Home of DJ and technophile Jonathan Puddle (aka J Puddy)
Books
A hunger to write
Jun 23rd
Over the last few months I’ve been developing a hunger to write again. Having a young family hugely impacts the time you have available for hobbies and personal fulfillment, so I’ve been trying (and generally failing) to make wise choices with the time I do have. God has provided for us in 3 awesome ways with a specific project that is consuming almost all of our evenings, at present.
The back story, is that our good friend Dave was approached to have his master’s thesis published as a book. A thesis and a book are two different things, and significant editing More >
Offline book lending ruining the publishing industry
Jan 20th
The RIAA and others use ridiculous headlines such as mine, to try and explain their economic troubles. Piracy is always to blame. Strange that 2009 saw the biggest holiday records broken once again, despite the “rampant” piracy.
Here’s a great and humurous perspective on the matter.
Apparently, over 2 billion books were “loaned” last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 Billion per year, losses which extend back to at least More >
Marty McFly’s 2015 Nikes coming to a store near you, in 2008
Jun 30th
Came across this this morning, via Engadget. Nike is *almost* bringing Marty’s shoes from 2015 back to the past.
See what I did there?
Anyway. Check it. And then get yourself a copy of the book Jennifer Government, which I just finished reading. It’s a superb piece of fiction, examining an Orwellian style future-present where corporations, not the government, control the world. Very funny, and quite disturbing, in it’s familiarity.
Truth and Evil
Jun 20th
I finished reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula last night. What a truly excellent book. I encourage you to read it. So many great elements and things going on. It’s told from the perspective of 5 different people, so the diction and world-view is constantly changing. Remember it’s set in the 19th century, so there’s a lot of superstition, but “everyone believes in God.” It’s fascinating to read how they put everything down to God, and in light of the spiritual happenings relating to the vampires, they have perfect room for God and his salvation. It seems to me that today someone More >
The Trouble with Islam Today
Mar 23rd
by Irshad Manji.
It’s actually a really important book. This kind of thing needed to be written, and not just for the reasons you’ll assume from it’s title. It’s written by a Canadian Muslim journalist, and is about Islam, Islam’s treatment of the Jews, of women, of other Muslims… and why it’s time for Islam to stop blaming the West for their problems and take a long hard evaluatory look at themselves. In addition to the usual ones, the author very recently received quite a credible death threat from a prominent Muslim authority. Her book is incredibly eye opening about a lot More >