Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Month: August 2012

  • Another Friday giant-list update

    It’s Friday, and I have no concrete ideas for a larger update, yet have all of these smaller bits and pieces, so here goes: I try to take notes of all of my ideas, but 90% of the time, they make no sense later.  I did this at some point in the middle of the…

  • What happened to hypercard?

    Hypercard was released 25 damn years ago.  Has it been that long? Back in college, I spent a lot of time screwing around on the Mac, and there were certain programs that welded that old-school 68K Classic Mac experience in my mind.  One of them was Aldus PageMaker, which was the desktop publishing program of…

  • Shut The Fuck Up About Megapixels

    I hate it when people think that more megapixels are better.  They are wrong. This has been bugging the shit out of me ever since the latest Mars lander touched down.  Once people heard the probe had a two megapixel camera, the circle-jerk started.  “HEY MAN WTF DID THEY USE THAT CAMERA MY ANDROID HAS…

  • Baseball 2012

    I haven’t been writing any posts about baseball this year.  Reason being, the wheels fell off the Rockies pretty early in the year, and then things just went from bad to worse.  I think I got a few weeks into April before I decided to stop watching, and things got exponentially worse after that. I…

  • Recalling Total Recall

    I always love to hear about a new movie adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story or book.  But I’ve been on the fence about the new Total Recall remake, mostly because I’ve always enjoyed the 1990 original movie.  It seems like almost every movie that comes out now, especially the big summer blockbusters, is…

  • Age of Aquarius

    I’ve talked a few times about my old Commodore 64, but this wasn’t my first computer. I actually owned a much weaker computer for about a year before the C-64: the Mattel Aquarius.  I thought I’d told the story before, but looking through the archives here, I didn’t find much.  So here’s the deal. The…

  • The Death of Paper Notes

    One of the changes in OSX Mountain Lion is that it has a dedicated Notes application.  It’s just a basic text editor, except it syncs with other Apple devices.  This isn’t entirely new; iOS devices have had a notes app for a while, and it would sync with an IMAP server and show the notes…

  • Mandelbrot and Genre Writing

    I’ve been in the post-book-release period of my writing cycle where I don’t know what I’m doing next, and I don’t know what I should be reading, so I start poring over non-fiction, usually some junk science book.  Specifically, it’s that James Gleick book Chaos, which is about chaos theory and the butterfly effect.  I mostly…