Entries from May 2007 ↓

Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier tells the story of W.P. Inman, a wounded civil war deserter who's only wish is to make it back to his home in Cold Mountain and his beloved Ada. Unfortunately for Inman, the civil war has blighted the South, and although he meets many compassionate citizens as he trudges west to Cold Mountain, the war has also brought out the worst in others. Ada, abandoned with a farm but not the skills to work it by  her Father's death, is simultaneously on her own path of discovery and learning. Continue reading →

The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason follows four  friends through their last year of college. The plot follows Paul as he attempts to unravel a centuries old mystery hidden in The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a book more rare than the Gutenberg Bible. Are the secrets it contains really worth killing over? But the story is really about friendship. How it is forged, how it is strained, and how it is lost as people drift and are pulled apart by their separate drives. I found the book to be very enjoyable and interesting.  Continue reading →

Writ of Execution by Perri O'Shaughnessy is a cross between a Grisham legal thriller and an Evanovich Stephanie Plum novel. Nina Reilly, attorney, gets naked on page 13, but due to a fast moving plot doesn't get any for the rest of the book (427 pages worth).  The book revolves around a 7 million dollar jackpot that's won by a girl on the run.  A string of murders follow and it's a race to solve the murders and get the girl her jackpot. Continue reading →

 
At our wedding, my wife and I provided blank guest-book pages at each table, along with a glass of colored markers. The guests really enjoyed filling in the open-ended blanks. After the wedding, we sorted the pages and then had them bound to make a personalized keepsake.

At the bottom of the page I have included an image of each side of the guest-book page, as well as the original SVG source files. Continue reading →

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire begins decades before Dorothy falls into the scene, with the birth of a strangely green baby girl who has unusually sharp teeth. We follow Elphaba as she grows up, attends university, and falls into the political turmoil behind the scenes at the Emerald City.

Maguire paints a detailed background of the realistic politics that shape Oz into the country it is when Dorothy arrives. The Wicked Witch of the West may be a tortured soul, but for different reasons than you had previously thought. The book is perfectly understandable even if you have never seen the movie or read the original book, but several parts are much funnier if you have. The end of the story can drag on if you are not interested in introspective psychological monologues, but flipping past a few pages of internal commentary can speed the story along. Continue reading →

Map of Online Communities which is similar to the subway map of the US highway system I posted here.