Sunday, July 13, 2008

Various products and services reviewed

Hancock: Meh. Way better than the reviews, unless you're my girlfriend who thought it was a waste of time. Still, it's comparable to Hulk, not Iron Man.

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron: Installed this on my laptop about a month ago, and it's really, really good once you make it better. Basically, install Wicd instead of the out-of-the-box wireless network software, and install the medibuntu repositories and you're pretty much ready to go. Since my laptop wouldn't play games if I wanted to, it's perfect for blogging, email, word processing. The desktop that I spent multi-hundreds of dollars on gets turned on when I feel like killing people. (I'm gonna argue that this also saves the environment, as I'm not turning on the watt-chugging desktop to blog.)

Power and Plenty by Ronald Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke: A 500-page history of trade during the second millenium A.D. Very, very good if you're in to that kind of thing. A bit too small-l liberal for my tastes, which says way more about me than it does about them. I started reading it around Christmas, put it down when classes started up again, then started again last week and finally finished it tonight. I'll probably be bringing up various bits throughout the next little while, but in particular I'd recommend their chapters on the industrial revolution and the "long 19th century", 1790-1914. Fascinating discussion about an age of globalization that, in many respects, we still haven't returned (regressed?) to.

1 comment:

Vicki said...

Dude, you're putting words into my mouth and taking pictures. I didn't call it a waste of time: I called it "meh".

Rollerball was a waste of time. And I will never forgive you for it.