Vond's Journal

... and I wasn't kidding when I said it was an LJ exodus. I just looked at my friends page on LJ and the last 25 posts consisted of:

1. Crossposts from folks' DW accounts
2. Syndicated feeds
3. 1 post each from starfallz  and jezeroth

Game over.

I am not going to be getting a DW account, since someone else has vond there, and I don't write very much long-form content anyway. I've set up an OpenID server on my box and have delegated vond.net to it, so if you are on DW and see vond.net friend you, that's me.

Also, if anyone wants an account on an OpenID provider where you know the admin, let me know :)

Pepperide Farm is now marketing Tim Tam cookies (I mean, biscuits) in the US: http://www.ilovetimtamcookies.com/

Heard a snippet of an interesting story on NPR going to the store just a few minutes ago. Apparently parts of the Berlin Wall no-man's-land are being turned into strips of wilderness. The story was neat in itself but it also had a great quote: "All walls represent policy failed". I thought that was a great quote for some reason.

Seeing a lot of complaints from across the spectrum of people on my friends list. Season change perhaps?

This time via Phil Plait "The Bad Astronmer", gotta love science-themed music.

"A still more glorious dawn awaits. Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise. A morning filled with 400 billion suns. The rising of the milky way."

( Carl Sagan - 'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed)Collapse )

Another video everyone should watch - "Instruction Manual for Life". Almost a year old, so apologies if it's a repeat for some of you.

Hmm. So I try to keep my ratings of books somewhat current on amazon.com, to leverage their recommendation engine for new suggestions (sadly, it seems to really just want me to read more of the same authors, I wish there was a way to filter that). Recently it recommended Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Arabesk trilogy (Pashazade/Effendi/Felaheen) based on my ratings (and purchase) of Effinger's Marîd Audran books. So I tracked them down and maybe there's such a thing as too literal of a recommendation - from the setting to the protagonist to the nature of the stories themselves, pretty much identical in feeling, which is really interesting because until now I'd considered the Effinger works to be refreshingly unique. He got there first, anyway. I'd still consider the Grimwood books recommended - even if you've read Effinger previously, you can compare and contrast the differences.

Not sure what I'm going to pick up next... Anyone read The City & The City by China Miéville? It's one of the next highest Amazon recommendations that's both by a fresh author and is available at my local library. Amazon seems to have decided that I like British authors, which, so far has been borne out by my reading.

"It was that instinct that drove him to try three times to save a young private injured by Taliban firefighters."

Nice editing job there, guys.

So, I can understand the Town of Blacksburg owning a GMC Savana cargo van - but why the hell do they own a jacked up GMC Savana cargo van?