CUViper

I liked the result that this quiz gave:

What Kind of Reader Are You?

Your Result: Dedicated Reader

You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.

There’s a question of how many books are on your to-read list, which I can actually look up with a simple tag. Thanks to LibraryThing for feeding my slightly obsessive behavior, so I can catalog all of my books and act like a normal person the rest of the time.

One of my favorite authors, Robert Jordan, passed away yesterday.  I don’t even know how to express this loss, except to say that I’m very sorry I never got the chance to meet him.  May he rest in peace with the knowledge that he has touched many lives…

I love xkcd for the funny-because-it’s-true look at the way some people think. He might just be the nerdy-webcomic equivalent of Jeff Foxworthy.

I thought of my own quip the other day along those lines. I won’t attempt to make it into a comic — not even with stick figures — but here’s the gist of it:

When you’re out with your friends (say N people in the group) and someone proposes a toast, do you ever watch to see if there are N*(N-1)/2 unique glass clinks?

Ok, I’ve never actually counted as it happens, but I have wondered before…

When I moved my blog a while back, I tried to give an explanation of how to use RSS to better keep track of blogs and other websites. But like many things, I think my explanation did little for people who don’t already have some idea about what RSS is. My mom’s reaction was simple: “Huh?”

So if you still don’t get it, check out this video, which (I think) does a great job of putting it in simple terms: Video: RSS in Plain English

The irony, of course, is that I don’t really end up spending any less time on the internet now that I use an RSS reader. The difference is that I can cover a lot more area in that time by letting it come to me. Just try it for a few days, and you’ll see how powerful it really is.

As suggested in the video, I use Google Reader for my feeds. (Clever Google — they’re trapping me in their services more and more…) I like that I can “star” items, which I use to track things that I want to read more or follow up on later. I can also share items that I think are cool, which ends up on my own link blog. And if you just added that page to your bookmarks, you’re missing the point — there’s a feed for it too!

Of all the predictions I might have made about Battlestar Galactica’s season finale, characters quoting from a Jimi Hendrix Bob Dylan song is nearly the last thing I would have imagined.

I love that show.

Update: I just found out that the song is actually by Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix just did a very popular cover version. I guess a lot of people make that mistake, but still, shame on me!

Music geeks may want to check out Bear McCreary’s discussion of this new cover version. He says the song will be on the season three soundtrack, so I definitely want to pick that up (and maybe the first two while I’m at it).

I like to read fiction, when I have the time, and most often I live in the fantasy section of the bookstore. Right now there are three series in development that I’m following as each new tome comes out. (I say tome because they’re huge — each book tends to be around a thousand pages…) In no particular order:

• The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan
• Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson
• A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin

I’m currently reading A Feast for Crows, the fourth in Martin’s series. I also read his blog, and I saw today the announcement that HBO has gotten the rights to do a show based on the series! I got home and told Millie, and she was laughing at just how excited this has me.

This series of books is definitely on the adult side of things, with often dark and violent themes. It’s less about Good vs. Evil, and more like the real world where good and evil aren’t always well defined. I’m glad that HBO got the rights for this, because on any other network I would fear that the show would be gentrified. With shows like Rome and The Sopranos under their belt, you can be sure that HBO won’t shy away in Martin’s world.

My desire for it to be done up right is seriously conflicting with my need to start watching it. For now I’ll get back to the book and anticipate great things to come…

Some food for thought: The Denver Blizzard

Of course, I don’t live in Colorado anymore, but I still consider myself a Coloradan. People around the Bay Area are freaking out that the overnight temperatures are dipping below freezing – OMG! News sources are having a field day with how to protect from the cold, even telling people how to keep their pipes from freezing. Give me a break…

The internets are all a-buzz with chatter about the iPhone (this one, not those) so I thought I should throw in my 2¢. And then I realized that I’d need $498.98 more to actually get my hands on one, plus a 2-year contract. I find it ironic that people were so up-in-arms about the price of the PS3 — which ironically has the exact same pricing tiers — but a cellphone seems somehow reasonable at that price. I like my phone just fine, and a 2-year contract got mine and Millie’s for free. So while Apple’s new toy does look cool, I’ll be passing on it, thank you very much. I hope I don’t lose geek-cred for saying that though…

My blog has moved — its new home is http://blog.cuviper.com/. Of course, if you’re reading this, then you’ve already found it. Anyone who can’t find it, just let me know… Actually, those of you who use a feed-reader instead of probably won’t notice, assuming my redirects work properly. You might want to update your feed subscription though.

The move is mostly inspired by me being lazy. I used to have the blog on my own hosting account at AxisInternet, which worked great. WordPress keeps coming out with new versions though — it’s good to get new features and bug fixes, of course, and the upgrades have all gone smoothly, but it’s still a nuisance. So, I transferred my blog to the official wordpress.com site (with some DNS magic so you still see it on cuviper.com), and now they can update it for me.

Hosting WordPress on your own is good if you want to do a lot of customization, but I’m not really doing anything special. The new site is almost exactly the same as before. The only loss is to the people who subscribed to email updates before, and I’ll send a note to those on how to get updates now.

If you read this far, you are now rewarded with our Christmas pics. Bombs away!

Update: After writing up directions of the various ways to easily track new content on websites, I decided I might as well copy that here. When a site gives you a feed URL, here are some things you can do with it:

1. If you use a custom homepage like Google or Yahoo, they usually let you add feeds to see updates. Look for a place to add content by URL and copy in my feed link.
2. When you have a lot of sites you want to keep track of, an aggregator can come in handy — this is what I use to read all my websites. There are programs you can download to manage this, or you can use a website like Bloglines or Google Reader. Basically, you get all of your websites collected into one page for you to read, so you don’t have to go all over the place looking for updates.
3. If you really like getting email updates, you can do that too. There are several sites that can translate RSS feeds to email for you. RssFwd looks pretty good, or you could try R-mail or FeedBlitz.

For any of those, all you’ll need is my feed address: http://blog.cuviper.com/feed/

Enjoy!

I’ve always wondered…

You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 70% Superman 70% Green Lantern 65% The Flash 65% Iron Man 60% Robin 55% Catwoman 40% Hulk 40% Wonder Woman 30% Supergirl 30% Batman 20%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

Spider-Man and Superman — I guess that makes me quite the goody-goody.

Tests like this are interesting, but not because of anything they reveal to yourself. Most of the time you’ll feel quite pleased with the result — since you provided the answers, of course it will align with your self-image. It’s more revealing for others as a way to see through your eyes in the mirror.

It might be a cool social experiment to flip it around — I tend to be curious about the way others see me. For example, if someone else found that I closely resemble the Hulk, that might indicate some areas for personal improvement. Anyone want to fill out the same quiz about me and let me know your result?

One of my favorite things about reading books is when I find something immediately worth quoting. I found this bit in The Fellowship of the Ring:

Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him.

J.R.R. Tolkien

I enjoy the fact that a passage from a fantasy novel, written over fifty years ago, can still have so much relevance. Just replace “the Dark Lord” with “terrorism”, and Tolkien might as well have been Nostradamus. He often said that he wasn’t trying to make any metaphors with reality, but I suppose things like this are just universal truths. It is what we do in fear that is dangerous to our way of life, more than any one person who would do us harm.