Reviews Written By: A3RNNHT8T1I5ZRprovided by Amazon.com |
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 | Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition | |
 | "Better than it was, but still frustrating" | 2009-06-13 |
| At my last job, I used various versions of Microsoft Office for the Mac. They were slow, buggy, inefficient (still using PPC binaries even after Apple switched to Intel), and idiosyncratic. I would have preferred to use alternative tools like Apple's iWork or OpenOffice, but we needed to maintain compatibility with our Windows-based colleagues. As they migrated to newer versions of Office, the Mac users had to download various conversion tools to cope with incompatible file formats. By the end of 2008, things had improved. Office 2008 for the Mac was relatively stable, the notorious Database Daemon didn't crash as much, and Word and Powerpoint were actually quite usable. Excel continued to exhibit frustrating limitations, however, and Entourage.... When I left my job, I reverted to using my own personal Macs. Although iWork is very god for creating new files, I found that I still needed a copy of Office to deal with some of the documents that people sent me, and that I found out on the Internet. So I was glad to get this "Home & Student" version. I guess the biggest problem with Office for the Mac is that it's Office first, Mac second. What I mean is that it's heavily optimized for collaboration with people who have adopted the "standard" Office way of doing things. Taken Entourage, for example. I use it occasionally to read my IMAP email, and it successfully handles my hierarchy of ~200 server-side folders. That's good. However the message list for each folder shows a number of columns, several of which ("Projects", "Categories") are tied into an Office-centric document management philosophy. You can change the columns displayed by right-clicking on the headers. However there is no way to make a uniform change for every folder; Entourage requires you to individually reconfigure the columns for each and every folder. That's 8+ clicks for each of 200 folders. Clearly nobody in the Office Test Group ever thought that the users might want to do this.... | ||
 | Transcend 16GB SDHC Class 6 Memory Card | |
 | "The highest praise is to forget all about it...." | 2009-06-13 |
| I bought a couple of these 8GB cards to use in my JVC Everio GZ-HM200 Dual SD High-Def Camcorder. They work perfectly. What more can I say? | ||
 | Transcend 8GB SDHC Memory Card (Speed Class 6) | |
| "The highest praise is to forget all about it...." | 2009-06-13 |
| I bought a couple of these 8GB cards to use in my JVC Everio GZ-HM200 Dual SD High-Def Camcorder. They work perfectly. What more can I say? | ||
 | ASUS Eee PC 901 12G (8.9" Display, 1.6 GHz Intel ATOM Processor, 1 GB RAM, 12 GB Solid State Drive, XP Home, 6 Cell Battery) Pearl White | |
| "A month with a netbook" | 2009-06-12 |
| Just over a month ago, I bought myself an Asus EeePC 901 netbook, and wrote a blog piece describing my first impressions, including the process of installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix as the default OS. And then I started using the device, and didn't think much more about it. A couple of days ago, a friend emailed me, and asked, "I haven't read any comments about [the EeePC 901] from you. Do you like it? Was it all you thought it would be? Would you buy it again, now that you have experience with it?" Good questions. First: yes, I like it. I've made two trips to California recently, for job interviews and apartment hunting, and each time I took the netbook with me. Previously I'd have toted my MacBook Air, and while I miss Mac OS X, Ubuntu is fine for the basics: email, web access, word processing, blogging, twittering, and so forth. And the netbook is half the size, with three times the battery life, at a fraction of the price. The latest Ubuntu WiFi works just fine - it's almost as easy as OS X. Audio is a bit of a pain: the function keys work sometimes, but not always, so I occasionally have to use the volume widget. More annoying is the fact that even when the volume is zero, audio output can still cause the speakers to buzz and click. Odd. Sleep mode works - mostly. I normally close the lid to sleep, then open the lid and press the power button to wake it. However on several occasions the machine has failed to go into sleep mode; on one occasion I retrieved it from my backpack after a few hours to find that the battery was drained and the machine was really warm! After that incident, I have taken to watching the blinkin' lights on the front edge of the machine when I put it to sleep; if it fails to go to sleep correctly (about 20% of the time) I open it up and reset it. I've recently been thinking about what gear to take with me when I'm travelling to Shenzhen for Huawei. Both the MacBook Air and the EeePC 901 are plausible: both can support Skype, so that I can phone home. (However the Mac has better support for L2TP tunnelling with services like [...].) Neither machine has a DVD drive, however, so I bought a bus-powered USB external DVD drive from LG which I can use to watch movies on either system. The size of the EeePC 901 has not proved to be a usability problem. The keyboard, trackpad and screen are all just fine. The only nit is that the space bar seems 1-2 mm too high, and it's quite sensitive, so that I tend to catch it after typing bottom-row letters. However those who know me will confirm that I'm a lousy typist anyway, so it may just be me. Would I buy it again? I think so - if not this unit, then an equally light netbook, like the Asus "Seashell". But the combination of size, weight, and battery life is pretty damn compelling; the 8.9 inch netbook is my sweet spot. It's a shame that manufacturers seem to be giving up on this configuration. Several people have asked if I plan to install Mac OS X on the EeePC. Right now, the costs - complexity, problematic networking, screen size assumptions in some apps, GUI real estate usage - seem to outweigh the benefits, so the answer is no. Now if someone came up with a foolproof way of reading a Leopard installation DVD and writing a bootable SD card, I'd be interested in playing with it. Until then, Ubuntu will be just fine. (And yes, I am composing this on the netbook. Not to do so would be silly, wouldn't it?) | ||
 | ASUS Eee PC 901 12G (8.9" Display, 1.6 GHz Intel ATOM Processor, 1 GB RAM, 12 GB Solid State Drive) | |
| "A month with a netbook" | 2009-06-12 |
| Just over a month ago, I bought myself an Asus EeePC 901 netbook, and wrote a blog piece describing my first impressions, including the process of installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix as the default OS. And then I started using the device, and didn't think much more about it. A couple of days ago, a friend emailed me, and asked, "I haven't read any comments about [the EeePC 901] from you. Do you like it? Was it all you thought it would be? Would you buy it again, now that you have experience with it?" Good questions. First: yes, I like it. I've made two trips to California recently, for job interviews and apartment hunting, and each time I took the netbook with me. Previously I'd have toted my MacBook Air, and while I miss Mac OS X, Ubuntu is fine for the basics: email, web access, word processing, blogging, twittering, and so forth. And the netbook is half the size, with three times the battery life, at a fraction of the price. The latest Ubuntu WiFi works just fine - it's almost as easy as OS X. Audio is a bit of a pain: the function keys work sometimes, but not always, so I occasionally have to use the volume widget. More annoying is the fact that even when the volume is zero, audio output can still cause the speakers to buzz and click. Odd. Sleep mode works - mostly. I normally close the lid to sleep, then open the lid and press the power button to wake it. However on several occasions the machine has failed to go into sleep mode; on one occasion I retrieved it from my backpack after a few hours to find that the battery was drained and the machine was really warm! After that incident, I have taken to watching the blinkin' lights on the front edge of the machine when I put it to sleep; if it fails to go to sleep correctly (about 20% of the time) I open it up and reset it. I've recently been thinking about what gear to take with me when I'm travelling to Shenzhen for Huawei. Both the MacBook Air and the EeePC 901 are plausible: both can support Skype, so that I can phone home. (However the Mac has better support for L2TP tunnelling with services like [...].) Neither machine has a DVD drive, however, so I bought a bus-powered USB external DVD drive from LG which I can use to watch movies on either system. The size of the EeePC 901 has not proved to be a usability problem. The keyboard, trackpad and screen are all just fine. The only nit is that the space bar seems 1-2 mm too high, and it's quite sensitive, so that I tend to catch it after typing bottom-row letters. However those who know me will confirm that I'm a lousy typist anyway, so it may just be me. Would I buy it again? I think so - if not this unit, then an equally light netbook, like the Asus "Seashell". But the combination of size, weight, and battery life is pretty damn compelling; the 8.9 inch netbook is my sweet spot. It's a shame that manufacturers seem to be giving up on this configuration. Several people have asked if I plan to install Mac OS X on the EeePC. Right now, the costs - complexity, problematic networking, screen size assumptions in some apps, GUI real estate usage - seem to outweigh the benefits, so the answer is no. Now if someone came up with a foolproof way of reading a Leopard installation DVD and writing a bootable SD card, I'd be interested in playing with it. Until then, Ubuntu will be just fine. (And yes, I am composing this on the netbook. Not to do so would be silly, wouldn't it?) | ||
 | Citizen Men's Skyhawk Eco-Drive Chronograph Watch #JR3080-51L | |
| "My second (of three) Citizen watches" | 2008-07-22 |
| I love my Skyhawk. It's almost the perfect watch. I bought my first Skyhawk in Tokyo, at the legendary Akihabara. It was a titanium model, and it quickly became my only watch. (OK, we'll ignore my ultra-thin Calvin Klein "airport special", designed to go through metal detectors without setting them off.) I wore it for 6 years, and then I had the misfortune to damage the bracelet. I inquired, and found that I'd have to send it back to Japan for repair, at a ludicrous price. Instead I decided to buy a replacement; this time I opted for this stainless steel version from Amazon. Why "almost perfect"? Well, as other reviewers have noted, the Skyhawk can only handle whole-hour time zones, and I need to travel to India on business quite often. This is frustrating. On my last trip, a few months ago, I stopped at the watch store in the new Hyderabad airport. I figured that the best place to find a Citizen watch that worked in India would be in India. And I was right - I was able to buy a Navihawk. It doesn't have Eco-Drive, but apart from that it's functionally equivalent to the Skyhawk - plus Indian time zone support! I paid a considerable price for it, but I don't mind: the Navihawk seems to have disappeared from the Amazon Citizen store. So now I have two Citizen "hawks": a Navihawk, and a Skyhawk. The Navihawk is slightly lighter; the Skyhawk slightly more comfortable. When I'm at home, I pick one at random each morning. But next week, when I head off to Chennai on business, I'll be wearing the Navihawk. Life is good. | ||
 | Jabberwocky and Other Poems (Dover Thrift Editions) | |
 | "If you have small children, or grand-children..." | 2008-07-22 |
| If you have small children, or grand-children, you owe it to them to read "Jabberwocky" to them. Every day. Ideally, with the lights off, in a low and menacing voice. Hopefully you know it by heart (and you remember that it's "borogoves" WITHOUT the "r", not "borogroves"). If not, you'll need this book. It's more convenient than lugging around a "Complete Works", with or without Martin Gardener's annotations. As a bonus, you'll get some of Lewis Carroll's less well known (but still delightful) poems. I recommend "You are old, Father William", which is the perfect opportunity to really overact. "And the mome raths outgrabe." And don't you forget it!! | ||
 | Chess Strategy | |
 | "How not to adapt a book for the Kindle...." | 2008-06-23 |
| The book itself has been fairly reviewed by others; I shall simply comment on the Kindle version. It appears that the original online version of the text was prepared "back in the day" when the VT-100 (or perhaps the Xterm) was the normal output device. The text was scanned or typed as ASCII, and all 167 of the chess board diagrams were carefully rendered as ASCII line drawings. Unfortunately, this kind of diagram requires the use of a constant-width font. The Kindle version is rendered in a nicely kerned Times Roman, or similar, and as a result the diagrams are unreadable. (It would be nice to know if the Kindle actually supports the use of fixed-width fonts for non-HTML content.) I'd like to get a decent chess book for my Kindle, with some annotated games from the last 150 years. This isn't it. | ||
 | On Consciousness | |
| "Possibly the worst philosophy book in print" | 2007-12-22 |
| A great controversy has sprung up concerning Colin McGinn's "worst ever review" of Honderich's book. The two protagonists have issued charge and counter-charge, both personal and professional, and the philosophical blogosphere has weighed in with opinions ranging from "unprofessional" to "right on the money" (not forgetting "great fun to read"). It so happens that I have a small contribution to make on this subject. Back in the spring of 2005 I was attending Dan Dennett's Philosophy of Mind course at Tufts, and inevitably I had to write a term paper.1 We were free to use any (relevant!) book or article as the starting-point for the paper, and... I decided to work with Honderich's "On Consciousness"... Within a couple of days I knew that I was in trouble. The more I read and re-read the book, the more it seemed to be no more than a sustained argument from personal incredulity. Honderich repeatedly declared that certain propositions were "unswallowable", as if this constituted a knock-down argument. I checked in with Dan and told him that instead of identifying, expounding, and critiquing Honderich's thesis, I would only be able to address the fatal weaknesses in one of his core motivations. And so I did. It wasn't a great paper, but I felt that it was a reasonable effort given my unfortunate choice of material. As I wrote: Beyond his unshakeable belief that functionalism is unbelievable, Honderich offers no argument. Indeed he acknowledges that "it is not easy to construct an argument against strict functionalism", and that is is perhaps impossible to find a premise more secure than his inescapable conviction. In a note, he acknowledges that his objection can be said to beg the question. Nevertheless he argues that this "shows that there is a role in inquiry for something other than arguments." Something other than arguments? Not, apparently, if you want to be taken seriously in Philosophical Review. | ||
 | BlackBerry 8700c Phone (Cingular) | |
| "Not bad... but one REALLY annoying design glitch" | 2006-10-09 |
| I changed jobs, and the corporate standard is the Blackberry, so I had to give up my much-loved Treo 650. At least I was able to keep my number and swap the old SIM into the new phone. Overall I'm fairly happy with the 8700c. I miss the five-way joystick: navigating in Google Maps is a bit awkward. (Alt+scrollwheel for side-to-side). The keyboard is OK, but "." should have a dedicated key. I find the phone sound OK, although some people that I call report high noise levels. The biggest issue is switching between silent/vibrate and ring modes. The Treo gets this right: there is a simple, easily visible, sliding switch. You can see instantly what mode you're in, and can switch into silent mode without even removing the Treo from its holster. On the Blackberry I have to unlock it (using my password) and get back to the main menu screen just to SEE what mode I'm in (interpreting a small multicoloured icon). If I need to switch modes I then have to scroll to the Profiles applet, select it, choose the right profile, and apply it - a total of 15-20 key presses and wheel scroll events. This simply sucks. Since I try to be polite and avoid phone interruptions during meetings, I wind up leaving the device on vibrate only, which means that occasionally I miss a call. RIM really needs to fix this. I can't imagine that anyone else has patented the idea of a "mute" switch.... UPDATE, 2/10/07: The usability issues that I mentioned, plus the lack of third-party applications finally got to me. My employer just added support for Windows Mobile devices, so I've replaced my 8700c with a Cingular 8525. | ||
 | Motorola 5.8GHz Digital 2-line Phone - Silver | |
| "S-l-o-o-o-w" | 2006-10-06 |
| Others have commented on the major weaknesses of this phone, but I'll add my own pet peeve: everything is so bl**dy SLOW! To scroll down through the phone book feels like click-pause-click-pause-click-pause.... Each handset defaults to private phone book use, so to switch to the shared phone book involves a couple of button-pushes, each of which takes ages to respond. And don't try getting ahead of it: your button pushes may or may not be recognized. What a piece of junk. | ||
 | Faithless - Back To Mine | |
| "Keeps drawing me in" | 2006-02-21 |
| I've collected a number of the "Back to Mine" series, but this one by Faithless keeps calling me back. It's partly the wonderful eclecticism - from Marshall Jefferson to Pauline Taylor, Tindersticks to Aaron Neville. Highly recommended. | ||
 | Risking Everything : 110 Poems of Love and Revelation | |
| "To live is to risk" | 2005-07-21 |
| A few days ago I picked up a copy of Roger Housden's anthology Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation. Today I opened it at a random page, and suddenly felt compelled to start reading the poem out loud. It was D. H. Lawrence's Deeper Than Love, and I found myself reading it slowly, lingering over the words, tasting them, feeling their weight on my tongue. Love, like the flowers, is life, growing. But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives alone and deeper still the unknown fire, unknown and heavy, heavy and alone. The noise of the air conditioner in the kitchen drowned my speech (it's a miserable night, dew point around 75, no central air) which was good: I was only reading for myself. I finished the Lawrence, and opened again at random: Billy Collins' This Much I Do Remember. Not a poem to read out loud, this one, but one to close your eyes and see what the poet had seen: that I could feel it being painted within me brushed on the wall of my skull And of course all of Housden's favourites are here, like old familiar friends: Rumi, Bly, and above all Mary Oliver. What a glorious collection. | ||
 | Storage Networks: The Complete Reference | |
| "Embarassingly bad" | 2005-06-24 |
| Try wrapping your brain around this sentence: "Unless the hardware and firmware release levels are inventoried and tracked in conjunction with the network, the NAS systems become unassociated storage servers unbound to the confines of the network in which they operate." Or this: "The corollary, or trade-off to this condition, is the economics of speed and capacity to price." I'm sure the contributors worked very hard to fill up the 526 pages of this book, but oh dear, oh dear, oh dear..... | ||
 | A Different Universe | |
| "Refocus" | 2005-04-13 |
| Chris W. says "Overall, I am left with the impression that Laughlin & Pines are giving a war to which no one should come, because the case for their revolutionary intellectual movement is founded on misperception and false choices." Well, maybe, but come on over to the philosophical side of the house and you'll find that Laughlin's correctives are urgently needed. His principled emergentism is exactly what is needed to counter (1) those who cite the failure of good-old-fashioned-reductionism as an argument for a nouveau dualism, and (2) those who think that they can simply build a theory of mind by gluing together enough neurons. | ||
 | What It Means to Be 98 Percent Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes | |
| "A wedge project?" | 2005-03-02 |
| I have no evidence that this is an ICR "wedge" project, but it fits so well. Acknowledgements to and citation of Phillip Johnson; a sustained attack on the value and ethics of science and scientists; numerous references to unnamed scientists that want to destroy "the meaning in people's lives"; sympathy towards evolutionists; smearing and innuendo..,. Yet at the same time he professes his own commitment to science, so the ICR can cite him as a "scientist exposing the evils of science". I was also amused that of the four books citing this one, three are Jeff Herman's notorious "how to get published" infomercials for scam artists. | ||
 | What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes | |
| "A wedge project?" | 2005-03-02 |
| I have no evidence that this is an ICR "wedge" project, but it fits so well. Acknowledgements to and citation of Phillip Johnson; a sustained attack on the value and ethics of science and scientists; numerous references to unnamed scientists that want to destroy "the meaning in people's lives"; sympathy towards evolutionists; smearing and innuendo..,. Yet at the same time he professes his own commitment to science, so the ICR can cite him as a "scientist exposing the evils of science". I was also amused that of the four books citing this one, three are Jeff Herman's notorious "how to get published" infomercials for scam artists. | ||
 | Outfoxed - Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism | |
| "Most bizarre catch-22 moment of the film" | 2004-07-19 |
| So Bill O'Reilly interviews the son of a 9/11 victim, then over the next year he keeps referring back to the interview and lies about what the kid said. And the young man inquires about suing O'Reilly for defamation. The legal opinion: you'd have to prove that O'Reilly knew he was lying - and he lies so pathologically, all the time, about everything and everyone, that it would be hard to prove that he knew he was lying. | ||
 | Panasonic PVGS9 MiniDV Compact Digital Camcorder w/20x Optical Zoom | |
| "Simple, effective, excellent price" | 2004-04-09 |
| I was looking for a simple, low cost digital camcorder. This fits the bill. There are a bunch of interesting effects built in, none of which I'll ever use because I plan to edit video in iMovie on my Macintosh and output to DVD using iDVD. For $350, it did the job straight out of the box. | ||
 | Al Stewart : True Life Adventures of a Folk Troubadour | |
| "It helps to understand the concept of "irony"...." | 2003-08-31 |
| The disappointed reviewer from Vermont clearly fails to appreciate subtle ideas, like irony. Al's bio by his old friend Neville is an all too accurate account of the "true life adventures" of a talented musician trying to make his way in the music business. What the reviewer describes as "false advertising" is simply the way things are. Get used to it. As to the balance of material: I for one am far more interested in the question "How did you break into the business and become a success?" than "What's it like when a dream becomes a career?" And as a contemporary of Al's, I'm still fascinated by "the haze of highs and lows and blues" that was the late 60s in England. I'm glad Neville concentrated on that. Is it a perfect book? Of course not: Neville is not a polished writer, the production quality is so-so, and there are numerous omissions and lacunae. But never mind. Those who think Al Stewart is a jazz musician, or a photographer, or a management consultant or an England wicketkeeper need not buy this. Fans of Al and his music will enjoy this account of Al's life and will take pleasure in discovering the origins of some of their favorite songs. So a solid three stars, plus one more for nostalgic delight. | ||
 | Civilization 3 | |
| "The crack cocaine of gaming" | 2002-03-25 |
| All of the criticisms are true. And yet, and yet... It's 2:30am, and you have to be at work tomorrow, and your rational mind knows that the lack of sleep will catch up with you in REALLY UGLY WAYS, and yet you STILL have to take "just one more turn". And the Germans are down to one last city, and either you (the French) or the Greeks are going to capture it, and you watch as the Greek AI botches the attack. OK, can you get enough mechanised infantry units in place? If that road were a railroad, yes. OK, can you scrounge up any workers that your own AI hasn't already moved? Yes, sleeping in that city over there. Build the railroad, move in the tanks and infantry, and nail the Germans with one unit move to spare. Damn, it's 2:55am. Maybe coffee will help. | ||
 | Reasoning about Rational Agents (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents) | |
| "A rarity - a user-friendly book of formalism" | 2000-09-06 |
| An excellent treatment of the formal modelling of what Mike calls Rational Agents and others have (more provocatively) usually termed Intelligent Agents. What sets this apart from other books on the subject are Mike's refreshingly direct, no-nonsense writing, and his recognition that his audience may not have all of the formal tools at their fingertips. The Appendix "Formal Foundations" would be a good choice for anyone who wanted to understand modal logics, especially as they apply to time and intention. Even software engineers who would rather hack code than grapple with formalism will find this accesible, stimulating and useful. | ||
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