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Friday, March 24, 2006

Damn! I've been looking at the ATOM spec in more detail, and I may have to switch from RSS to ATOM. I didn't know the 1.0 spec was out and did not want to use 0.3, so I chose RSS a while back when I was choosing a feed format. Oh well. It's all XML so it should be easy to convert, right? Won't it?

Friday, March 24, 2006 9:32:42 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

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Thursday, March 23, 2006

Book Review: Old Man's War - John Scalzi (2005)

This is the first published book from an author I've never heard of. Almost. Actually, the reason I picked this one up is because of the authors blog Whatever. I enjoyed his writing style online so I took a chance. Glad I did.

"I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army." Old Man's War is the story of one senior citizen that joins the Colonial Defense Force's Army to serve a 7 (?) year tour of duty and then be allowed to retire to the colonies. The only way to get off planet Earth, the good news that he would get a new body, the bad news was a 10% survival rate in the 1st two years!

This is really one of my favorite SciFi books I've read. It only took me a few days to read, even at my new slow "married" rate. I haven't been this into a SciFi books since Ender's Game (the sequels sucked). Scalzi manages to write a very readable story, full of human emotions and interest, while still delivering a solid hard-core science fiction story. I loved the tech in it. One of my favorite scenes in the beginning of the book was right after the new recruits are given their new genetically engineered bodies and they all run off to have a serious orgy. I know if I got a new bod at 75, I'd definitely be right there! AWESOME READ! Get it, get it, get it! And the sequel too!

Up next: Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi. I've read 2 of his and and finishing up the sequel to Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades. I'll finish up these reviews then hit some others...

Thursday, March 23, 2006 3:47:44 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

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Where To Begin?

It's been almost a year since I have done this, thanks to the great state of <Insert Crap Company Name Here&> and their site-blocking fun. Recently the blocking came down; I guess some Exec wanted to see pictures of someone's ugly kids. (Yeah, just a little bitter...) Anyway, I miss my book reviews (yeah, be scriptin' that too!), especially now that I've found the Amazon Image Abuse format.

This go round, I want to expand on the technical side of thing more too. I will be constructing a tool to help built this site just fot the fun and experience of it. All in C# 2.0, of course. I will post snips of code I find useful. Also will be building this whole thing data driven despite the lack of any language support from my ISP servers. Everything has to be on the cheap, i.e. FREE. I will post lessons-learned there too.

So sit back and enjoy! This may be a fun ride. Or not. It's really for my own benefit and that of friends. I can be reached by emailing fwhagen.blog at the great free "G". (Figure it out, I'm not publishing my email address.)

Thursday, March 23, 2006 9:34:34 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

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Back Online With RSS

Well, I'm back. This time with an RSS feed that I encode manually at this point. Well, it's not entirely manual; I built some vbs scripts to generate each post and built the feed.

I still need to build out the XSL pages for purdy-ness, but the feed can be used in nearly any aggregator. Well should anyway; I have conformed to strict RSS2 specs.

Thursday, March 23, 2006 9:34:08 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

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