Seattle.BloggersPub

I like Rosemary Edghill’s work a lot. She’s been very successful co-authoring books with Mercedes Lackey that I don’t like very much - I’m just not a Lackey fan. This is a stand-alone work that came out in 2003. I’m surprised I didn’t see this when i…

Brin has been one of my favorite modern science fiction authors; his one failing is that he tends to let plots spiral out of control. Kiln People is a stand-alone work, and although the twists and turns get a bit grandiose, he manages to keep everythi…

The existence of this book makes me laugh.Featured prominently in Terry Practhett’s best-selling fantasy slapstick series, Where’s My Cow is the picture book that Commander Vimes reads to his son every night in Thud!. It’s also a book about that book….

I think we all follow the release of the Flash Player penetration statistics very closely, but I had an interesting email the other day asking about an independent verification of these numbers. I’ve started wondering about this the past few weeks, and wanted to see what people on MXNA had to say. Are there any […]

I often have some difficulty in making a business case for a good user experience. To play off Potter Stewart, I can’t define why experience is important, but I know it’s valuable when I see it. In the cold, technical world of software development, it’s even more difficult to reconcile. Which is why I like […]

In the typical year, my family’s biggest source of CO2 emissions is — by quite a wide margin — air travel.  We use a bit less gasoline than a typical American family, but we more than make up for it by travelling long distances to visit our family, scattered around the east and west coasts.

A few years back, I started strategizing about how to reduce our air travel.  And I settled on a two-step plan.

Step one:  convince my sister to move from San Jose to Seattle — which would not only mean that we could see much more of each other, but also save our families at least 2 round trips per year. 

Step two:  vacation close to home every other year, saving at least one cross-country round trip flight for our family of 4.

So this year, we put both steps into action.  My sister will be moving into our neighborhood (yay!) and we decided to visit the Olympic peninsula rather than our families on the east coast.  We’ll be flying a lot less as a result.

But as things have turned out, I’m not sure that our plans have saved a single drop of fuel.

Memorable Quote of the Night Award goes to Billmon for this keeper:
All in all, looking at how the war has progressed so far, I would say the Olmert government has come down with a stunning case of the reverse Midas touch: everything it touches turns to shit.
This too is quite mordantly funny:
How many more innocent […]

Rescuer cradles body of dead girl at Qana (photo: Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Image)
I’m calling it A.Q–After Qana. Everything that happens after Qana in this miserable conflict will be colored by Israel’s grisly massacre there yesterday. And everything that happened before as well. At the beginning of the current war, I predicted here that […]

Over three days, beginning July 22, 2006, “Wake,” a sculpture by Richard Serra, was installed in Seattle’s Olympic Scultpure Park (OSP). The park, currently under construction, and developed by the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), opens on October 28, 2006. …

Seattle Times’ Sports Editor Cathy Henkel reviews Shaun Alexander’s new book, Touchdown Jesus today. She admits to not being big on sports books, and then explains that the book “is not what I’d call a page turner” and concludes by saying “… the book will not be considered a classic.”
But in between she gives a […]