I’m a blogger, editor, writer and slinger of web pages. Among other things, I’m the author of The Map Room, a blog about maps, and DFL, a blog about last-place finishes at the Olympics. When I’m not blogging, writing or correcting other people’s grammar, I raise snakes, play the piano, and look through my telescope.
Interests
astronomy, cartography, herpetology, hiking, Macintosh computers, maps, movies, photography, science, science fiction, snakes, web design, writing.
The Targus ThumbPad is an external thumbboard that attaches to your Palm via the Universal Connector at the bottom. Rather than covering the buttons and Graffiti area, it extends a couple of inches beneath the handheld, which amazingly rests firmly in place. The ThumbPad is made of plastic and is very light.
It's not nearly as functional as the full-size folding keyboards -- useful extra keys like "New" and "OK" aren't there, but that's to be expected with a keyboard this size. More perplexing, however, is the absence of parenthesis keys. You do have to reach for the stylus and the Palm's own buttons from time to time, and you must resist the temptation to use the ThumbPad's directional… Read more
I came to this book to learn more about life on Pelee Island, knowing full well that this was incidental to the author's purpose. I got what I was looking for: a vivid sense of life on that island during the off-season and a well-crafted, sympathetic portrayal of its inhabitants.
But I was not indifferent to Jane Christmas's purpose: to take a sabbatical from urban life (viz., her high-powered career as an editor with the National Post), to share what she had learned from the experience, and to say something about spiritual retreats in general. Did I learn something from it? Yes -- though I'm not starting from the power-career-long-commute-single-parent position she did, and that brings… Read more
This is a marvellously well-done little book whose only (minor) fault is that it skimps a bit on information about the animals themselves; facts about their diet, reproduction and behaviour are condensed into a paragraph each. Instead, we have a field guide worthy of the name that tells you where and how to find reptiles in northwestern North America and how to identify them, and that provides very good subspecies data (a rare thing nowadays), excellent range maps, and beautiful photography. Most enjoyable are the field notes at the end of each species description, in which the author tells a story about finding the animal in question in the wild (often so that it could be photographed for… Read more
