Note: I’m still experimenting with how best to write about books without reading spoilers. I think I’ve largely managed to do that here, but if you don’t want to know anything about the series other than whether it’s worth reading, the answer is yes. I just spent the last week reading The Hunger Games Trilogy by […]
Review: In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
As a tech blogger and journalist I’ve been following Google pretty closely since 2006, and I was using their products before that. But for the most part I’ve focused on the parts of Google that everyone sees: the finished products. Steven Levy took a peek behind the scenes and paints an intriguing picture of a […]
Review: Force of Nature (on the greening of Walmart)
There are a lot of reasons to hate Walmart, and while Humes skims over them he doesn’t ignore them. The company puts smaller stores out of business, squeezes its suppliers so that it’s tough to make a profit (but it’s tough to say no to the biggest retailer in the world), doesn’t pay its employees […]
Mini-review: A Princess of Mars
A Princess of Mars: John Carter of Mars, Book One by Edgar Rice BurroughsMy rating: 3 of 5 stars After seeing a couple of trailers for the new movie John Carter I was wondering what the heck I just saw… and decided to give the first book in the series I try. It takes a […]
Book review: The Deal From Hell by James O’Shea
O’Shea may think he’s written a book about how profit-driven, ego-centric people ruined some of the nation’s largest papers, but that’s because his own biases are at work here. Actually what this book does is paint a picture of why it’s hard to run a newspaper as a for-profit business with the goal of constantly […]
Crypto
Crypto by Steven Levy My rating: 3 of 5 stars Steven Levy has an amazing talent for taking complicated, technical material and turning into engaging narrative. I’m not particularly interested in cryptography, but knowing that Levy was interested enough to write a book about it prompted me to pick up Crypto and give it a […]
Rule 34
Rule 34 by Charles Stross My rating: 4 of 5 stars Stross does a good job of fleshing out the near-future world first introduced in Halting State, and of introducing new characters. The second-person narration does a good job of trying to get you into the head of the characters, but it falls a little […]
Rooftop garden tour (October, 2011)
The last time I wrote about the urban container garden on the roof of our Philadelphia apartment, I was dealing (poorly) with an infestation of bugs that had attacked my Asian greens. I never did come up with a good solution for that problem, but I have to admit I didn’t try very hard. That […]
Halting State
I’ve been reading science fiction and speculative fiction stories since I was a kid. But I’ve tended to have a soft spot in my heart for the stories of the past… set in the distant future. Authors have a lot of freedom when they’re writing about a distant world we’re never likely to visit in […]
Endings are hard
As a radio producer I’ve often struggled with the difficulty of ending stories. It’s easy to start a story. People often say just start at the beginning, but there are plenty of different places to start .You can start with an idea, an event, a character, an example, or any number of different elements Ending, […]
Google Panda 2.3 and recovery
The good news is that Liliputing appears to have recovered much (but not all) of its search engine traffic. The bad news is that I have no idea if any of the hundreds of changes I made to the site had any impact at all, or if I just wasted an awful lot of time. […]
Infestation
The battle for the rooftop garden continues. While my green bean plants are still shorter than I would have expected at this time of the season, they’re generating some full-sized and rather tasty beans. The Pai-Tsai, on the other hand, seems like a lost cause. I had hoped that I could find a hot weather […]
The beans of summer
There’s still a fair bit of greenery on the rooftop, but the snow peas, bok choy, and spinach are done for the season, and the green beans, peppers, and pai-tsai are starting to come in… but not as quickly as I would like. I think that’s going to be a recurring theme on the rooftop […]
Kicking the Panda: Steps I’ve taken to try to deal with Google’s latest algorithm update
Over the past few months I’ve made a number of changes to Liliputing and Mobiputing in an effort to recover from a loss of Google search engine traffic following the company’s Panda update. Here are some of the things I’ve done. You can find more details and the back story below. Remove some web pages […]