The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Month: July 2012

  • The Feel of a Book

    I really do wish I could switch to an all-digital book library, buy every print book in this house in some e-book format, and haul all of this shit to the goodwill, or sell it in the Amazon used section.  Someday, books will kill me, and I’m not talking about being buried alive via hoarding.…

  • The Loudness War

    The loudness war is a weird k-hole I recently fell into, trying to find out more information about a Stooges remaster.  Let me explain. Okay, have you ever owned some album, and listened to a song a million times, and then heard the same song on an FM radio and it somehow sounded different?  It…

  • Snowcone and Haystack

    I didn’t remember it until this morning, but today is the anniversary of the first moon landing.  It’s hard to imagine it was 42 years ago (mostly because I was -1 years old at the time) but it’s also hard to fathom that it’s been something like 33 years since Skylab fell back to Earth,…

  • Listicles Are A Window Into The Soul

    I am stuck in that “what do I post here” mode lately, so it’s time for another big long list of random stuff. I’ve been re-reading Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, a book I think I haven’t read since 1995.  It has not aged well, for two reasons.  One is that the technology is obviously obsolete.  It talks…

  • Calculator K-Hole

    Something I sometimes do when I don’t have time to waste but still want to lock into some useless pursuit that will eat up hours is to try and find various things I owned as a kid.  The other day, I started thinking about old calculators, and went on an endless search to find some…

  • New Tires

    I bought new tires the other day.  I got one of them patched a few months ago, after attracting a nice bolt into the tread, and the TPMS light flickered alive last week, signaling a slow leak either in that plug, or from something else.  And my car, after almost five years and just shy…

  • Re-reading Infinite Jest, part 2 of 863

    So I’m now just shy of 300 pages into my re-read of Infinite Jest, which is just over 25% of the way through according to the Kindle, although I think it’s closer to 1/3 done when you consider the last hundred-some pages are all endnotes.  Here are more random observations as I continue: I think…

  • Patents, Apple, Whatever

    There’s been a lot of coverage in the news about Apple’s various patent wars against Samsung and others, and the gist of the coverage is that the patent system was 100% fine up until Apple woke up one morning and decided to destroy anyone making a rectangle-shaped touchscreen phone. I have no real arguments for…

  • Re-reading Infinite Jest, part 1 of ?

    Okay, I gave in and started re-reading Infinite Jest the other night. I’m 8% finished as of last night, which is roughly like running the first two miles of a marathon.  It’s enough that I’m getting some momentum, but so little that I feel like it could take me a while.  I dug through my…