2012 Holiday Sale

Happy Holidays!

From now until the end of the year, almost all of my books are on sale for $.99 or greatly reduced in price:

$ .99
Bloated Goat
Granny Gruesome: Nursery Rhymes to Terrify Children
Granny Gruesome 2: Thoughts and Observations to Terrify Adults
Just Be Yourself, Zap

$1.99
Simple Series 3-Books-in-1

$2.99
Simple Series Anthology

Any other books not mentioned here are already set at $.99, so you can just click on the appropriate link in the upper-left corner under Books to Purchase and start reading.

The Dog Stars by Peter Heller

Are you looking for a beautiful book? I know that sounds weird, but Peter Heller's The Dog Stars is a wonder to read. The words, sentences, and emotions jump off the page. What a great book! I was sad to finish it. To summarize, there are very few people left in the world. Most were killed by a super flu. The people left have to survive in a new world full of challenges and struggles just to get food and shelter. Hig, the star of the book and one of the few immune humans, is having trouble adapting to his new life. What he finds in the story isn't exactly what he was searching for.

Again, this book was a truly well-written, fun, entertaining, and real. Characters were interesting and plot was fascinating. Definitely a must read for anyone who enjoys a great story about a possible near-future on earth.

Rating: 5/5

http://www.peterheller.net/the-dog-stars/

Sharp PC-3000: The iPad Killer

My daughter will be a teenager soon. Many of her classmates and friends have smartphones and portable media devices like an iPad. Not wanting my daughter to feel left out by her peers, I looked deep within my heart and deep within my wallet and decided to give her the best. I found the answer up in our attic in the bottom of a long-forgotten box.

I couldn’t wait to see my daughter’s happiness, so I surprised her with my early birthday present. She unwrapped the box and her eyes and face said it all. She was speechless. Tears of joy ran down her rosy cheeks. She shrieked with excitement and ran from the room. I heard a long, wailing cry of jubilation coming from her bedroom.

I looked down at the opened box and smiled. Sitting there, in all its pristine condition, was the Sharp PC-3000. It was beautiful. Honestly, I felt a little jealous that my daughter would now be in control of this monster. Chock full of cutting-edge technology, I knew I was staring at an iPad killer.

Let me break this beast down for you:

The outer shell is a charcoal gray and feels strong and heavy. This baby weighs in at a full one and a half pounds...just bursting with bells and whistles. It even has a clickable latch to flip the screen open. The 10 megahertz processor is as speedy as they come, and the 128 kilobytes of RAM has more than enough space to run the most demanding applications.

Easily compatible with other devices, my daughter can work on the PC-3000 while listening to the newest music by using a radio, CD player, or just humming to herself. The Internet is a just simple click away, on separate Internet-ready device.

The PC-3000 is bulging with a total of eight pre-installed applications. Sharp thought of everything that a teenager might want to use on a smartphone and put it in. The clock, calculator, and text editor applications deserve special mentioning here. The clock will keep accurate time to within the hour, provided you manually update it every morning, while the calculator allows my daughter to have all the power of addition and subtraction at her fingertips. The editor allows creation of text documents up to 500 words long, assuming all the words are six letters or shorter. It’ll be months before my daughter discovers all the possibilities.

Another wonderful feature is the battery life. Using the tried and true technology of the 1950’s, the PC-3000 incorporates three AA batteries to provide almost two full hours of use before needing to replace a battery. A word of caution, though—if you attach any external device to the serial or parallel ports, the batteries do tend to wear out faster.

The mono-chromatic screen prevents any unwanted eye strain and the 128,000 pixel resolution will trick my daughter into thinking she’s living in the future. The PC-3000 includes a patented hardware noise, best described as a constant low-level whine that your ears can’t ignore, which forces the user to stay on task.

The last thing worth mentioning is the QWERTY keyboard that comes standard on all PC-3000 devices. The keyboard is mildly responsive and the smooth keys feel cold and lifeless. Amazingly, the keyboard even includes the numbers 0 through 9. Unfortunately, the space bar doesn't come standard, only as a separate add-on. So, I have to recommend buying the small but pricey space bar, since it allows greater freedom when typing.

Well, it’s been three days since my daughter received her early birthday gift. She’s been so infatuated with the PC-3000 that she hasn’t had time to say one word to me or even look me in the eye. She’s been holed up in her room, probably writing letters to her friends with pencil and paper. Well, that's just fine with me, since I get more time with this perfect machine.

I thought kids these days loved technology...