I just found this book: "The Great Planet Robbery" by Craig DiLouie. The primise of the book looks interesting but I was really impressed by the fact that the book has a trailer! See it here:
http://www.greatplanetrobbery.com/trailer.htm

I find that often after reading books, I want confirmation of the images conjoured up in my mind of the heroes, villians, landscapes, vehicles featured in them. After finishing the Ringworld series, I spent a quite a few hours searching through the DeviantArt archives, looking at various renderings of ringworlds and ringworld creatures. I did a few google searches after finishing Frederick Poul's Gateway series, and after reading Anne Proulx' "That Old Ace in the Hole", I spent hours pouring over google's sattelite maps of the Texas Panhandle, looking for aerial photos of hog farms.

I don't know if I'll read DiLouie's book--I'd be more likely to read it if I could find it in audiobook format--but I do really appreciate the trailer idea. How about a trailer for Joseph Conrad's Nostromo?

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My four and five year olds both gave up the training wheels on their bicycles this week. I'm tempted to put the training wheels back on the four year old's bicycle. Without the extra wheels to slow him down he's become a speed demon, often racing past his 7 year old brother while peddling madly.

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I found this blog yesterday and I really like the author's use of an analogy to describe the difficulties faced by the music industry as they attempt to regulate distribution of MP3s.

Now, I will argue that any artist, musician, director, writer, or whomever should have the right to produce a work and make a profit from that work. But, they have to be aware of and deal with the side effects of the distribution medium. An artist can create an oil painting on canvas and sell it. A musician can charge at the door for a performance. But once they step into any digital medium, they are now dealing with licenses. Not a product, not a measurable time period of entertainment, but a license.

What’s the problem with that? Well, imagine a company selling SuperBalls. Imagine that company marketing two types of balls: one for bouncing, and one for rolling. The two are identical except for the license that accompanies them. If you bought the SuperBall Roller, you’re only allowed to roll the ball. If you bought the SuperBall Bouncer, your license is only for bouncing. Now imagine that company attempting to enforce those licenses upon every 5-year-old kid who owns a SuperBall. Sounds like a ridiculous expectation of the company, right?

I've just uninstalled Adobe Creative Suite 3 from my laptop. Why, you might ask, would I give up the most excellent Photoshop and Illustrator applications, Acrobat Professional and Flash?

The short answer is because they're just so damn inconvenient and I've found that CorelDraw CX4 is a good replacement for the two applications that I used primarily on the laptop, Photoshop and Illustrator.

You see, Adobe has this really onerous licensing scheme that permits the suite to be installed on only two PCs. They do this by means of a licensing service and a pig of an install program. To uninstall the suite from my laptop took two hours (!) and the laptop seemed to run significantly faster without the licensing service installed.

I'll keep the Adobe Suite on my desktops at home and at work so I can work with Flash and Acrobat Professional but I think Adobe really does their customers a great disservice with the licensing mechanism that they've chosen.

Especially when I compare it with the much less demanding Corel licensing mechanism which basically consists of a forced registration. Go Corel!