A Day in Paradise

As you, my regular readers know, I have a soft spot for self-published authors, and when I find an autographed advance copy of “An American Hedge Fund” written by Timothy Sykes and self-published under the “Bull Ship Press” imprint, you know I’m going to take off with it and tear through it on a lazy […]

What can I say, Leonardo does the South African accent so well he totally disappears as an actor. Between this movie and “The Departed” which I watched two days ago, my opinion of Di Caprio has totally changed. He has transcended (whatever that is supposed to mean).
Blood Diamond is set in Sierra Leone during the […]

Short version - Awesome cinematography, interesting action sequences and CGI - the demonization of the Persians and underlying political rhetoric make the movie hard to watch.
spoilers and ranting ahead… click through at your own risk

Just got back from watching Crank. What can you say? It’s craaaazzzzy! A couple quick comments.

The first time I’ve seen google product placement. Between the scenes there were shots from google maps where it panned across the city and then zoomed in on a street/car/house. In the corner was a “Maps provided by google” logo
Nokia, […]

The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)
This is probably one of the funniest movies I’ve seen this year. The title pretty much sums up the premise of the movie, there aren’t a whole lot of big surprises as far as the plot goes, but it’s still an enjoyable watch.
We watched the 133 minute unrated version, which […]

A couple days ago I blogged about the Loose Change documentary on the events surrounding September 11th. I finally got around to watching it last night.
Now, even though I’m a bit of a conspiracist I do understand a couple basic points about these kinds of events.

You are not an expert! Even though something may sound […]

When I first started listening to podcast novels, I had a hard time getting used to the fact that unlike dead tree books, unless the author decides to tell you how much of the book is left, you have no idea how many chapters are left. When Matthew Wayne Selznick’s performed the final chapters of […]

This is a 5-minute review of “Whiteout” by Ken Follett, the whole premise is a spoiler so if you don’t want large portions of the story line revealed then stop reading now.
Firstly Ken Follett is one of my favorite authors, his stories are simple, focused and always a good read. I was hooked after reading […]

At the recent International PHP Conference held in Frankfurt, Germany I was able to pick up a copy of Sebastian Bergmann’s “PHPUnit Pocket Guide” a slim pocket guide published by O’Reilly which forms the most complete documentation for PHPUnit. I hesitated before picking up this book, the last “Pocket Guide” I bought covered Python and […]

“Look Mom, a PHP book without a chapter on design patterns”. Yup, you heard me right, the PHP Phrasebook goes back to the basics of PHP with a focus on functionality, simplicity and security, things which seem to unpresent in a lot of books these days.
The PHP Phrasebook is the first installment of a […]

Ancestor: The Next PodCast Novel by Scott Sigler
Just listened to Scott’s teaser for his upcomming podcast novel Ancestor, and figured that I would give a little pre-review of what you should expect to hear.
In an attempt to find out how to genetically engineer an animal to create organs suitible for human implants, the German […]

Michael Ridpath: Final Venture
I had read Ridpath’s first book “The Marketmaker” a couple months ago, I enjoyed it, and was pretty happy when Stella picked this one up for me.
The story revolves a junior member in a Boston-based Venture Capital firm. Big money, stocks and venture capital are being moved around, there is some internal […]

EarthCore: A Podcast Novel
EarthCore was initially published as an ebook in 2001, in 2002 it was slated for a Nationwide paperback release, but the imprint was closed four months before the book was published. Riding the Podcasting wave Scott Sigler decided to pull “a cheap publicity stunt second only to a nude, ball-flapping, Secret Service […]

Even though I have four unopened computer books on my shelf, over the weekend I took the time to read Dan Brown’s �Angels and Demons� (I keep wanting to write daemons). I probably wouldn’t have bothered if I hadn’t enjoyed the style and pace of �The Da Vinci Code�, but this book was seriously lacking.
The […]

When I say that I was disappointed to find this book in my mailbox, it is only because I knew that when I got my hands on it I wouldn’t put it down for the rest of the day. Keeping up with the style of my 5-Minute-Reviews, I’ll have to prefix this by saying that […]