tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59652752012-01-22T00:34:35.998-08:00HistorySundroidnoreply@blogger.comBlogger251100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-88668598633953634372012-01-22T00:24:00.001-08:002012-01-22T00:34:11.549-08:00Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-85355490611116712202012-01-22T00:15:00.000-08:002012-01-22T00:34:36.011-08:00Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1150500666589683442006-06-16T16:28:00.000-07:002009-04-12T09:32:33.497-07:00Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1086145908852190932004-06-01T20:04:00.000-07:002004-06-01T20:11:48.853-07:00An easy statement to make is the following: “Science and art require two different parts of the brain, therefore they do not mix.” Many, however, will argue just the opposite: “Scientists and artists have one common aspiration—to achieve perfection, therefore science equals art.”
An apt example is Google’s homepage. The clean and ad-free homepage is, as I understand it, the result of stubbornSundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1085618041666576522004-05-26T17:31:00.000-07:002004-05-26T17:34:01.666-07:00Have we become better communicators now that we have more tools of communication than ever? These days, one doesn’t have to be a techie to take full advantage of instant messaging, emailing, and blogging—one’s fingers can literally dance all day on the keyboard and do all the tasks of communicating with friends and strangers near and far.
In theory, verbal communication lacks the kind of depth Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1085020267691113842004-05-19T19:25:00.000-07:002005-08-21T21:48:53.110-07:00In the blogosphere, everybody has an opinion on everything. Even casual browsing of the blogs out there can cause one to get serious neck injury from nodding and shaking one’s head about bloggers’ opinions on all things that matter and some that don’t.At the minimum, blogging is a harmless way of letting off steam, but sometimes one wonders if all those blog entries one merrily punches out are Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1084942404228995752004-05-18T21:49:00.000-07:002004-05-18T21:53:24.230-07:00Some time ago, a reader of my other blog asked a fair question, “Do people think about Tibet?” She was questioning the tagline I use to describe my novel. I never gave her a satisfactory answer; for that matter, I have no way of knowing if she cared to hear an answer from me.
How often do we think about people in far-flung places? For those of us who do, will our pondering ever affect their Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1084853370694278612004-05-17T21:05:00.000-07:002004-05-17T21:09:30.696-07:00Years ago, in a smoke-filled apartment on Carmine Street, NYC, the hostess of the party I was attending played Sinatra. I felt alienated at the time because I couldn’t make any connection with that Jersey-big-band-casino sound. Flashforward to present day, here in the culture desert of California, I’ve grown to like an AM radio station that plays oldies nonstop and commercial-free during the Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1084752322384237302004-05-16T16:59:00.000-07:002004-05-16T17:05:22.383-07:00I look out of my window and I see a sun-bleached Southern California landscape with its drought-resistant vegetation and master-planned housing, but when I turn my attention back to my computer, I’m back to the blog universe where things happening in London, Manila, Singapore, New York seem more “real” to me through those vivid blog entries.
Some science-fiction writers would have us believe Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1084501420002780632004-05-13T19:18:00.000-07:002004-05-13T19:23:40.003-07:00Maybe I’ve read one spy novel too many, but I won’t be surprised if intelligence analysts at CIA are trying to determine if al Qaeda members are communicating with one another through blogging.
It’s not hard to imagine that people could be blogging for various clandestine purposes, such as the aforementioned sinister scenario. On the benign side, some are probably sending their romantic Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1084405847730856712004-05-12T16:47:00.000-07:002004-05-12T16:50:47.730-07:00Views about the future of blogging in the context of digital culture vary. Some are already predicting that it will fade, the way “geocities.com fad” did, whereas the enthusiasts think this is only the beginning of a new trend not unlike writing emails, which is now firmly part of the modern life. I have no idea which prediction has more truth to it. There are reports saying that thousands of Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1084319589782585962004-05-11T16:48:00.000-07:002004-05-11T16:53:09.783-07:00I emailed the link to my blog to an old friend in New York City. He replied that he didn’t even know what “blog” was, and humbly suggested that he still lived in the previous century. His answer gave me pause. What is the significance of blogging anyway? I created my first blog account at blogger.com in October of last year, not for the purpose of making journal entries or writing little Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1084208296514323742004-05-10T09:57:00.000-07:002004-05-10T09:58:16.513-07:00Most of us are familiar with the story about how Bill Gates decided to drop out of Harvard in 1975 to pursue his dream in the then-still-untested territory of computer programming. Imagine you were his father, and you had just received a phone call from your son, who was now telling you that he planned to drop out of Harvard in order to “be his own man”, what would you do?
I have no idea how Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1083899145006526822004-05-06T20:05:00.000-07:002004-05-11T18:04:28.523-07:00In the late 70s, some in this country were ready to concede the dominance of industrial innovation and manufacturing to Japan. In the early 80s, with Japanese cars and electronic products beating American counterparts in every category of technical excellence, many here were lamenting that the day they might not own anything made in the U. S. A. was approaching frighteningly fast.
Thankfully,Sundroidnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1083816703237843372004-05-05T21:11:00.000-07:002004-05-05T21:19:25.840-07:00One can just imagine the moment the proverbial light bulb over Bill Gates’s head clicked on as he figured out that modern men’s desire for speed is insatiable. Once we buy our computer and take it home, the processing speed of the good old Pentium will remain the same until the next purchase. Meantime, during the current period of ownership, say, 5 years, our longing for the beige workhorse to Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1083727084548551052004-05-04T20:18:00.000-07:002004-05-04T20:22:29.170-07:00Not being an expert in Norman Rockwell’s works, I can’t be sure if he’s ever done a painting depicting a father and a daughter in a bookstore. Nevertheless, a fellow blogger provided that imagery when he informed me about his intention to bring his 9-year-old daughter to a Barnes & Noble bookstore. There is nothing sweeter than the sound of a parent shushing his or her excited children in a Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1083642413062302402004-05-03T20:46:00.000-07:002004-05-03T20:50:56.576-07:00I lived in Hollywood for a period of time. There was a used-book store on Fairfax Avenue where I had spent quite a few Saturday afternoons. I cannot be sure if the bookstore still exists today, what with all that thriving used-book commerce on the Internet. I bought my two-volume set of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” there for $17.50. The price was penciled on the Random House Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1083549887666885252004-05-02T19:04:00.000-07:002004-05-02T19:09:09.653-07:00To some people, reading classics authored by writers long deceased has the unfortunate implication of “school assignment”. To others, it’s a process of pleasant discoveries. I dare say even those who have advanced degrees in literature, or those who are the most voracious readers, have one Bronte, one Turgenev, one Conrad, one Proust squeezed at a corner of their bookshelves which they swear Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1083286626578994332004-04-29T17:57:00.000-07:002004-04-29T18:10:54.340-07:00Microsoft created mslit.com, I suppose, to promote the eBooks published in its proprietary .lit file format. On its “Most Popular” download list, 6 out of the 10 titles are free eBooks. To me it’s an indication that most people still expect to get things for free from the Internet (a notion that has caused tremendous anxiety for record company execs and enriched lawyers on their payroll). How Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1083208634358038822004-04-28T20:17:00.000-07:002004-04-28T20:29:36.060-07:00For those of us who are fans of Virginia Woolf, the absolute delight is knowing that her works are in public domain and many can be downloaded from the Internet for free. However, I could not find a free version of her most influential writing, "The Waves", in Microsoft Reader eBook format. I did find a HTML version of the book in University of Adelaide’s e-library, and proceeded to convert theSundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1083125075351655432004-04-27T21:04:00.000-07:002004-04-27T21:58:06.873-07:00Microsoft has a nifty tool that turns a Word document into a Microsoft Reader eBook. Moreover, it shrinks the Word document down to a truly portable size. "Slipping into Madness" (68,000 words) is 513K in Word; converted into a Microsoft Reader eBook, it turns into a svelte 279K file; in Adobe’s PDF format, however, it grows to a chubby 712K thing.
On the download site, it says that the Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1082994151923020962004-04-26T08:42:00.000-07:002004-04-26T08:46:44.576-07:00A fellow blogger points out, correctly, that when we read online we tend to pick out short articles. I browse through dozens of one-pagers a day and do hesitate a little with multiple-pagers.
The question here is: will e-books, with their pages numbered in hundreds and words in thousands, catch the attentions of people who read online habitually and frequently, thereby justifying their digital Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1082593684455290112004-04-21T17:28:00.000-07:002004-04-21T17:35:13.216-07:00It has occurred to me that certain analogy can be drawn between e-book publishing and electric car manufacturing—both need entrepreneurs with tremendous optimism and determination to produce solid results. Unfortunately, in the case of electric cars, Detroit has decided that it has spent enough money on it and killed the project recently. Fortunately, much less capital is required to bring the Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1081995480104051092004-04-14T19:18:00.000-07:002004-04-14T19:23:57.200-07:00A reader of this blog opined that e-books “will not become vital in the near future” because they are “simply no fun to read”.
I agree that book industry’s effort to push e-books has yet to produce the kind of result they had hoped for when they started out. I will point out, however, that our habits of reading written words are changing in the age of Internet.
If you’re reading this, you’reSundroidnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5965275.post-1081733825540662682004-04-11T18:37:00.000-07:002004-04-11T18:40:58.200-07:00One of my readers informed me the other day that she had printed out all 16 chapters of my novel so she could read them at home. I received the news with minor horror. I would prefer that people read my book online or have the chapters downloaded to their hard drives then read them offline. Nevertheless, I am thankful that anyone would read my book, and I have no intention of pretending that Sundroidnoreply@blogger.com0