Books
One of my favorite modern authors, Robert B. Parker, died at home, literally while writing his next Spenser novel. I have read the whole Spenser series several times over the years and buy each new one as soon as it comes out in paperback. I wonder if he has tucked away in his files a [...]
“Mr. Rearden,” said Francisco, his voice solemnly calm, “if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling, but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater [...]
Continue reading about Atlas Shrugged: a brief review w/spoilers
OVERNIGHT LINKS ITEM: Hey! Al Gore and I both celebrated Earth Hour with our lights on! We’re buds now! As for Kentucky, heck, they celebrated a whole Earth Week not long ago! ITEM: Creeping socialism/fascism alert: Obama tells GM CEO to hit the road. For firms and organizations still considering taking government money, there’s a [...]
AFTERNOON UPDATES: ITEM: NASA Scientist and Moonbat Warmist James Hansen says that “The democratic process doesn’t quite seem to be working” with regards to climate change and is calling for protests and direct action (Wikipedia: “Direct action can include nonviolent and violent activities which target persons, groups, or property deemed offensive to the direct action [...]
Great word: “bibliophibians”. Swap the genders of the two people in the Wondermark strip below, and you’ll capture the essence of many conversations that Sandra and I have had over the years (click on the strip to go to the full-sized original): The difference being, of course, that Sandra and I started out together with [...]
I’ve been hired by Ziff Davis Enterprises to write a weekly column on IT Management for the online version of Baseline. The column itself will be based on materials I’m writing for my (forthcoming) book, Surviving Complexity. My first column is up: “Lies, Damned Lies, and Metrics (Part I)”; here’s the opening paragraph: When Capers [...]
One of the books I’m currently writing is Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering, a greatly expanded and updated version of a book I published back in the 1990s. I’ve been posted new and revised pitfalls over at my Bruce F. Webster & Associates (bfwa.com) website. To make the pitfalls a bit easier to browse, I’ve [...]
Continue reading about “Pitfalls of Modern Software Engineering”: an update
I’m a fan of Howard Phillip Lovecraft, not because I think he was a great writer (his prose is a bit purple by today’s standards), but because he really was the father of 20th Century post-Gothic horror. Sadly, all the film adaptations of Lovecraft’s work to date have been mediocre at best and usually wretched, [...]
Continue reading about A good introduction to H. P. Lovecraft
I’ve gotten some feedback on my memorial for Arthur C. Clarke, both direct and indirect, that the “Big Three” should include Ray Bradbury, either by expanding it to the “Big Four” or by dropping one of the “Big Three” (usually Heinlein). My response is that Bradbury doesn’t belong in that group for two critical reasons. [...]
Thursday throes
We aim to please (most mostly we aim to hit) . . . MID-MORNING UPDATE: The FBI raids the office of the DC Chief Technology Officer, who is (or was) Vivek Kundra, who is now the new CTO for the Obama Administration. However, it appears that the focus is not on Kundra, but on two [...]
Continue reading about Thursday throes