These Bookbooks are very cool, and I would very much like to have one. The only issue is that they are designed for MacBooks, but I bet with some fiddling my Toshiba Satellite could be made to fit in the 15″ model.

Protecting your MacBook is a top priority and it’s job one for BookBook. Slip your Mac inside the velvety soft, padded interior. Zip it closed and your baby is nestled between two tough, rigid leather hardback covers for a solid level of impact absorbing protection. The rigid spine serves as crush protection for an additional line of defense. BookBook creates a hardback book structure that safeguards your MacBook like few other cases can. Far better than any floppy neoprene bag ever will. End of story.

I also wouldn’t mind owning one of these doormats shaped like an “Enter” key:

A doormat like this says: “Enter if you like, but beware — you may not return.” Get it? Return? Like, as in the “Enter” key is sometimes called the “Return” key?

[whistles as he walks off]

I finished reading Warren Ellis’s SHVERING SANDS yesterday, a collection of essays and various writings Ellis has spewed onto the Web over the last seven years.

What I enjoy about Ellis’s writing is that not only does he entertain me as a dancing monkey would, but he also brings to my attention interesting and weird things I might otherwise never have known.

For instance, in one entry he was discussing how drug use can sometimes fuel stories writers might otherwise not have come up with. In particular he mentioned Terence McKenna, a writer/philosopher who used psychedelics in part to form his view of the world. One of Ellis’s favorite McKenna stories was about a time bifurcation that posited a world where Jesus Christ had never been born, and the positive effects this had therein.

I had never heard of McKenna before, but the story sounded interesting, so a quick google later and I was able to locate a copy of the essay in question, “The Great Timestream Bifurcation”:

The soliton of improbability which interacted with our world occurred two thousand years ago in the phenomenon of the Immaculate Conception. An event that I think you and I can agree is highly improbable! But let us take it at face value and see if we can work with it. When the Immaculate Conception occurred through the collision of the soliton of improbability with this Galilean village girl called Marian or Mary, in one world she became impregnated with a figure destined for a great religious and political future: our world. The world in which Christ was born, became a young man, taught his message, and went to his execution around 27 AD. Another world sprang into existence at the moment of the Immaculate Conception and in that world nothing whatsoever happened to this young Galilean girl. She continued to live with Joseph. He continued to make fine furniture. Eventually they were able to move to the better side of Nazareth. And that was their story.

So you see I’m suggesting that at the time of Christ, a parallel world came into existence that knew nothing of Christ. And consequently the forces which shattered Roman civilization never came into existence in that parallel world.

The essay isn’t very long, and if you’re into this sort of thing, it’s definitely worth a couple of minutes of your time to read. McKenna’s take on the Tunguska event is particularly cool.

And if you like having a middle-aged Englishman shout at you (or you enjoy HOUSE), you should definitely buy SHIVERING SANDS.

In this episode of STAR TREK, Kirk prepares to make First Contact with a Big Shoulder Pad being from Soarbuhm VII:

(From Things That Are Doing It.)

Every person on the Internet who has some form of bully pulpit is probably going to write about the much-ballyhooed iPad that Apple announced today, so I may as well throw in my two Abe Lincolns.

In short: I have taken an immediate disliking to this iPad.

It’s expensive, considering how little it does — $499 for the cheapest version, which is only 16GB. You can get up to 64GB, but that costs $699. And then there’s all the extra Apple-exclusive crap that they will nickel-and-dime you for: apps, iBooks, etc.

You can’t multitask with it, since it’s not running OSX, but only the stripped down iPhone OS. So you want to run iWorks and do anything else? Sorry, out of luck.

It’s an ebook reader, yes — but only if you purchase the books through the iBookstore. So if you have other DRM-free or PDF ebooks, you’re screwed.

Boing-Boing has a short summary of the iPad’s major features that is pretty good, though I disagree with them on the theory that it will kill the netbook, if simply because of the keyboard issue.

The iPad has a full on-screen QWERTY keyboard, similar to the iPhone, which is fine for typing in a quick Internet search or sending a short message, but as far as doing any real typing? No, no one who has to do any serious amount of typing is going to want to use an on-screen keyboard. The tactile dichotomy between a virtual keyboard and a physical keyboard is just too awkward for any extended use.

There’s more that I could go on about, but I think that’s good for starters. And as a small note: this post isn’t coming from some hatred of all things Apple. While admittedly I am a PC person, I do own an iPod (sadly, Microsoft’s Zune is a flawed product) and wouldn’t complain if a MacBook magically showed up on my doorstep one day.

My issue is with the annoying fervor of the hype and speculation that has been going on for the last six months regarding the announcement of the iPad, not to mention the perception of Apple in the general public.

Like I told my sister earlier: It’s not that I hate Apple; I just think that they sell overpriced products which uninformed people automatically “know” are better, simply because they cost a lot more and are shiny. People who have no idea how a computer actually works will go on and on about how their PC is slow and has nineteen hundred viruses on it, which is certainly not because they’re an idiot and click on malware links or have 900 programs running or still download music from Limewire, but because “PCs suck.” They think owning a Mac will suddenly make their computing life so much better.

So Apple: I already own two computers — a desktop and a notebook — and I like my books analog. Tell me why I need this product?

I had a whole entry typed up last night, recapping what I’ve been up to lately, and it was all good to post . . .

And then my computer farted and reset itself, and my pretty little entry was gone. I immediately turned the computer off and went to read to a book, lest I do something I’d later regret.

So here I am now, attempting to recreate that lost entry.

Tuesday night, I conducted a small experiment involving a cheap bottle of wine, my computer, and my imagination.

And before anyone asks, no, it wasn’t anything like this:

Instead, I attempted to do something that I had never done before: get drunk by myself and write. I realize that drinking, especially with the intent to get drunk, with only one’s self for company, is not generally the most admirable or lofty of goals. In fact, such people are usually termed “alcoholics.” But I wanted to find out, a) was I even capable of being productive whilst hammered, and b) if I were capable, would any of that prose be good?

So around 22:30 Tuesday, I cracked open the finest bottle of $7 wine that Kroger sells, and stared at the computer screen.

Three hours later . . .

I finished the last of the wine, stumbled drunkenly to the bathroom to pee, came back to the computer, and surveyed the damage. I had completed some serious outlining of an upcoming section of the Project of a Novelish Nature, and written a good thousand words or so of that section. I AM TEH R0X0RS!, I gloated to myself. Then I dicked around on the Internet for a while longer, and went to bed.

The next morning I checked out the prose, and it wasn’t bad. It needed a little fixing: I omitted a fair number of words, used the word “transmit” three times in a sentence, and almost exclusively used pronouns instead of character names, which made things a little confusing. Some really good dialogue made up for these negatives, so overall I was pretty happy.

All-in-all, I would call the experiment a resounding success. Apparently alcohol and writing mix very well for me, which is about the only thing that Hemingway and I have in common. Not that I plan on doing this sort of thing very often. Drinking, like sex, is much more fun when someone else is doing it with you. That being said, drinking and writing is a fun way to spend an evening, so I’m sure I will do it again at some point in the future.

2010 — and that’s pronounced Twenty-Ten, just to be clear — though we’re not yet a full two weeks into it, is already off to an auspicious start.

Despite the fact that I just got over being sick a month ago, some kind of flu-like thing came back to rape me last Friday, and did so with a vengeance. Thusly I’ve spent the last sixty hours or so doing almost absolutely nothing except watching television and wishing I were dead. Over the weekend I managed to watch the excellent fifth and final season of BOSTON LEGAL, a couple of the HARRY POTTER movies, and a terrible film called DEATH SENTENCE (which was a new adaptation of the book that was originally adapted in 1974 as the Charlie Bronson masterpiece, DEATH WISH).

Today finds me feeling a little bit better. Not good enough to really do anything that might risk setting back my recovery, but at least good enough to be getting bored from all this laying around. Always a good sign, in my opinion. So I shall dick around on the Internet for a bit, and contemplate being well enough to see friends again soon.

Until tomorrow, then . . .

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(This is for part of Technorati’s verification process.)

There we go: just finished porting the blog and everything from joshbales.net to its new home at joshuabales.net.

I had the opportunity to buy the joshuabales.net domain last month for one dollar, so I did. GoDaddy had some sort of sale going on so I thought I’d nab it before some other rapscallion Josh(ua) Bales came up with the idea. Then I thought to myself, Self, now that we own this lovely domain, why not make it our new home on the Web? After all, it might help differentiate us from that other Josh Bales.

And here we are.

If you’re like me and are too lazy to edit your bookmark and add an “ua” to the URL, no need to fret. You can still reach this blog via joshbales.net; it’s forwarded to joshuabales.net, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. I don’t ever intend to give up the rights to my venerable domain. And should anyone else ever decide that they want to own it, well . . . I’ll give it up when ICAAN takes it from my cold, dead hands.

One last thing: as I’m sure you’ve noticed, this joint has a new look to it. Per what has become my semi-annual tradition, I spent the last couple of weeks redesigning the theme. I like it. The minimalist theme suits me.

What do you think?

Head is hurting so bad I wish it would fall off, but I wanted to share with you the Quote of the Day:

“A gentleman’s todger should never be larger than the fine cigar he smokes.” –Winstonchurchil

Sage wisdom, indeed.

Ah, New Year’s Day. A day when many Americans indulge in watching football, and a day when I try to catch as much as I can of the Sci-Fi Channel’s marathon of THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

It’s odd: even though it’s fifty years old, the special effects are dated, and some of the acting is a little on the nose and over the top, THE TWILIGHT ZONE is still an incredibly effective and entertaining show. I’d be blathering during a commercial break one moment, but when the show would return, I’d shut up and just stare rapt at the television. I probably watched four or five hours straight tonight, and could easily have done more had I not started to get a headache.

SyFy — still a truly moronic name change — kept advertising the complete DVD collection during the commercials, but it’s not something that I’m tempted to buy. Part of the fun of TZ is watching it late at night, or during these holiday marathons. I think it would lose some of its charm if you could watch it on DVD whenever you like. I know I’m already looking forward to the next marathon over the Fourth of July.

Edited to add: This post was somehow set to “Draft” status when I wrote it early yesterday morning and didn’t initially appear on the main page. Total web fail, me.