The Wizard Hunters, Martha Wells Enjoyable fantasy with convincingly comfortable characters and some nice dialog, but it petered out towards the end, which isn't a great sign for the first book of a trilogy.

Vitals, Greg Bear
Wobbles between a spooky conspiracy story and in incoherent one. It generally but not completely succeeds in communicating to the reader the fear and uncertainty of the protagonist.

Chasm City, Alastair Reynolds
I'm not sufficiently versed in SF to say with certainty which 60's or 70's novel set the emplate for this sort of story; Samual Delaney comes to mind, as does Iain M. Banks. The protagonist works through a plot, joined midstream, which also showcases a world or universe of the author's creation, and frequently there are unsettling plot revelations about the protagonist's history. Chasm City is more of the same, and readable, but neither the characters nor the story nor the environment are noteworthy or compelling.

Light Raid, Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice
Connie Willis is such a flawlessly confident writer, reading a bad novel with her name on it is like watching Lance Armstrong fall off his bicycle. Painful and eerily attractive. A fairly dreadful novel, with many standard elements from Connie Willis but a claustrophobic scope and amateurish setting.

1. Learn Danish. Start as soon as possible. Study on your own. Learn vocabulary.
2. Learn Danish. Don't worry about pronunciation - you'll be completely wrong until you get into school. Try to do the level 1 class at KISS because it focuses on some subtleties of sound creation that you will almost certainly never acquire without instruction.
3. Learn Danish. Go to school as much as you can. It's free if you have a CPR number. Avoid KISS unless you thrive under pressure.
4. Make sure that the first words out of your mouth to any Dane are always Danish.
5. Bring your own stuff. Look around your house - anything you are going to need over there you will probably have to buy, and it will cost more there.
6. Read the newspaper. Use it to learn written Danish before you go. My unawareness of local Danish news contributed to the feeling of living in a vacuum.
7. Watch Danish TV and listen to Danish radio. I didn't do this; the cost of forgoing so many hours of ear training exceeded the savings on the TV tax.
8. Go to expat meetings. Meetup.com is one source. You need to make in-the-flesh friends, and network.
9. Spend some time there in the summer so that you have a positive mental image to hold on to the other eleven months.
10. Learn Danish.

As we have already seen in the case of the word free, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink. ...

times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify

—Principles of Newspeak

The challenge was how to capture this body of knowledge in a unified and dynamic way. So I invited a cross section of people on a retreat where together, we explored the relationship between paradigms, change and leadership.

The obvious reason is the form factor - many buttons are squeezed onto a small object which must fit smoothly into a pocket. But more subtly, it suffers from computer syndrome—any object, combined with a computer, behaves like a computer. That means it is probably excessively complicated in design and interaction, that is probably crashes, that it is certainly not simple and perfectly suited to the task.

Consider, then, the Siemens GigasetSL1. It's a cell phone posing as a cordless phone. I already hate cordless phones, because they introduce pronounced unreliability and battery limitations for inadequate gain, particularly in an office environment where a cord is a negligable problem. But what makes the GigasetSL1 an astoundingly awful idea is that it carefully husbands all of the limitations and design compromises of cell phones into an application where they are completely unnecessary. Office phones, which don't have to move frequently, can offer large displays, sizeble and well-labelled buttons with dedicated functions, and in general a less computer-like interface. Instead, we get the short end of the stick - all the drawbacks of a cell phone traded off for ... nothing.

The former head a Republican consulting group pleaded guilty yesterday to jamming Democratic telephone lines in several New Hampshire cities during the 2002 general election. ... Raymond plotted with unidentified co-conspirators to jam Democratic Party telephone lines established so voters could call for rides to the polls in Manchester, Nashua, Rochester and Claremont. Manchester firefighters’ union phone lines also were affected.

We did our own bit of sleuthing and found out that Raymond was also the Executive Director of the Republican Leadership Council -- an outfit run by a long list of Republican worthies -- and that his company had done phone banking for them on election day too. And Steve Kornacki of PoliticsNJ.com found out that Raymond also seemed to be behind another phone banking scandal in New Jersey.