Helpful votes received on reviews:
100% (3 of 3)
Location: Johns Creek, GA USA
In My Own Words:
Anyone who needs more than 4000 characters to describe themselves shouldn't be writing reviews--they should be writing NOVELS! Sex: Male. Age: 42 Race: White boy Residence: Norcross, GA Religion: Agnostic/Humanist Marital Status: Single Offspring: None--and keepin' it that way! Education: MS, Geochemistry Position: Technical writer/web designer Income: Hey, it's not even our first date! Media Pr… Read moreAnyone who needs more than 4000 characters to describe themselves shouldn't be writing reviews--they should be writing NOVELS!
Sex: Male.
Age: 42
Race: White boy
Residence: Norcross, GA
Religion: Agnostic/Humanist
Marital Status: Single
Offspring: None--and keepin' it that way!
Education: MS, Geochemistry
Position: Technical writer/web designer
Income: Hey, it's not even our first date!
Media Preferences, Movies: Adventure and comedies - The Princess Bride, Big Trouble in Little China, Stay Tuned, Mystery Men, The Shadow
Media Preferences, TV: Immature comedies, fantasy, and sci-fi (Friends, Sliders, Futurama, Super Chicken, Powerpuff Girls, Star Trek, Herc/Xena/Jack, etc.)
Interests: Animal cruelty legislation, free speech, childfree living, biblical errancy and Fightin' the Fundies, astronomy & space exploration, etymology & linguistics, mythology, church/state separation, men's issues, and Alice in Wonderland.
Dark Secret: I still read comic books. And not the 'mature' ones, either--classic superhero stuff.
Comment: 'To surrender to ignorance and call it god has always been premature' --Isaac Asimov--
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Reviews
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The stories in this book often have a very bitter tone... one lashes out with contempt for "Russia" (a quaint attitude nowadays), another sets up a strawman republic to poke holes in it, etc. And not a few of their so-called anarchist utopias have chilling elements--for example, murder being punished only if the victim was a "paying client of a justice service." But that's not to say there aren't good ideas to ponder and explore here--and not every story is so overloaded with political outrage that the tale itself suffers. Van Vogt's "The Weapons Shop" is probably the purest exploration of an "armed-society is a free society" mentality as thought experiment, and the author pays close… Read more
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
I've long been curious about this book because it is so often cited and hailed by current usability experts as the "starting point of software usability." And maybe it was a groundbreaking work in 1995, when hardcore coders and "power users" still made up the majority of the user base. But now, many of Cooper's claims and proposals seem awkward or downright unusuable... the antithesis of what usability now stands for. To be fair, this is an old book (in the IT sense of the word), and a new "About Face 2.0" is apparently hitting the shelves soon. Thank goodness! A lot of the ideas presented in the original are timeless and important, but others have hopefully been relegated to the… Read more
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I just finished "Nickel and Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich, and it was an okay book, but not as good as I'd hoped. The ads and reviews on it made it sound like a groundbreaking work on the 'reality of living at minimum wage,' but it really wasn't. The majority of the book is a series of anecdotes--one per chapter--of how she lived for a month in a given location and tried to find food, housing, and basic necessities while working at a low-wage job. ("My 24 Hours in Wolfland") Sounds like an interesting experiment, right? But it's really just one-sided war stories, and the whole thing comes off as too artificial to carry any real weight. To her credit, Ehrenreich… Read more
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