L'America: What's So Great About America?
When I moved to America, back in the ancient days, my friends tried to dissuade me. “Don’t move!” they’d say, “You won’t like it!” I asked why, and the replies were scattered. There was a cluster of “Americans are so shallow!” in the mix, but mostly it was about trivialities like, “Their bread is terrible,” or “You can’t ride your bike anywhere.” My friends clearly had no idea of what life in America is like. Continue reading
Apple Buys Beats: Who Do I Want to Be When I Grow Up?
It was easy to dismiss Apple when Steve Jobs took back the reins in 1997. It seemed for a while that the company’s only reason for existence was as a fig leaf, allowing Microsoft to claim Windows was not a monopoly. Redmond even bought a substantial amount of Apple stock, maybe as a gesture of support. But Steve Jobs turned the company around completely. First, he decided the fundamental question: software or hardware? Continue readingWorld Cities
Did you ever play the game of who can find the name of a city starting with a specific letter of the alphabet? Continue readingL'America: Poker Face Cool
The YouTube player can not be loaded with disabled JavaScript. The following video is embedded here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bESGLojNYSo Before moving to America, I always wondered why poker is such a popular game over here. I mean, we used to play it back in Europe, and of all the card games, it seemed the singularly stupidest. You look at your cards, you try your luck, then you see who’s got the best deal. Continue readingRunning Out of Time: Mountain Collective Passes Nearly Sold Out
Quick word of warning: while last year’s Mountain Collective passes were “nearly sold out” for months, who knows what’s going to happen this year. In any case, the site lists them as almost sold out, and they are still the best deal in mountains you’ll find. (A season pass with Epic is my second choice and would be my first choice if I lived closer to Tahoe or Colorado!)
Samsung UD590 4k Monitor and Kubuntu 14.04
I confess I had an itch. Even in my dual monitor setup, I never seemed to have enough visual real estate. If I had the Android development UI full screen on one side and the emulator on the other, it took only a single konsole shell to fill up everything I had. Then I was left without space for instant messaging, writing, emailing, etc. It’s common year 2014. There are 10 inch tablets with 2560×1600 resolution (Google’s Nexus 10 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire HDX 8. Continue readingI HEART Janet Reid, but She's Dangerous
I’ve been following the blog of one Janet Reid, literary agent. Well, she really has two blogs that I know of: the one I mentioned, and a second and much juicier one. It’s called Query Shark, and it’s a collection of queries and her comments. Queries, in case you didn’t know, are the letters (emails) that authors send to agents. In them, the former request representation by the latter, by presenting a project. Continue reading