Several months back I sang the praises of the online personal library network by the name of LibraryThing. In addition to all of the great stuff I talked about earlier, they also receive several hundred free books a month from publishers that they give away. After a few months of trying, I was notified in June that I won a copy of The Marriage of True Minds by Stephen Evans. In exchange for the free book, LibraryThing asks you to review it for the community. Here we go: Continue reading The Marriage of True Minds – Review
Category: Opinions
A category wherein Ken rates certain products, companies, services, and ideas by giving them between 0-5 “cheese” based on usefulness, fun, mood and other arbitrary criteria.
Check it off…
Disclaimer: I have never seen The Bucket List. But it’s about two guys who are going to die so they do a bunch of things that they have always wanted to do before the kick the bucket. Apparently they are quite different; I imagine they go on all sorts of adventures and shenanigans, while one eventually dies, the other one tears up about losing his new friend, dies of a broken heart and a red fern grows between their graves. Anyway, the bucket list… Continue reading Check it off…
The Kite Runner
I finally got around to reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini a few weeks back. It had been sitting on my shelf for several months–a few of them while I plugged through Don Quixote. I picked it up on a whim one evening in a bookstore…it was on sale pretty cheap, I’d heard someone mention it to me before, and it was a NY Times Bestseller. I read it in two days. Continue reading The Kite Runner
Slaying a Giant
Last spring I needed a new book to read over Spring Break. We were heading down to Florida to visit Renee’s folks (and Jack!) and I planned on doing little else but running and relaxing in the sun. I decided to finally get around to reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. It had long been my favorite musical, ever since we saw it in Chicago on our Annual Chicago Weekend with the Roehrigs. I then saw it on Broadway on our high school senior class trip and again in Chicago with Renee, Doug and whoever had a crush on Doug at that time in college. I plowed through unabridged version that week of vacation. It was amazing how much more back-story there is to what happens in the musical. Anyway, I was hooked on the Classics. Continue reading Slaying a Giant
Got Books?
?When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.? ~Desiderius Erasmus
I stumbled upon an intriguing website a few weeks back: LibraryThing.com. Basically, the website is social networking for book readers. After registering an account, you add all the books you own (or have ever read) into your catalog. Then LibraryThing can show you other users’ profiles who have the same books in their catalog. You can browse their catalog and see what they thought about the books you have read, or even get ideas for new books to read from like-minded readers. A pretty nifty concept that is extremely well done. Continue reading Got Books?
OpenOffice.org Review
Well, I finally decided to check out OpenOffice.org’s free office suite software. It is an open-source software solution which includes word processing (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), database (Base), slide show presentation (Impress), drawing editor (Draw), and scientific equation creator (Math). Open source software allows the source code to be open to the public, which allows thousands of developers to work on it and offer the software for free. See this article on the possible future for open source software. After reading about about this software and knowing that Microsoft offers it’s Office software suite for about $499, I thought I’d give it a try and compare it.
Continue reading OpenOffice.org Review