Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

The Weekend
Erika asked that I take Vanessa "away" on Saturday, as she needed a Mom-break. So I elected to take Vanessa to the Ontario Science Centre, which Vanessa readily agreed to.

We got there just prior to 11am, just in time to see the Circque du Soleil iMax movie Journey of Man. She enjoyed it, though she was intimidated by the initial iMax introduction, where everything goes dark and you hear loud noises. The movie is best enjoyed as spectacle instead of trying to piece it together as a real narrative. Oddly enough, I'd say the movie doesn't work well in the iMAX format, as the huge screen somehow minimizes the human scale of the performances being shown. When everything is out of scale, what are incredible performances when viewed in person somehow seem more like movie special effects than anything else.

The day almost paid for itself, thanks to somebody who lost $20 that Vanessa found on the floor at the OSC. Donated a portion of that to the OSC as a donation on the way out.

The OSC itself was sparsely populated for a Saturday. There was no rush to do anything in particular, so I let Vanessa pretty much lead me around to all of the things she wanted to do. She spent a lot of time at a few computer terminals, especially since she seemed to "get" the idea of the large trackballs they use there as pointing devices. Hmm, I may have to invest in one of those! Had a fun time there, marred only at the end when a tired Vanessa dropped a small plastic box filled with mini-polished stones at the store there, which started her crying. I consoled her, the kind people there helped clean up the mess, and I bought Vanessa a second set of such stones to cheer her up.

Book Reviews
Spent much of Sunday writing book reviews for The Computer Paper. Managed to get three additional reviews done, meeting my goal of getting six finished for the month (in part to make up for a dearth of material I submitted last month). I don't normally mention my review work here, as The Computer Paper pays me for my opinions, and hence for publication rights (which includes online rights). However, two of the books I reviewed, posed some interesting problems for me, and so I mention them here. I felt obligated to add disclaimers to two reviews, one for a reference book on CSS (of which it could be argued I have a level of self-interest, since I wrote a competing book a year ago), and the other for a book for which I was a technical reviewer for several chapters. (Note that I am deliberately *not* providing links to the books in question). Arguably, as a writer of a book on CSS, I am better off than most reviewers to see this new book's strengths and weaknesses. The other book I feel a bit more conflicted about, as I was a technical reviewer for it, and it seems aimed primarily at a student market. My main problem with the book -- which I also pointed out during my technical review -- is that it virtually ignores browser compatibility issues, focusing almost exclusively on Internet Explorer, even to the extent of leaving out CSS properties that don't work in IE. I think this does a real disservice to the reader, especially if it is aimed at the student market. So I say as much in my review, though on the whole I give it a thumb's up (the rest of what the book does it does fairly well).

Am also a little PO-ed that I still haven't been paid for the technical review work I did on the book, which was back in early June -- not that that reflects in any way on my review of the book.