Category: books

Programming Training Resources

Just over a year ago I made a career switch, from desktop support and project management to programming. As I have been learning to program, here are some of the best free or inexpensive resources I have come across: Bob Tabor is the great for C#, HTML5 & CSS3, and his videos are on Microsoft Virtual Academy. The C# …

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Quotable: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“To the King’s favor quite restored again, Reynard sets forth with all that lordly train, Upon his pious journey to be shriven,— Much the same road that Lawyers go to Heaven;—” —from Reynard the Fox

Aeschylus

“Valerius Maximus wrote that he [Aeschylus] was killed outside the city by a tortoise dropped by an eagle which had mistaken his head for a rock suitable for shattering the shell of the reptile. Pliny, in his Naturalis Historiæ, adds that Aeschylus had been staying outdoors to avoid a prophecy that he would be killed …

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Quotable: Alister McGrath

“Cultural assimilation is all too often the prelude to ecclesial extinction.” — from Heresy!

chromatical book stacking

Dr Ray Stantz: “Symmetrical book stacking. Just like the Philadelphia mass turbulence of 1947.” Dr. Peter Venkman: “You’re right, no human being would stack books like this.” –Ghostbusters, 1984 Last Saturday Heather and I went to Excelsior Springs to kick around some antique shops and flea markets. We have found in our travels that you …

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“Sorry to burst your pig bladder!”

The best possible closer to an already interesting article at NPR on the surprising success of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiography, published last year.

Quotable: John Piper on William Mackenzie

“…a lover of books and a lover of people. That’s an unusual combination, you know. Most people who are bookish don’t like people–they just tolerate them.”

Review: Would It Kill You To Smile?

I didn’t even make it through the first two chapters. The characters and their relationships to the narrator are hard to keep track of, and the book might just have the most unlikeable protagonist since Drumline. I paid a quarter for the book, and sadly, I overpaid.

Pine Martens

In  An Innocent in Scotland, the author describes the scene from one of the bed and breakfasts he lodges at: ‘On a lamp table in the dining room there’s a little stuffed [taxidermied] animal, some kind of weasel sitting there with a little bushy tail and the sweetest look on its face. “Who shot that little …

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Quotable: J. B. Morton

“Not only must Justice be done; it must also be seen to be done.” from Rex v. Sussex, though I first heard it in the 1985 movie The Black Arrow, based on the Robert Louis Stevenson novel of the same name.