Mortaine’s Blog

Some great things have been happening this holiday week:

• I finished reading my 88th book for the year.
• I sent an article about Costa Rica to Matador Travel (online site, in beta right now).
• I finished reading “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity” (by David Allen) and started implementing it in earnest this time I mean it!
• I established inboxes for John and myself at the breakfast table.
• I got rid of a lot of the paper piles from my office.
• I got some work done for the new project
• I did five pet-sitting jobs
• I wrote my thank you cards from Christmas.
• I ordered my sister and niece’s birthday presents from Amazon.com
• I drank a lot of hot spiced cider
• I wrote my next Toastmasters speech
• I mentally prepared myself for Janowrimo (which starts in 3 1/2 hours!)
• I talked to my father for a good half hour. And scored a pair of home-made wool mittens in the process.

  Also: Something that made me smile today: Worst Vlogs of 2006. Why smile? Well, for one thing: I’m not on the list.

This is an archive of my shorter book reviews and notes, which historically have been posted over at the 50 Book Challenge on LiveJournal, but which I’m starting to move over here. I’m posting them with altered date-stamps, but they might show up in my LiveJournal cross-post anyway. Bear with me, please.

Note: Many of these books also have full reviews available in the book review podcast (RSS).
Read the rest of this entry »

WTHR - Indianapolis News and Weather - Family of murdered Greenwood woman says the warning signs were there:

The alleged murderess is the victim’s daughter, named Stephanie Bryant. This person is NOT ME. I wish Google would pick that up and stop delivering this gruesome story to my Ego Alerts, but what can ya do?

For reasons that I won’t go into in a public blog, there are about a dozen weird coincidences in this story that give me the heebie jeebies.

Wired News: The Year in Online Video:

Wired has a round-up of YouTube in 2006.

It troubles me that they didn’t bother looking at any of the hundreds of other more watchable video sites.

A nifty howto from Make: blog:
HOW TO - Magnetic Rubik’s dice cube

Very gamer-nerdy!