Just finished Charles Sheffield’s Cold as Ice. Really, really, really good modern hard science fiction - highly recommended.

In a similar vein, I finished Planets of Adventure - old, almost antique science fiction by Murray Lienster. Definitely a little long in the tooth here and there, but the stories are pure gold.
Can’t find this book on […]

Note:
This is not a review; this is an almost stream-of-consciousness pouring out of emotion that I wrote immediately after reading Night.
. . .
. . .
I just finished reading Night, by Elie Wiesel. It was, as Goethe says, like an axe to a frozen lake.
Not that I’ve never read about the Holocaust before. Quite […]

I am getting a little envious. How can this guy be so good - virtually every single one of his posts is gold.
Here’s a piece of a recent one:

Judge others by their intentions and yourself by your results. If you want to be at peace with the world, here’s what you should do. When you […]

The DEA and US Customs found a tunnel between Mexico and the US on Wednesday night. Thursday morning, it’s on the news.
Umm … not smart. Not smart at all.
Watch the tunnel. See who comes through it. Follow them. Contact Mexican police and do the same on the south side. Wrap up a whole ring and […]

OK, everyone knows: Google is selling out.
China is big, China is profitable, China wants control over communication and transmission of ideas. Google is big. Google is profitable. Google, whose original purpose was to enable easy access to all the world’s information, is helping China censor communication and transmission of ideas.
And the rather idiotic “don’t […]

I’m sort of in the market for a design tool that will let me have some fun with home design and architecture, and there are two tools that appear interesting right now.
One is Microspot Interiors. Looks very cool - you see it in action via a demo movie. A bit pricy, perhaps, at about 120 […]

My wife Teresa saw this on a website yesterday:

Nice!

So it wasn’t a stupid question after all.
So many of us have wanted to go with a digital SLR camera for better quality on fast-action shots, but hated to give up the live LCD preview that we’ve gotten used to.
Now we won’t have to ask why digital SLRs can’t do that anymore. Because they can.
Well, […]

I’m building another calendar and wanted something annoying out of a picture of my daughter Gabrielle.
Here’s what 30 minutes of photoshopping bought me:

Not too shabby, although far from professional.
As is usually the case, poor composition is the problem; I should never have taken the shot with that buoy in the background.
This happens to be at […]

I recently posted a tribute to Henk Berends, the retiring chairman of our company.
Today I actually delivered the speech, after making some changes, and I’m really, really, really relieved to say it went over extremely well.
The difficult thing about this particular speech is that I wanted to imitate his fairly inimitable speaking style, and so […]

We had an election today and nobody came.
Sorry, I just wanted to use that line for no particular reason. That’s what you can do when you have your own blog.
Actually, what happened, of course, is that we elected a lame-duck minority Conservative government that will have to battle every step of the way to […]

Vancouver Web 2.0 forum has started a weekly blogger interview series … all featuring bloggers from Vancouver, of course.
This week, they’re featuring Jeffery Simpson, who writes at a variety of personal and multi-author blogs. Jeffery needs a new pic for his site and should apparently never venture into another elevator ever again. (Well, at least […]

Henk Berends, the chairman of Premier, is retiring this month. Here’s something I wrote for a memory book that we are presenting to him on Wednesday.
(I can post it here two days in advance fearlessly, since he is something of a technophobe, and “blog” would likely sound as alien to him as “blickfarx.”)
Without further […]

Had to send out a little bit of mail today:

What would I do without you, Direct Mail? Easy, fast, elegant … and very inexpensive!

Akismet has now caught and liquidated 777 comment spams for me.
If you haven’t got it, you need it. It’s one of the best reasons to get Wordpress.

… that’s what my two-year old son Aidan said to me tonight as I was preparing to brush his teeth just before bedtime.
I’m humbled.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about giftedness.
It’s kind of the idea that each and every human being has certain gifts, in unique composition and degree, and that there is something, or maybe even many somethings that you, that I, that any particular individual can do better than anyone else in the world.
I personally, because […]

Last summer, I spent a day helping my dad refinish his basement. It’s in the house I grew up in; my parents have owned it for almost 40 years.
The house itself is well over a hundred years old. I was born and raised in New Westminster - the oldest city (and former capital city) […]