Thursday, September 09, 2010

The Passage

I just finished The Passage, by Justin Cronin. I heard of the book while listening to the author being interviewed on NPR's Talk of the Nation. I was on my way to Walmart, which fortunately had one last copy of the book.

I really enjoyed the story. I enjoyed that the monsters, the vampires, were not totally evil. They were as much to be pitied as feared. Although the story is classified as horror and science fiction, it has very strong, well developed characters. Peter is the perfect reluctant hero. As the miracle girl Amy has enough mystery, yet she is real enough to be believable.

Some reviewers felt the book was too long. But I really enjoyed the length. The author took the time to develop the characters and the situation. It took time to show the life on the colony and then how it came unraveled.

The end was really exciting, not what I expected at all. It really made me think. It will be worth it to read this again in a few months to catch some of the clues I may have missed the first time.

My only disappointment is that the next volume won't be published until 2012.

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

New Toy

I just learned about Shuttercal, which is a photo sharing site where you load one photo per day into a calendar. It's an intriguing idea. I still send most of my pictures to Flickr, but as far as I know they don't have a calendar format like this. Here is the lastest picture from the Shuttercal sharing tool.



Sunday, September 05, 2010

landscape timbers and wood products marketing

We have been working on this project to mark the edge of our driveway
with landscapte timbers. Just another course or two to go.

I went to Lowe's to get more timbers and found out they were on sale
at just under two dollars for pressure treated, eight foot timbers.
How can they even make any money selling at these prices? Is it meant
to be a loss leader? Or, is the goal to entice people into the store
and buy other things. Probably, they just have a lot of them to get
rid of. I just don't understand marketing.


These pictures were sent with Picasa, from Google.
Try it out here: http://picasa.google.com/

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