The Fighting Librarian and I spent the evening at a book signing/reading with one of my favorite authors, Christopher Moore. There's nothing like hearing an author wax prosical to make you want to fire up the old blog.
He was supposed to read an excerpt from his new novel Bite Me: A love story (linked on the site above), but ended up just chatting with the audience for an hour and half. He told stories, talked about his new found fame, and then fielded questions from all the weirdos in the audience.
It was a really really good time. He was witty and self deprecating, funny and sincere. To be short, I would really like it if he and I became friends. I've actually written him a few fan letters and was amazed when I got replies...within 30 minutes. I'm not kidding. I wrote the guy after I read Lamb and not even half an hour later I got a response wherein he commented on my email. That is to say, unless he has some dastardly clever reply program, I think he actually read and responded to my email. Now that's a man who's dedicated to his fans.
For those of you who have not read Mr. Moore, I highly recommend picking up some of his stuff. Lamb is spectacular, but it's even better if you're familiar with some of the christian mythology. A Dirty Job stands out as one of the best and most hilarious books I've ever read. I put it up there with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (though it's a different kind of humor).
I also, just recently, purchased a DROID. You may know if it as the only phone/operating system that comes close (in terms of popularity) to the iPhone. Now, you all know I'm a HUGE fan of Apple and the Macintosh computer. I learned to type on an Apple II gs and my first personal computer was beige Macintosh G3. I've had a clamshell iBook and powerbook titanium, and my computer right now is an aluminum iMac. I've loved them all. However, when it came time to get a new phone I had two reservations when it came to apple. 1) I like having a physical keypad for typing. Something about the iPhone touchscreen keypad drove me bonkers. I would start to twitch and mutter curses in german. 2) Apple's business practice vis a vis the App store is just short of despotic. I don't like the closed door iron fist acceptance rejection policy and I don't like that I can't make my own app and load it on my phone. Apple has always kept tight reigns on their hardware/software, but at some point you begin to stifle creativity. Enter the Android operating system. Made by a somewhat less despotic Google to be an open source, pretty GUI whereon you don't need to void your warranty to upload any app your tech savvy grandmother just made.
The Motorola Droid, the flagship of the Android fleet, has a slideout qwerty keyboard and an open source philosphy I can get behind.
So far, I love it! I've never had a true "smart phone" before and I love how it syncs up with gmail and gmail calendar. The screen is big and beautiful and the apps are wicked fun. There's even an app that let's you download public domain literature.
O.k. that's all that's on my mind for now. I hope you all are happy and well.
=SP=
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