Meet the Austins by Madeleine L’Engle

by

Meet the Austins by Madeleine L'EngleTakeaway: I am glad that we have moved past the point where children’s books have to be completely wholesome and teach morals.  Because they can be a bit boring.

Over the last few years I have been trying to read more old books.  Originally published in 1960, Meet the Austins gets counted as an old book because it was published before I was born.

I have read more of L’Engle’s books than just the Wrinkle in Time series as a child, but I had not read Meet the Austins.  Meet the Austins feels like a mid 20th century children’s book.

L’Engle’s Camilia and And Both Were Young were written before this book, but were much more young adult than children’s and they did not feel as dated.

There is just not much that happens in this book.  The Austins are a happy family.  There are four children, John, Vicky, Suzy and Rob.  Wally (the father) is a rural country doctor.  Victoria is the mother.

Read more

Digital Parenting With Pressgram

by

aPressgram was released yesterday for iphone (android coming later).  I have been using the alpha and beta test versions since they were released and I am very pleased with the final product. Below is the post that I wrote about Pressgram during the Kickstarter campaign in April.  

_______

Now that we have publicly announced that my wife and I are going to have a child in the fall, I have been thinking more about digital parenting.  I have thought about this more than a lot of first time fathers because I have also been a full time nanny for five years.  In that time I have seen an enormous change in the way we share our children’s lives.

When my oldest niece was first born I created a static Web site for her.  A few months later I changed to a Blogger blog.  Once my second niece was born I primarily turned the blogs over to their mother and I started sharing pictures and happenings through twitter, Facebook, and eventually Instagram.

My nieces (sisterly love)

But over the past 18 months my love of social media sites is waning.  Not because I don’t love the communities there, but because I am increasingly concerned with how Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are using my information (picture, stories, timeline) to make money and how I am losing control of my own data. And more importantly how I may be losing control of my nieces data.

My friend John Saddington announced a solution that I have been looking forward to since before we publicly announced our upcoming child.  Pressgr.am is a way to use the filters and photo tools of Instagram and other photo apps while keeping your photos on your own site or choosing when and where to share them.

Read more

The Boy In the Striped Pajamas by John Boynea

by

The Boy In the Striped Pajamas by John BoyneaThe Boy In the Striped Pyjamas is a novel by Irish author, John Boynea.  The story is about a 9-year-old German boy, Bruno, whose father becomes a very important man within the Nazi party.  The boy’s father is transferred to be in command of the Auschwitz concentration camp and takes his family with him.  Out of loneliness and curiosity, Bruno goes exploring and discovers a boy who is the same age as him on the other side of the fence.  The boys find that they have quite a bit in common and after talking for many weeks or months they become very close friends.

The novel highlights the fact that this 9-year-old boy is very sheltered and relatively ignorant to what is going on in the world around him.  All the boy knows is that he had to leave his best friends in Berlin to come to this horrible place where he has no friends except for this one boy who lives on the other side of the fence. While he has been told that Germans are superior over others, he really doesn’t know why he was told that or what implication that statement has on other people’s lives.

Read more

An eInk Case for Your Galaxy S4

by

I am a fan of eInk technology.  It is low power, low eye-strain, good for lots of reading conditions.  So I am interested in the variety of ways that it is used. PocketBook has released a new eInk case for your Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone. The Galaxy S4 is in a case, the connector works … Read more

Redshirts by John Scalzi

by

Reposting the review of Redshirts because it won the 2013 Hugo Award on Sept 1.

Redshirts: A Novel with Three CodasSummary: The Redshirts realize they keep dying.

If you are a fan of science fiction, you probably get the joke about redshirts. In the original Star Trek whenever there was an away team that visited another planet or ship, there was usually one extra person (that was wearing a redshirt). The extra person was supposed to be just a general crew member, but it was almost always that person that got killed or hurt.

In this book, Scalzi takes the idea of the Star Trek meme and writes a world where the redshirts are aware of the problem and try to avoid the captain and upper officers as much as possible.

Read more

Philosophy: A Student’s Guide by David Naugle

by

Philosophy: A Student's Guide by David NaugleTakeaway: Content may be king, but organization is important to communicate the message.

I read because I love to read.  But one of the biggest reasons that I love to read is because I am curious.  I want to know more about the world.  I want to hear great stories that help me to experience what has been or might have been or could be.  The more you know the more you know you don’t know.

I picked up Philosophy: A Student’s Guide when it was on sale from Crossway a couple weeks ago.  While I have a pretty good background in theology and bible, my philosophy background is weak.  So this seemed a good place to bone up on a weakness.

Philosophy: A Student’s Guide is a short (130 pages) introduction to Christian Philosophy.  The basic question is ‘in light of canonical Trinitarian Theism, how do we approach…’.  There is a chapter on Metaphysics, Anthropology, Ethics, Epistemology and Aesthetics.  These chapters were fairly helpful at looking at a particular way to approach Philosophy as a Christian.

Read more