. And besides, Chrome, my current browser of choice, automatically syncs my bookmarks to my Google Docs account. I was really using Xmarks for the password syncing.

Now I’m not going to do the feature vs feature breakdown with charts and graphs that the title may have implied. I’m just going to describe the two experiences:

Xmarks - Create your account, install the software, surf the web. It imports the saved passwords in your browser and remembers new ones you use. It syncs automatically with their server. Browsers on other computers you use (or other browsers on the same machine) automatically stay in sync. After a couple of weeks of using Xmarks you forget about it, and it just becomes part of how surfing the web works. You can view your bookmarks by signing in to their website from any browser.

LastPass - Create your account, install the software, try to surf the web. It imports (and wipes out) the passwords in your browser. When you go to a site that requires a log in you get two weird options – AutoFill and AutoLogin. Try all the options listed under each and eventually sometimes one of them turns out the be your credentials for that site. You’re in! Unless of course none of those worked. In that case you get temporarily redirected to a form on a separate page that asks about dozen questions about that particular site / login. Most are optional. Instead of staying out of your way and working behind the scenes, LastPass is constantly in your face. About 25% of the time I end up having to log in without it. And lastly, if you lose your LastPass password you are SCREWED. There’s no recovery.

End result – LastPass uninstalled. I’m back to Xmarks. All is good with the world again.

Yesterday Google notified me that I was overcharged, and would be receiving a partial refund:

We’re writing in regards to your recent Nexus One purchase. There was an issue with the way the sales tax was applied to your order. When your order was placed, you paid taxes on the full retail price of the phone. However, you should have only been charged taxes on the sales price of the phone. We apologize for this issue and wanted to let you know that Google will issue a partial refund for the difference in the amount of taxes you were charged.

Today they made good on it with a $17.50 refund.

More Android Awesome.

I realize most of you believe that, and probably aren’t even picking up on my sarcasm. That’s fine. If you believe that  it’s settled –  global warming is real and man made, and we must do something to stop it – I can’t do anything to change your mind. You can’t reason someone out of a position that reason didn’t get them in to. Global Warming is your religion, Al Gore is your Savior.

All I ask is that you take 15 minute to read a speech Michael Crichton gave to the National Press Club on January 25, 2005.

Michael’s detailed explanation of why he criticizes global warming scenarios. Using published UN data, he reviews why claims for catastrophic warming arouse doubt; why reducing CO2 is vastly more difficult than we are being told; and why we are morally unjustified to spend vast sums on this speculative issue when around the world people are dying of starvation and disease.

There are scientists who believe in Global Warming – even ones who were alive during the 1970′s Global Cooling crisis-that-never-was. They are the ones the media gives the mic to. And despite what we are told every day, there are also scientists who do not. 31,486 American scientists, including 9,029 with PhDs signed a petition stating that there is no convincing scientific evidence of man-made global climate change. BUT NONE OF THAT MATTERS!

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.  Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.  In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. -Michael Crichton

Now go read the whole speech, and let us never speak of this again.