Reviews

What do you get when you combine the genres of hard-boiled detective noir, spaghetti-western and urban fantasy set in L.A.? You get Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey. This book was recommended to me by my friend Quentin, and my fiancé had also mentioned to me that she had read a promising review of the novel.

I have not been posting here much of late, which is partly due to the amount of stuff I’m working on, and partly due to the fact that I’ve been writing and posting stuff in other places around the web, since it is easier.

I am not naturally a very organized person, which is something I’ve always struggled with. My tendency, from an early age, has always been to try and hold all my responsibilities, appointments and tasks within my head.

Let The Right One In is a novel from Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist, and also now a film from Swedish director Tomas Alfredsson. I’ve consumed both now, and while they each should be judged on their own merits I’m going to attempt to review both the novel and the movie in one post.

Google Voice is Google’s upgrade to the GrandCentral service they acquired almost two years ago. I’ve had a GrandCentral account for almost as long as the service existed, but I never found a reason to use it, mostly because the feature set was just short of being useful enough for me to want to manage an additional phone service.

I went to go see Watchmen opening night, and I thought it would be worth my while to jot down some of my thoughts, now that I have had a couple to days to think about the film.

A few weeks ago I was having drinks with my good friend Greg, and the topic of social bookmarking came up. I was discussing some of my ideal features in a service, before we got back to the more serious business of catching up.

If you are a reader of tech blogs, you will have no doubt noticed the thorough savaging that the Amazon Kindle has been receiving at the hands of many prominent technology pundits like Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble, as well as podcasts, including the crew at TWiT and Buzz Out Loud.

On recommendation of far too many people to mention, I’m checking out Google Reader again. I remember peeking at it when it was first released, when I was stubbornly intent on sticking with browser/desktop based reader, and I remember being less than impressed.

How many times have you googled yourself? Too embarrassed to say? Same here. I suppose just about everyone with a connection to the Internet has been guilty of a little ego-surfing once in a while.

Against my better judgment, I went to go see the movie adaptation of Silent Hill this weekend. While I’ll agree with the guys at Penny Arcade that I should not pretend this was a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, I will say that I enjoyed it.

It hardly seems worth it to write a review of Google Calendar this late into the game does it? After all, with a Google product I’m sure everyone who is interested has already jumped onto the link to create their own account and see for themselves what it is like.

I cannot remember how I initially heard about Krugle, but I’m glad that I did. For those of you who haven’t heard of this service (which may be many of you), Krugle is a service that aims to be the search engine for developers, and it appears to be well on its way.

It is with some trepidation that I set out to review the developer preview of the Flock browser. It hardly seems fair, does it? After all, the public beta isn’t scheduled to come out for another month.

If you are a blogger, you have probably already heard about Performancing.com. If you haven’t yet, or have procrastinated on checking out the site, you really need to go there this very instant.

As usual, my review is being written somewhat late. This Saturday, I went to go see V for Vendetta at the local IMAX. I have to admit that despite my excitement, I was very worried.

I haven’t posted in a few days, in part because I’ve been pretty busy, and partly because I’ve been overhauling my system with a brand new Linux distribution. I’m now running Gentoo and I absolutely love it.

Just about every fan of the creative team of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean has heard of the new movie MirrorMask, and just about every fan waited as impatiently as I for it to reach the theaters.

I recently came upon a Boing Boing post regarding a new online store serving up digital media for the public. The store is Common Media, which has been supplying free fair-use media for a while now, but as a commerce site it comes in two flavors: Common Tunes and Common Flix, which are music and video stores respectively.

Last night I attended the Dresden Dolls show at the Barrymore Theater in Madison, and it was one of the best rock shows I have experienced in my life. The night began quietly, but with a sense of mischief.