HiWire

You Don't Mess with the Zohan

It sat on my bookshelf for years – it's a long book, but it's easy to read because Bryson is a great storyteller. Highly recommended.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson – a great science book for non-scientists:

The White Stripes (1999)

The History of Fraggle Rock (my favorite children's show):

I was listening to music from my 2011 MacBook (from my Alessandro MS-1 out of the headphone jack – RIP mini Toslink) – I turned the volume up one click (to 4 out of 16) on a short pop music track and it nearly fried my ears (ow ow ow). Don't underestimate the volume level coming out of modern pop music – going to give my ears a headphone break until tomorrow. ? I think I'll turn the iTunes volume down to 1/2 to reduce loudness with headphones from now on. There are some huge jumps between volume levels on the Grados. I was lulled into complacency after I listened to Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations (Zenph).

Lost (2004), Season 2 – hard to believe so much time has passed

Porsche announced the new 6-cylinder 718 Cayman GT4 and Spyder (with 6-speed manuals) – this might cause the price of the older 981 GT4 to finally drop a little and some of the more conservative owners might take them out of storage: https://www.evo.co.uk/news/22794/the-porsche-718-spyder-and-718-cayman-gt4-are-finally-here

Congrats! Might be worth getting the Linn fixed later as well. My Arcam CD player's tray broke a while ago and Arcam refused to repair it. A local electronic repair shop was able to fix it.

It sounds like a recipe for fun if I ever heard one. I like that Aston has been earning their credentials through racing since their big comeback in the early '00s – taking on established giants like Porsche, Ferrari, and team Corvette, especially in endurance racing, is a tough job for a smaller company. Their cars from the 80s and 90s were kind of like living fossils. TV presenting and production must be lucrative in the UK. That's quite a collection of rare cars that Chris Evans has assembled.

Here's one of my dream cars, peak Aston Martin (the V12 Vantage V600 with 7-speed dogleg manual) – why are the best cars always the rarest?

Is Anna Holmwood the translator? I've been getting around to starting the series, but the books are expensive import editions.

I looked up the "nano-texture" matte option on the display... it's an interesting idea. I wonder if they'll look at offering it on the other products later. Who is going to be able to use the display without the stand? Almost makes me glad I have a spare VESA arm under my desk.

AMD's partners have been showing off PCIe 4.0 on their motherboards lately, so that's an option if Apple jumps to Ryzen and Threadripper in the next Mac Pro update.

Looks like it will be very powerful (it's definitely very expensive). I'm glad they designed it with fewer thermal and power constraints. I hope they are working on making Metal more efficient, as there is still a bit of a performance gap between similar applications running DirectX vs. Metal (it would be a shame to run Windows 10 on this box). They will probably jump to PCIe 4.0 (or 5) as soon as possible... I'm wondering if Intel's Optane will work in the new Mac Pro. The lack of Nvidia support means they are going to lean hard on AMD to execute on Navi's performance potential in the short term.

You'd think men would have figured out the beauty industry drives women crazy and learn from their example – it amplifies, reinforces, and preys on their insecurities. Nearly finished this one: Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens

Matthew Sweet – Girlfriend

Natalie Prass – The Future and the Past Richard Thompson – Rumor and Sigh

That is depressing. Are people really that stupid or that superficial?

I don't think I got to read many of the Lone Wolf books. I do remember that they looked like this (distribution probably wasn't as wide in my home town's bookstores) – very English-looking: I took a quick look on Amazon and it doesn't look like Knut Nærum's books have been translated into English yet. I'd love to check them out when they are released into the English-language markets. I Am Pilgrim sounds like fun and it did make the New York Times bestseller list – all those people can't be wrong. Most of the young people I know don't have much respect for books – they're just an obsolete data storage medium to them (especially people in non-humanities studies). I can understand the academics' point of view (the fish-gutting line was particularly apt), but books are also where data becomes meaningful information. Words and ideas require structure and development and the newer methods of infographics, information science, etc. have only proven superior in specific instances.

Re: modern sports cars – I love the Time Attack Viper (manual only):

Richard and Linda Thompson at the BBC (1981)

Anyone else spend a lot of their childhood reading gamebooks (Choose Your Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, Be An Interplanetary Spy, Time Machine, etc.)? I've been looking for this series for years and I finally found it: https://archive.org/details/Star_Challenge_1_Planets_in_Peril/page/n1

The Grave's a Fine and Private Place by Alan Bradley Just starting the ninth book in the Flavia de Luce mystery series. Each one has been a riot of cleverness, humor, and deadly murder in the 1950s English countryside and they are some of my favorite books. There are a lot of references to classic literature as well as music (organ music in particular), but the best part of the books (other than the ridiculous characters and situations) is the 11-year-old protagonist's fascination with chemistry... especially poison.