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Last week Rachel and I went with some friends to the Red Pearl, a new Chinese restaurant in Columbia. Our server, Ben, was able to immediately tell me which dishes contained peanuts – an excellent start. Even with so many peanut allergies this is a rare trait; most of the time they have to go [...]

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I’ve been wanting to get out a paper on some of my undergraduate research and with my impending cross-country move, it’s moved back up the priority queue. In preparing this paper I will be collaborating with my PI as well as the then-senior grad student, now-postdoc who helped me at the time. This seemed like [...]

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I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy reading Tycho’s writings over at Penny Arcade. His command of vocabulary and rich, fantastic metaphor fills me with a tingly delight. After finishing Lolita, I think Vladimir Nabokov tops it, like a Tycho writing in the 1950s if Tycho was a trilingual synesthete.

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I finished watching Dollhouse this weekend, further convincing me that somebody like Joss Whedon is perfectly positioned to lead his contemporaries into the wonderful world of 21st century business models, a la Trent Reznor in music. Careful, spoilers inside.

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All too often my weekends pass by in a blur of responsibilities, visiting families, and going places that, after ensuring I am sufficiently dizzy, cruelly abandons me on Monday morning. I am left drinking coffee and asking myself just where that time went, and how long is it until Friday again? In a refreshing inversion, [...]

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I saw the movie 9 on Saturday night, after being sufficiently excited for it by the trailer. As the title of this post reveals, I left the movie with a richer understanding of its 56% on RottenTomatoes. The animation and action sequences were great; in fact, the movie was oozing with potential. Unfortunately, thanks to [...]

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This was an excellent book – I especially loved the way Ray Bradbury ended it with the Afterward and Coda. Both of these bits have a confrontational anti-censorship edge that makes me smile, and continues to be relevant today

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I don’t know if I’m happier that I finished this book or that I’m finally pushing at least one of the Inheritance books off of my bookshelf display.

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It’s been a little while since I’ve posted here. The main reason is that I’ve been spending my online time working on my secret site redesign. I’m extremely close to finishing and after the work I did this afternoon, I think I’m in pretty good shape to launch in the next couple of days.

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I’m three books deep into this “cycle” and I really wish that Paolini would do the world a favor and just stop writing. In Brisingr, he adds Dragonheart and Redwall (sword forged from the metal of a falling star) to his list of stolen themes, while remaining true to form and adding nothing new to them. Much of the writing continues to be amateur, including several paragraph-long sentences punctuated with a single comma. These sentences and much of his description is filled with useless information in an attempt to sound flowery…

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