Category Archives: Essay

April Book Browse: Coffee, Magazines, New Books, and Zeitgiest

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It’s the beginning of the month, so I was looking forward to my First Saturday Book Browse at the Potomac Yards Barnes and Noble. But first I finished[amazon_link id=”0316093556″ target=”_blank” ] Chasing the Moon[/amazon_link], mostly at the gym, but I polished off the last few pages in the parking lot outside the bookstore. Like all Lee Martinez stories, it was a good romp through much weirdness that give the main character a chance to find themselves. In this case, it’s a girl named Diana, who moves into an apartment full of eldritch horrors that glom onto her, though it winds up a pretty good deal out of it for everyone, except maybe the moon, which is as the title promises, being chased. Sort of like a grownup version of Pixar’s Monsters Inc., without the Inc. Continue reading →

Overheard In Bar: “Your Problem Is That You Don’t Understand Micro-Economics”

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by Ernest Lilley

Alex Pournelle and I were hanging out in a Manhattan Bar down by 17th st having a beer. We didn’t really need a beer, what we needed was sleep because we were in town to do a network installation for a trade show, which means the following morning we’d signed up for a non-stop sixteen hour day full of debugging switches, dragging cable, tracking down unauthorized wifi access points and soothing frayed nerves. It just seemed like a good idea to get a beer. At the time. But I digress. Continue reading →

iPad 2 V The Contenders: Sadly, Still The Year Of The Hare

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[amazon_link id=”0823405648″ target=”_blank” ][/amazon_link]

Apple's early tablet lead may be slowly shrinking, but this racewatcher doubts that either Android or PC tablets will either sneak past the iPad, or spur it to greatness. Book cover: The Tortoise and the Hare, by Janet Stevens

Apple’s head start is nearly a year old, and you’d think that the tortoises, both Android and Windows driven, would be catching up with the hare by this time, but it just isn’t happening. Make no mistake, though my iPad’s been a nearly constant companion since launch day when I picked it up at the Apple Store, I’m not an Apple fan. I don’t like the closed ecosystem that Jobs has created, and consider it a hip version of AOL’s gated community from the 80s. No gated community can really be hip, but I get the utility of it. Job’s is a utopianist, and for those who fit the mold, it’s a great thing to be part of. Continue reading →

Things You Did Not Know About The Garden State

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[amazon_link id=”0762759933″ target=”_blank”][/amazon_link]

I haven't read it, but I'm sure it's full of fabulous secrets about the Garden State!

When people ask me where I’m from, I often say New York City. When they ask me which part, I tell them, “New Jersey.” NJ is a diverse and wacky state about which there is much confusion, and I’m here to add to it.

Q: Why is it called the Garden State, when it looks like an industrial wasteland when you drive through it?

A: I thought I’d explained this already. Some idiot went and named it the Garden State, and people started flocking in from NYC cluttering up the place. So we established a blighted area zone around the major traffic arteries so that everyone would think it was a post-apocalyptic movie set and…just…keep…going. Sort of like the Hollywood western movie towns in reverse. Instead of desert behind the facade, it’s lush greenery and bucolic landscape. Continue reading →