Stefan Hayden

Finished the last book of the Bartimaeus Trilogy today. I’m a horrible book reviewer but I liked them a lot. The last one really seemed to stick out as exceptionally good. The last page really seemed to cut to black a bit quicker then you might like. Fantasy books tend to have epilogues and long drawn out endings but this one just stopped. It was sad but nice for a change.

Now that I’ve read all three I felt safe to roam the web looking for any additional info that might be out in the wild. Wikipedia has a nice collection of articles about the series, books, and characters. In general the book has enough mythos to build on and so a community coming together to put this together isn’t that surprising.

Finally I made it over to the official web site. My goodness that is the ugliest web site that I’ve seen that wasn’t made for a high school. If I was the book publisher I would be embarrassed to have a website so incredibly horrible. It’s not even good for an old website, like early 90s, and these are very recent books abd YA books at that! And last I heard young adults are using the internet.

I just called the Boston Transit Authoritie’s customer service. The number was easy to find on the web site. A human picked up after only 2 rings. This has to be the best experience I’ve ever had with customer service in years.

how long will it be before Mac fanatics start say Macs are better cause they can dual boot Windows (edit: about 4 hours or so)? I’m counting the minutes before I read an article about that.

It’s not secrete I’m not a big Mac fan. What I really want is an easy way to dual boot OSX on my PC. When it comes down to I only want to do that for browser testing.

With the operating systems slowing coming closer and closer together how long before it’s easy to run windows, OSX, and linux all at the same time on any computer?

Update: Khoi Vinh, for the most part, agrees with me.

Update 2: Robert X. Cringely makes the most sense out of everyone:

Boot Camp makes no revenue for Apple and never will. IT IS BETA SOFTWARE. I doubt that its existence, especially as a beta product, is going to make some Fortune 500 company suddenly sanction the purchase of Macs because they can, with some effort and an extra $100, pretend to be Windows machines. While Boot Camp might help show prospective purchasers the superiority of Apple hardware, those purchasers would have to buy their Macs first and then convince themselves that they had done the right thing, which is totally backwards.

Is it just me or are these martial arts fantasy movies looking more and more like Final Fantasy games? Or perhaps the other way around. Either way I love them both. The Promise looks awesome and I can’t wait for it to come out.

With so many changes in store for the upcoming $100 it must be earlier in production then I thought. Here is a choice excerpt:

Negroponte said one meeting with an unnamed display manufacturer spotlighted the importance of high-volume manufacturing. "I said, 'We'd like to work with you on the display. We need a small display. It doesn't have perfect color uniformity, it can have pixel or two missing, it doesn't have to be that bright," Negroponte recounted. "The manufacturer said, 'Our strategic plan is to make big displays with perfect color uniformity, zero pixel defects and to make it very bright for the living room.'" "I said, 'That's too bad, because I need 100 million a year.' They said, 'Well, maybe we can change our strategic plan.' That's the reason you need scale," Negroponte said.

Too funny.