I was listening to a book. It was early, the clock just barely approaching quarter-to-eight this morning. I had just climbed up the stairs from the Central LRT Station, I was plugged via my headphones into the 20th Anniversary Audio Edition of Star Wars: Heir to the Empire — which is awesome by the way — and one of an army of orange-shirted volunteers jabs a copy of today’s Edmonton Journal into my hands. Again, my headphones were on, I was mostly distracted, and I realized a few dozen hurried-steps-closer-to-my-office later that I probably should have given the guy a couple toonies or a fiver: it was a fundraiser for the Raiser a Reader Day events going on around the City today. Instead, I thought [...]

I’ve been reading the graphic novel “Bone” for the last few days, after having picked up the complete epic one-volume edition and letting it idle on my shelf for a while. It requires me to be sitting, because at thirteen hundred pages the book is a brick of paper. In other words, it doesn’t get taken on the train, and instead I resort to propping it up on a pillow in bed and driving through another chapter-slash-book in a fit of marathon reading. It’s pretty good. The story revolves around the cryptically-epic adventures of a trio of stylistically simple cousins, the Bones, who somewhat In medias res find themselves lost in the Valley after being run out of their hometown. In the Valley they are [...]

But… well, not really. My girls went on a three-night vacation without me this week, packing up and heading out Eastward to visit friends in the lovely city of Saskatoon, while I — holiday-less and obligation-ridden — stayed back in Edmonton to go to work, tend to the dog, train some Fringe volunteers and make sure the junk mail got from the super-box to the ever-growing pile of recyclables on the kitchen counter. The girls get home sometime today. And from what I’ve gathered, they’ve had a lovely time. During my solitude — when I wasn’t at work, getting to or from work, or sleeping — I managed to accomplish a couple of things: Some will have already noticed that I took quite a few [...]

About four years ago, back in early 2007, when Karin (four months preggers) and I spent ten days on holiday in and around London, we saw some shows… but, of course. Busy touring about as we were, my blog posts were quick, to-the-point updates regarding our overseas activities, glimpses intended to do not much more than tease others and (later) remind myself of the things that we’d done that had sparked my imagination and piqued my interests. As such, it was no real surprise that I would, all these years later, find posts such as the one titled: A quick note from Oxford, hastily written from a public library computer sometime back in early May 2007, glimpsing with barely a passing comment the details of [...]

There were a trilogy of science fiction books that I read back in my high school and university days called the “Requiem for Homo Sapiens” by an American author named David Zindell. I don’t really have a solid gauge on their popularity because (a) I’ve rarely encountered anyone else who has read them, but (b) everyone who I have encountered gushes about having read them — so I ask myself: are they unpopular or just unknown? Likely it is simply that they are not to everyone’s taste: hard, rich, and complex sci-fi, rolling-fantastical and quasi-spiritual-philosophical epics with characters that stretch the limits of believability… but I enjoyed them, for what they were. And have re-read them since. Actually, to be fair, I more than just [...]

Over the past couple years I’ve slowly been acquiring a small collection of books focused on a narrow band of topics in the non-fiction genre of information management, user interface design, and information design technology. I suppose like any good techie, the confluence of paper documentation with a set of well-loved ideas on a passion-inspiring topic is the metaphorical fly-on-honey.