Reviews

Review: Laughing Corpse, by Laurell K. Hamilton

This is the second book in a series: Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. I’m not really sure why I bought this book. The first book in the series didn’t knock my sox off. It was mostly o.k. – but it wasn’t something that sent me teetering on the edge of obsession to get the next book. I guess the author’s Merry Gentry books swayed the decision. I just read the first two books of THAT series…
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CoffeeWellbeing

Pop quiz

You are filling your coffee mug from the tap at your office, when you smell a distinct metallic odor. Do you: a. dump out the water in your mug and seek another source; b. stick your nose in your partially filled mug to determine if the smell is coming from the water; c. put your mouth under the tap to see if it tastes like metal too; or, d. pretend you never smelled anything and finish making…
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Kitchen Sink

If someone asks a question in the woods and no one is there to hear it, do you have to answer?

I feel pretty inadequate when I see sites that look cooler than mine, so you could expect that I feel pretty low just about every time I browse the internet. One thing has kept me going, my agency’s internal site design was really lame. Notice the strategic use of the past tense? Sure, the folks in my department may be underpaid civil servants, but they get paid to design a web site. Me? Cheryl…
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Kitchen Sink

Good times

I had lunch with a friend I had not seen in a couple of years today. That, by its self, made today a pretty cool day. I also got to spend the workday hanging around a couple of people I really enjoy talking too. It may be the ingredients for an overly productive workday, but it makes for a really nice day. Now that I’ve filled my quota for saccharine this week, tomorrow we’ll return to our…
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Family and Friends

Where there’s a will, there’s a dead guy with real or liquid assets

People keep running into me. First there was that run-in with a car after our circle of life, downpour dash at Adventure Island. I was standing beside my car, minding my own business, when the car next to me unexpectedly leapt into action and sideswiped my hindquarters. I let out what I felt, at the time, was a perfectly acceptable yelp – which seemed to serve its purpose, the driver stopped.
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Kitchen Sink

Day number 12,322

It’s these kinds of things that keep me busy when “the system” is down at work. In Excel, enter today’s date in one cell, your birth date in another cell, and a formula that calculates the difference in a third cell. WA LA! Your age, calculated in days. If only I knew what time I was born, I could be a little more precise. Good thing the internet connection is still up, eh? Excuse me… I…
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Travel

A water logged adventure

There is a place, deep in the heart of Tampa’s urban wilderness, where the locals go to cool off. Like an oasis in the midst of desert wasteland, it is a place filled with life. It is also a place of death defying falls, unrelenting surf, and the never-ending smell of Coppertone. This place has a name, and its name is Adventure Island. Theme parks are a place where even the hardiest native…
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Kitchen Sink

Random pieces of metal and plastic

I am constantly finding odd shaped pieces material lying around. Often, I have no idea where they came from. The most insidious of these objects fall in that grey area between vital cog and piece of scrap. At first glance (and the second and third), I can neither tell where they belong or how important they may be. (The art of determining a mystery object’s likely value is something I don’t…
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AppleComputer

Sleeping with the enemy

“Cats and dogs, living together, mass-hysteria!” – Bill Murray, Ghostbusters 97.5% of the folks out there who bought a PC this year won’t care one whiff about this – but what do they know anyway? First, there was the Macintosh. Then, there was Wintel. Now (or in 2006 anyway) there is Macintel. This is just like finding out Darth Vader was Luke’s father. There’s a great disturbance in…
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Reviews

Review: Lies: A fair and balanced look at the right, By Al Franken

First, I’d like to say that I wasn’t a big Al Franken fan when he wrote for and appeared on SNL. Second, if you’re a registered Republican, you’re probably not going to enjoy this book. Having said that, this is the second book by the author I’ve read and I’ve really enjoyed both. Hey, I’m man enough to admit that I’m a liberal commie bastard, I really liked it. In a nutshell, the…
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