BilmBlog500

Weight: With its case the iPad weighs 1.5ish pounds. I am youngish if not youthful and do modest lifting but mostly the weight doesn't bother me. A bit when I was reading a novel on it while walking around the DC area for a good chunk of a day. A big hardcover fantasy can weigh more than an iPad. So it is true that the dedicated eReaders weigh more like a modest paperback while the iPad is compared to an epic fantasy in hardcover, but the weight issue can be put into perspective. Typing: I have survived typing on an iPod Touch, this keyboard is bigger! My biggest problem is that my finger will hit a bottom letter key instead of the space bar resultingminmsomethingblikenthis. And the autocorrect doesn't do a good job of recognizing run-on words that result from this unfortunate habit of mine. Maybe with time I will train myself to hit the space bar. Less often I hit the space bar instead of an m or n. I did also mate the Bluetooth keyboard that came with the new home Mac to...

I got meself an iPad three weeks ago this evening. I am quite happy with it so far. First and most important for me is its utility as a tool for reading, and it's quite winning for that. With reading, as with many other things, one of the things I like about the iPad is that it gives you a lot of different ways to do something. So for reading, option #1 might be to just open up an e-mail with a manucript and read the manuscript within Mail. Option #2 might be to open the file in Pages, Apple's word processing app for the iPad. Option #3 might be to put the manuscript on using shared wireless network with Stanza , which is what I'd been using on my iPod Touch, and which is owned by Amazon. Option #4 might be Apple's own iBook store. And then you've got the Kindle app for the iPad and the Nook app and the Borders app. Or you've got other word proccessing apps like Documents 2 Go. I've read one novel and reviewed a contract which I had opened in Pages, ...

You know how much I love our airport security regime, so here's a nice article sent my way courtesy of a tweet from Elizabeth Moon http://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/2010/08/06/airport_security/index.html And of course it isn't just at the airport. Still have fond memories of the Washington Nationals, who let you bring in a factory-sealed water bottle but not the same bottle empty. For all the TSA lunacy, at least they let me bring an empty bottle in to fill up at water fountain and take on to plane. Why do we put up with this, people? Why do we put up with it??

Restrepo is a documentary about a US Army base in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. It is the effort of noted writer Sebastian Junger, whose book The Perfect Storm was the source material for George Clooney movie of same name, and British photographer and documentarian Tin Hetherington. The two embedded with the 2nd platoon of the Army's 173rd Airborne, who are assigned to the Korengal in Summer 2007. Taking daily fire from Taliban forces, the commander decides to essentially leapfrog his opponents by building a smaller outpost that can put Army eyes on some of the attack routes. That outpost is named Restrepo, after one of the soldiers killed by the Taliban, and that in turn the name of the movie. Cinematically, the film is certainly to be recommended. The filmmakers were embedded for an extended period. When the bullets were flying, when the firefights were raging, when the unit was out on a dangerous patrol in areas ceded to the Taliban, the filmmakers were there. So they earn...

My client Tim Akers took some time away from his work on Dead of Veridon to give us his thoughts on the Nook he got for Christmas. Click here and enjoy. And then you should enjoy Akers' debut novel The Heart of Veridon, which Library Journal has rightly hailed as a key title in the modern steampunk movement, and then reserve his forthcoming The Horns of Ruin . We've heard of sword and sorcery, or s&s, and now we add the third s of steampunk to create a fully-realized s&s&s fantasy which people are giong to be talking about come November. He mentions an article in the NY Times today by Randall Stross, an author on hi tech topics. I, like Stross, don't see the dedicated ebook reader as a lasting technology, that being said a lot of people are betting a lot of money that Randall and I are wrong. And Randall gives a lot of attention in his article to Amazon's notorious tendency to say lots without saying anything. The only problem here is that Amazon has ac...

After reading the third issue of the new Paul Leviz run on Legion of Superheroes... good first issue, awkward second issue, now with the third the series seems to be settling in to something I might like very much. I'm not the biggest fan of e DCU tendency to drown everything in crossover but there is some interesting Green Lantern stuff here that doesn't require a doctorate to follow and which has a nice portent to it. One subplot that seemed incomprehensible in the second issue has a comprehensible conclusion here. There is another page promising some interesting subplot and then we've got Darkseid in the final page. And Paul Levitz has always done good Darkseid. I also like the art by Yildiray Cinar and Francis Portela on pencils and Wayne Faucher and Portela on inks. The Legion are teenagers and in most instances the art looks like strapping teens in spandex, Earth-Man and Colossal Boy maybe not so much but most of the others most of the time. Which is kind of settling...

Whatever else we can say about Inception, it's not a masterpiece. Not even close. A masterpiece wouldn't be a half hour too long. In particular, when we get to the scene where somebody's dreaming about On Her Majesty's Secret Service, we just don't need this. We really don't need endless sequences of men in white ski uniforms, very attractive white ski uniforms I'll admit and if I ever take up skiing I want to ski headlong into a tree and die wearing one of these, skiing and skiing and skiing all around Telly Savales's secret mountaintop lair only there aren't as many women in this one. No, we don't need this at all. Did James Bond dream about being married to Teresa? I'm thinking maybe that's the giant secret message of the movie. Too much like some long never-ending boring action scenes in movies like the 2nd Narnia movie or a Transformers movie, I had no interest in watching all of this gobbleskigook from a character standpoint. ...