Conner's Blog

Since it’s summer not only do I write infrequently I also read less.  This isn’t to say I don’t keep up with my favorite blogs, but I don’t hunt down as many news ones as I do during the months of hibernation (aka October – March).  But I still run across many great MN blogs and as usual I’m here to share them with you.

• a closer look at flyover land – Giving you reasons to land in MSP and not just keep flying to LAX
• A Girl can Dream/Eat - My friend Marissa cut her poor blog in two
• been thinking – Great photos and writing
• Kurtis Scalette – An interesting collection of odds and ends.
• Mykl Roventine – Tune in on Thursday for some Typography love
• Perfect Porridge – Music, Music, and Music
• philcrissman.com – Web Development, startups, entrepreneurship, books, art, and other stuff
• urbanfoodie - Another wonderful food blog based in our great state

As always you can find the growing lists of blogs here.  If you have any other suggestions, leave a comment and I’ll check them out.

There will be no Wednesday Where? today.  I’ve been home most evenings and couldn’t find anything in my photo archives that seemed like a good candidate.  Sorry about that.  Instead I give you nine new blogs to peruse.  They have been added to my Minnesota Reading List page.  Please add any comments over there.

• All Those Possible Worlds – A tumble blog in the truest sense, lot of updates so subscribe with caution. (They are good updates though, so it’s worth it)
• insights outsights - Another tumble blog, lots of inspirational content.
• MNStories – Video’s by Minnesotans about Minnesota.
• Blog, Blog, Blog – Kassie’s new site, replacing Mmmmmm, Dinner.  Following her 101 in 1001 journey.
• Name Taglines – Name tags not found at your last convention.
• That’s how we do it in the T.C. – Replacing We Have Mixed Feelings about Sven Svengaard.
• The Punsultancy – Brought to you by the same guy who brings you Hey Look it’s Art.  If you enjoy groaning give it a try.
• T****y Photoblog – I refuse to write the whole title here, but even with a name that isn’t fit to print the photos are stellar.
• a simple exchange – Only 50% Minnesotan but 100% fun and inspirationa.

I have to admit that I had never heard of J. Robert Lennon until I picked up one of his books at the library. Now that I’ve read one of his books though, I’ve decided I need to go back and make sure that The Funnies wasn’t a fluke.

The Funnies is a good book.  It’s inspirational, full of weird stories, great characters, and just a bit of humor.  It’s basically tells the story of a family of a comic strip author in a sort of roundabout way.  It start out quickly and Lennon keeps you engaged throughout the entire story.  I would say the biggest knock against The Funnies is it’s a bit predictable.  Very few of the plot twists come as a surprise but this is fine because you wait in anticipation for it to happen.

The Funnies is an easy read, I read this after reading Anathem and it was the perfect way to decompress.  I actually read The Funnies from start to finish in one day.

Rating on scale of 1-10: 6

I have decided to start doing short book reviews of the fiction I’ve recently read. I thought this would be a great way to help my readers find new books, and a great way of cataloging what I’ve read throughout the year.I’m going to start with the three most recent books I’ve read and should be posting the reviews today.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson.  This is a book I almost bought the week it came out but for some reason decided to hold off.  I finally picked it up at the library a few weeks ago.  I should mention that I’m a huge Stephenson fan, Crytonomicon is probably one of my favorite books of all time, and I own all three books in the System of the World series.  Anathem was a Neal Stephenson book through and through.  Anathem is a giant book filled with really interesting ideas.  One of the great things about all of Stephenson’s books is that you learn something new.  It may be just a theory that hasn’t caught hold or historical ancedotes, but you walk away from his books having learned something.

In Anathem the major idea is intriguing and plays a pretty major part in the story.  The story itself is giant yet attached to one character.  At first this seems odd, the story takes a while to really get going, but once it does you realize that having more than one character telling the story would be too much.  The story is wonderful and complex and throws a bit of action, suspense, and yes even love at you.  My one complaint is that some of the major characters don’t get the treatment they deserve and you never truly get to know them.  Still it’s a wonderful book with great characters, ideas, and story.

do leave you with one warning though, Anathem is not for those who like a light summer read.  I can usually plow through most books very quickly.  Anathem took me almost three weeks to finish, it gets so complex and the characters get into so many discussions on interesting topics that I had to step away from the book for a night once just to let my brain catch up.  I don’t recommend this book if you are sleep deprived.

Rating on a scale of 1-10:  8.5

Ok, I’m not quite back yet.  I’m sitting in the Seattle airport waiting for my flight to Minneapolis to board.  After allowing myself to go disconnected for four days I’m feeling a little out of the loop.  That said, I had a great time and have decided these mini-vacations need to happen more regularly.  Taking a few days off and not bothering to check Twitter, email, or my reader was nice.

The only problem I see is what this screen shot shows.  I came back to almost 400 unread items, an Inbox full of mostly crap, and a ton of spam comments.  Thankfully I should be able to sleep on the plane and plow through most of this today.  Then I have almost 400 photos to look through.

Anyway, it’s great to be back, I had a great time, and am actually looking forward to getting back into the routine

Not to make light of the situation  But I couldn’t help but wonder what the person who wrote the except was thinking.  “He is dead” isn’t exactly wrong but wouldn’t it have sounded better to write “A pedestrian in Queens was killed after being struck by an S.U.V. and dragged by a van. ”

I don’t know why this bothered me, I may even be wrong and the excerpt was written correctly.  How would you have written the excerpt?

This is the first Plinky questions that I instantly wanted to answer. I bought Catch-22 a few months ago. I had actually nearly purchased it every time I saw it for about a year but had never taken the plunge. Maybe my subconscious had been telling me. Consciously, It had intrigued me for some reason, the concept of a bumbling pilot in World War 2 who was just trying not to get killed seemed interesting. It also had a ton of praise behind it so I decided it can’t be bad.

Well I won’t say that it was bad, but I just couldn’t get into it. I just couldn’t get past the authors writing style, which was really messy. The story jumped all over the place and though it was full of the kind of ironic humor that I usually love, I just didn’t find it funny.

I think I’m about 1/3 of the way through it, I had it sitting on my nightstand for about a month, and finally just gave in and put it back on my bookshelf. It currently sits there mocking me. Someday when I’ve read everything in my house and everything on the series of tubes I’ll pick it up again. Until then, the adventures of Yossarian will remain only partially complete.

This article deserves it’s own mention for anyone who thinks that this counties anti-terrorism policies are logical.  http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/07/homeland_securi_2.html.

Please check out my shared items feed from google reader.  I have the last 10 items in my footer but you can always check out my entire list at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/18055001078653007870.

Hot on the heels of removing readburner from my feedlist, which by the way I will probably be adding back in a few days, I have just decided to remove Lifehacker from my list.   One too many completely worthless posts and a week of one year ago posts did me in.  The whole Gizmodo at CES debacle definitely swayed my decision to, not such a fan of Gawker right now.  I really wish Gina would start her own blog, she is much better than what has been going up at Lifehacker lately.

Recently, I subscribed to Readburners’s upcoming feed. Readburner aggregates the shared items on Google Reader and creates a feed based on the items shared most frequently. The first few days were great, I found some interesting posts and there weren’t too many. Today was a completely different story, I checked it before I went to work and had around five items. I got to work and opened up Google Reader and suddenly I had 51 unread items on the ReadBurner feed. I hardly get 50 items a day from all my other feeds combined.

Well I unsubscribed from it immediatly. I love the idea of a feed of interesting items generated by users, and I really like the fact that it gave you the original feed item. This is much better than using Digg and having to click through to the Digg site and then on to the actual article. 51 items is just too many to parse through for me. I like to be able to get through all my feeds quickly and have no unread items. I might check ReadBurner out later and see if I can find a different feed to follow, but as of right now it’s off my list.