http://popblur.com An evolving website of theory, opinion, popular culture, highbrow pursuits, and science fiction abstraction. Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:11:00 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I dabbled a bit with mind mapping software in the past - namely, with a program called FreeMind - and found it "neat" but not very "useful". I mean, given half a chance it could have become more useful to me, I suppose, but I found it a little too ... http://popblur.com/archives/57 Here's a website that is also a challenge in itself. It's a six week training program to completing one hundred consecutive pushups. I got through the first week, no problem, but then a weekend vacation happened and, long story short, I'll probably redo that first week again.Anyway, I've got some ... http://popblur.com/archives/54 *I also posted this on my tumblr blog - it was just too good a book to just mention there :-) I just finished ENDER’S GAME, by Orson Scott Card, and I was honestly blown away. What a great read! While it is true I have been reading more mundane, down-to-Earth literature of ... http://popblur.com/archives/52 There was nothing wrong with this book. It was fine. Really. It's just. Well. (I didn't want to get into this but here goes) It was kinda boring. Yeah. To me, this book felt like a war documentary - I think it was the lack of exciting plot, more than anything - Heinlein was ... http://popblur.com/archives/51 What's up with twitter.com? One day it's "having difficulties", another day it's "down for maintenance", today it's "over capacity." I guess they're just waiting for someone to buy them out, meanwhile making only the minimum amount of upgrades to keep up with interweb traffic. Kinda crummy - then again, they ... http://popblur.com/archives/50 Just received two new Moleskine notebooks in the mail. Under normal conditions, this delivery would tend to incite an atmosphere of inspiration and literary proliferation within me. But, alas, I am but only halfway through my current notebook and not quite finished with my previous Moleskine. So, with a notable ... http://popblur.com/archives/48 In hopes of expanding this blog's functionality and cool-factor, I've added a new commenting plugin called Disqus (that's pronounced "discuss" not "discus"). This is a third-party website/service that keeps track of all comments you make from any website that uses the Disqus plugin. So, yeah, it's a little chicken-before-the-egg kinda ... http://popblur.com/archives/47 Hehe. This is just an interesting short-list I ran across on the Mental Floss Magazine Blog. Here's the link: The 10 Longest Novels Ever. I noticed a comment on the post asking how long Ulysses was, and after briefly consulting my handy hardcover copy, the answer is 768 pages. (Your welcome) ... http://popblur.com/archives/46 For those of you who use the Gimp [the GNU Image Manipulation Program] - and I recommend it for anyone who doesn't have Photoshop, takes a bit of playing with it to get the hang of it, but it works great - I stumbled across this collection of script-fu macros ... http://popblur.com/archives/45 The results of our Best Superhero poll are in. I should first point out that this was not a scientific poll - in fact, only one or two of the voters were actual scientists, and that's hardly a quorum - but legality aside, the results were startling, and we have ... http://popblur.com/archives/44