Home
Really!
Recent Entries 
30th-Jun-2008 10:37 pm - The Big Read
When reposting, please link to http://www.neabigread.org/

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE, and strikeout the books you read but didn't like.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read only 6 or less and make them read.


1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh .
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen .
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (highly predictable, read like a screenplay)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan .
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac .
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce (a very hard read, but it gives tremendous insight into the lives of the Irish poor at the turn of the last century)
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry .
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ( a whole chapter on just how dark the jungle was helped to make it a very dreary read indeed)
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
10th-Jun-2008 01:30 am - New Car
Microsoft is going into the car business by remaking the Traban in their own image. They are going to call it the Fully Automated Retro Transport.
8th-May-2008 08:19 pm - Message to Ms Clinton
In May of 2007, Pamela Jones (Groklaw) made this statement : "People aren't as dumb as Microsoft needs them to be."

I'd like to offer a paraphrase of P.J.'s statement as advice to Hillary Clinton as to why she should drop out of the race for the Democratic Party's nomination for president:

The people who will vote in November aren't nearly as dumb or forgetful as you need them to be.
8th-May-2008 02:13 pm - Mandriva One it is
I replaced the Mepis 6 partition with Mandriva One. The laptop is a dual boot with Win XP which I need to retain because of the accounting application I use for my small business. The problem was that the new naming scheme for hard drives has made a mess of what used to be a simple procedure for setting up dual boots using IDE drives. The situation was further complicated because with the release of Mepis 7, Mepis has switched from using the Ubuntu repositories to the Debian repositories. This means that to move forward you have to do a re-install rather than an upgrade. I first downloaded the iso for Mepis 7 but the install process could only see sda as a whole rather than the Win XP partition and the linux partition. Ubuntu 8.04 was a bit better inthat it saw the linux partition, but it just completely locked up at the 15% mark of the install. The Mepis and Ubuntu forums both indicate that they think the problem lies with the version of GRUB that is being used, but I'm not so sure. I think that the problem lies in Debian's preference for upgrades over re-installs. It's almost as though Debian is hard coded not to overwrite a previous Debian or Debian based install (not likely I know, but neither can it be a GRUB issue because the boot loader is not written to the hard drive until the very end of the kernel install stage). In any event, I tested my theory by choosing an RPM based distro. I discounted Fedora from the get go because I really prefer KDE. Suse was out because of Novell's deal with Microsoft. Next on the list was Mandriva and what do you know but it installed without a hitch. Mepis 7 is a great distro and it installed without a hitch on my desktop which has an all SATA set up. For the laptop, Mandriva One made it by process of elimination.

Why do we have to jump through these hoops? It seems to me that if one mainstream Linux distro can work around / eliminate the bottleneck, they all should be able to -- out of the box!!!
28th-Apr-2008 04:32 pm - Another laugh for all of us
Two priests died at the same time and met Saint Peter at the Pearly gate.
St. Peter said, “I’d like to get you guys in now, but our computer is down.
You’ll have to go back to Earth for about a week, but you can’t go back as priests.
What’ll it be?” The first priest says, “I’ve always wanted to be an eagle, soaring above the Rocky Mountains.”
“So be it,” says St. Peter, and off flies the first priest.
The second priest mulls this over for a moment and asks, “Will any of this week ‘count,’ St. Peter?”
“No, I told you the computer’s down. There’s no way we can keep track of what you’re doing.”
“In that case,” says the second priest, “I’ve always wanted to be a stud.”
“So be it” says St. Peter, and the second priest disappears.
A week goes by, the computer is fixed, and the Lord tells St. Peter to recall the two priests.
“Will you have any trouble locating them?” He asks.
“The first one should be easy,” said St. Peter. “He’s somewhere over
the Rockies, flying with the eagles.
But the second one could prove to be more difficult.”
“Why?” asked the Lord.
“He’s on a snow tire, somewhere in Canada!”
29th-Mar-2008 04:56 pm - Earth hour
We're supposed to turn our lights and electrical devices off tonight from 8:00 pm to 9:00 pm to mark our concern over global warming. Not me. My 20 pound cat Toby is afraid of the dark and she just freaks out when ever the lights go out. I'd just as soon not have to blame myself for copious claw and teeth marks, thank you very much. :lol:
28th-Mar-2008 05:36 pm - Good timing
The Leafs have once again conveniently knocked themselves out of playoff contention before the start of the Blue Jays season so there will be no arguments about what sport to watch for the next seven months. I do admit that calling the Leafs a sports team is being overly generous and that my house mate does not have access to this journal. :lol:
7th-Feb-2008 12:09 am - Describe yourself
From Wind_4

YOU'RE ON MY FRIENDS LIST, and I want to know 36 things about you. I don't care if we never talk, or if we already know everything about each other. Short and sweet is fine ... You're on my list, so I want to know you better!

Copy from here, and then answer the questions in a comment and re-post the EMPTY questions in your own journal.

1) Are you currently in a serious relationship?

2) What was your dream growing up?

3) What talent do you wish you had?

4) If I bought you a drink what would it be?

5) Favorite vegetable?

6) What was the last book you read?

7) What zodiac sign are you?

8) Any Tattoos and/or Piercings? Explain where.

9) Worst Habit?

10) If you saw me walking down the street would you offer me a ride?

11) What is your favorite sport?

12) Do you have a Negative or Optimistic attitude?

13) What would you do if you were stuck in an elevator with me?

14) Worst thing to ever happen to you?

15) Tell me one weird fact about you.

16) Do you have any pets?

17) What if I showed up at your house unexpectedly?

18) What was your first impression of me? (hmmm...careful!)

19) Do you think clowns are cute or scary?

20) If you could change one thing about how you look, what would it be?

21) Would you be my crime partner or my conscience?

22) What color eyes do you have?

23) Ever been arrested?

24) Bottle or can soda?

25) If you won $10,000 today, what would you do with it?

27) What's your favorite place to hang at?

28) Do you believe in ghosts?

29) Favorite thing to do in your spare time?

30) Do you swear a lot?

31) Biggest pet peeve?

32) In one word, how would you describe yourself?

33) Do you believe/appreciate romance?

34) If you could live anywhere in the world where would you chose?

35) Do you believe in God?

36) Will you repost this so I can fill it out and do the same for you?
4th-Feb-2008 04:13 pm
"Depending on your business you will most likely be engaged in various design, implementation and support activities of MOSS at any given customer. In order to be able to support the activities being executed for a customer, Microsoft has broadly identified the 4 roles typically seen in a customer implementation of MOSS and the associated training that can assist in preparing your organization to deliver the required activities."


Does this mean that in order to eradicate Microsoft completely, all we need is some decent weed killer?
15th-Dec-2007 07:53 pm
Stolen from whistlebinky and S.R.

Read more )
This page was loaded Jul 4th 2008, 4:36 pm GMT.