The Blog: Laments From La Mancha

I don’t know about you, but I find that for me reading is a habit. Like all good habit’s, they only work when you make a conscience decision to take them up and keep them maintained. I go in cycles. All my life I’ve been an avid reader, but there are days, weeks, months and even years, when I’ve set aside the written word and just haven’t exposed myself to new thoughts and ideas.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d still pick up a book from now and then, but recently I had gone through a dry spell. During the Memorial Day weekend, my wife finally had some time to do some reading and she picked up Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card) to give that a read since I had been extolling her for about a year to look at it.

Seeing how much my wife was enjoying, I thought to myself, self, you need to be reading something to. That weekend started off a streak of reading that I haven’t seen in a little while and it feels good. I had tried to pace myself to read a book a week, but that isn’t always possible, so here’s the list as best as I can remember it. If you have suggestions of things that you’ve read and think I should as well, let me know. I tried to jot them down in the order I read them (oldest at the bottom), but I could be wrong. A lot of life has happened between then and now.

Seventh Son – Orson Scott Card

Armageddon’s Children – Terry Brooks
Angel Fire East – Terry Brooks
A Knight of the Word – Terry Brooks
Running With the Demon – Terry Brooks

Earthborn – Orson Scott Card
Earthfall – Orson Scott Card

Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles

The Ships of Earth – Orson Scott Card
The Call of Earth – Orson Scott Card
Memory of Earth – Orson Scott Card

Promise of the Witch King – R.A. Salvatore
Digital Fortress – Dan Brown – Meh
The Stolen Child: A Novel – Keith Donohue
The Sparrow – Mary Doria Russell – Great Book

First Meetings – Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Giant – Orson Scott Card
Shadow Puppets – Orson Scott Card
Shadow of the Hegemon – Orson Scott Card
Ender’s Shadow – Orson Scott Card

So as you can see, it’s been an Orson Scott Year so far and I’m digging it. If you’re not reading, get out there, dust something off and give it a peek.

There’s been an influx of technology and gadgetry into the Soulliere house hold over the past few weeks. Some personally investments, some work related, but few things are as fun as setting up and playing with some new technology.

On the personal entertainment front, I broke down and finally stepped into the iPod lifestyle with a new black 80 gig iPod. (The sad thing is that it is full already – and that’s with me not syncing my entire collection of John Denver CDs!) It’s really kinda fun. I got a black iHome for the office and I’m in music heaven. While I haven’t an ounce of musical ability (vocally or with instruments), I love having tunes with me all the time and this makes that possible. Plus the new iTunes 7.0 has a lot of the features I was complaining about a while ago when I discussed iTunes vs. Music Match. Music Match still comes out ahead on some features, but iTunes is a heck of a lot slicker.

To go along with the iPod, I decided that it’s time I dip my toes in the mac waters (you know what they say, “once you go mac…”). I want to make sure I have the knowledge and experience I need to best advise the University on various projects. I’ve always hated macs, but like most hate, that was born on a platform of ignorance. All that having been said, by Tuesday I should have my new 13” black macbook. I had thought about just going with a 17” macbook pro, but I’m not ready for that kind of experience. Instead I settled for the 23” Apple HD display…. (you can see some pictures as that’s already arrived). MMMMmmmm HD goodness. Another little add on for the iPod is that we got the media connection center so we can plug the iPod into the TV. It’s actually awesome and looks great (we took a snap shot of that as well).

The other little toy add to the house was actually prompted by my wife. We are now proud owners of an XBOX 360. I know, about a year late, and a few days before the PS3 and Wii hit the stores, but honestly, with 4 of them showing up at your local Walmart, how soon do you think you’ll actually have you hands on one. Michelle thought it would be cool to kill zombies in Dead Rising, but for me, I was interested in the streaming media aspects and its connectivity to Windows Media Center and eventually Vista. I’m tired of plugging a laptop into the TV to watch some streamed content. I know that if I hacked an XBOX I could do a lot of that already, but we’re trying hard to be honest folks and do things within the legal limits, and with a hacked xbox, it’s too easy to download games and what now and not pay the piper his due.

So with that in mind, I have a new computer coming this week as well. I’m gonna need a Media Center PC, and since The Beast has passed from the desk into the box, it was getting time to replace it. So this is what’s on its way:

Intel Core2 Extreme processor X6800 (2.93GHz, 1066MHz FSB, 4MB cache)
4 Gigs of ram PC5300 (choke on that Adobe Photoshop!)
Terabyte of Space
ATI Radeon X1900 CrossFire Edition with 512MB, Dual DVI
2 21” HD LCDs

So that should be enough to keep me busy for a little while.

In any case, if you’re xbox living and you’re looking to school me in a variety of games (we have like a dozen, so we might have some overlap), look for “Don Quixote1974”

“Weird Al” recently did a paradoy of James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful”. Do to various record label struggles, it didn’t find it’s way on his new CD. Here’s a fan video version and the original James Blunt Version for your enjoyment.