Just finished up “Black Tulip”, by Milt Bearden. It’s a military thriller, but written in such a realistic fashion one wonders just how much truth it might contain. As it was written by a CIA employee one wonders about just how close to the truth it might be.

Reading this make me think about how much the U.S. owes to Afghanistan after using them as a pawn in the cold war, and then tossing them to the wind. Of course, like any co-dependant relationship we were being played as well, used for our money and weapons.

Got a few fresh books today. Number one, a friend sent me “Lamb, The Gosepl According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal”. He IM’ed me last week and said he was sending a book, which I thought meant that he was sending me his copy. Instead he sent me a brand new copy from Amazon. Wow, that pretty much makes my day. Thanks, Christopher.

Secondly, I took a batch of books back to the library and got a fresh batch. Today’s haul included “The Weatherman”, by Steve Thayer, “Pattern Recognition”, by Willian Gibson, “Walking with Muir Acroos Yosemite”, Thomas & Geraldine Vale, and “A New Kind of Science”, Stephen Wolfram. “A New Kind of Science” is one of the heaviest bboks I have attacked in a long time, with over 1200 dense pages.

At the moment, I am sitting typing on a laptop watching one of my favorite movies, “Good Will Hunting”. Sometimes I still can’t believe that such a fabulous movie was written by two unknown kids from Boston, the same kids who turned in really great acting performances. Hat’s off to them for creating a real great film. (I also love being wireless at home.)

“So what did I think? I’m holdin’ out for
somethin’ better. I figure f*** it, while I’m at it why not
just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn
enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby
seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I
could be elected President.”

Sometimes I wish I could riff like that.

Here are the top search terms leading people to my web site. I am fascinated by 10% or so who look for palm pilot repair info. I mean, the info is soo old the phone numbers don’t work. I really should update it for the poor folks who visit.

1 	69 	7.96% 	palm repair
2 	37 	4.27% 	evil penguin
3 	37 	4.27% 	porsche carrera 4
4 	22 	2.54% 	linux t-shirt
5 	20 	2.31% 	lake vermillion
6 	16 	1.85% 	mel masters
7 	15 	1.73% 	palm pilot repair
8 	15 	1.73% 	palm upgrade
9 	14 	1.61% 	polish grom
10 	11 	1.27% 	memorial day race
11 	10 	1.15% 	baby pictures
12 	10 	1.15% 	sailing lake superior
13 	9 	1.04% 	porsche boxer
14 	9 	1.04% 	vacation pictures
15 	8 	0.92% 	hamilton high school milwaukee wisconsin
16 	7 	0.81% 	barbary pirates
17 	7 	0.81% 	kaui
18 	7 	0.81% 	when i am old
19 	6 	0.69% 	fake text
20 	6 	0.69% 	hiker cuts off arm

Amazon let’s you search through the text of a book now instead of just the title/subject. It’s shocking to me that they either scanned so many books or got electonic acess to the text. Now if they just had a link where I could reserve the book at my local library I would be set. Perhaps that would be a bit of a money loser. “Ramsey County Library has eight copies available for free, click here to reserve yours.”

I am experimenting with new garish colors.

I use four computers daily each with at least two different web browsers installed on each system. Over time this has led to a fragmented list of bookmarks. Finally, I merged them all. I am still not sure why. Perhaps it was to make me feel like some small part of my life was organized and under control. For a while I thought that I might be able to forego bookmarks all together as Google was sufficient to remember everything. But as good as Google is it still takes some clicking to find just what I am looking for. This seems especially true with seaches for retailers or items sold by retailers.

I am having a program crawl through the links and see which links have rotted. We’ll see how that goes.

I am curious about what sights people visit everyday. Here is my list.

• Slashdot
• My Yahoo
• NY Times
• My own web page, duh

There are a few blogs I visit almost daily. But I’ll save those for another day.

Courtesy of Research Buzz, a new google syntax. Type in “define:malaprop” and get exactly one definition with a link. Or type in “define malaprop” and get a normal search listing with multiple definition kind of entries. It’s amazing to me the infrastructure of the internet, with very complicated routers, OS’s, web servers, wires and buttons allows me to define a word faster than I can find a dictionary and look it up by hand. Stunning.

I feel neutral about this movie. If you liked the book, and I mostly did, you’ll probably like the movie. I thought Cusack, Hackman, and Hoffman put in work man like performances that won’t garner them Academy Awards, but were fun to watch. The movie definitely follows the lead of the book, which is too say it’s a good story, won’t challenge you much, but will be a nice diversion.

I don’t care how bizarre it is that I have a Tivo so I can skip commercials, but then I d/l them from the internet, but everyone really should check out the videos of Terry Tate, Office Linebacker that are available on the reebok web site. (Unfortunately, you’ll need flash to navigate reebok’s home page, then you’ll need to register, then Quicktime or MS Media player to watch them.) They are well worth watching.

I could use an office linebacker in my office.

jill/txt has produced one of the most sweeping definitions a blog that I have seen so far in a post titled, final version of weblog definition.

I like this definition as it includes the notion that posts are free form, may be edited later, and can be fiction, non-fiction and other forms.