ScottSchulz.us » Books

Deathly Hallows: A Worthy Read!

admin — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 23:08:36 +0000

I finished Harry Potter 7 last night and I admit, it was excellent. JK did a very good job of tying up many of the loose ends which had been outstanding, and certainly answered the major questions, like whether Snape was good or evil. If you haven’t already done so, I heartily recommend that you …

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

admin — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 13:36:21 +0000

Much to my surprise, Donna stopped off at Borders (no, that’s not surprising) and picked up a copy of the new Harry Potter book for me. So, in light of the fact that we are having one of the nicest weekends I can imagine we’ll have this summer, I spent part of the afternoon outside reading.

The book is a whopper at just over 750 pages! It will take some time to get through, but thus far it has been an interesting read.

Random House Postmaster Killed by Hannibal?

Scott — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 21:16:49 +0000

Want to run a contest and ensure that you do not have to award any prizes? If so, then perhaps you should follow the lead of Borders and the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Why? What?

I received notification by email a couple days ago of a contest the abovementioned were holding in honor of the release of the latest Haniibal Lecter novel by Thomas Harris, Hannibal Rising. The contest purports that five winners will be selected from those who send an email to bantamdell@randomhouse.com with the subject “BORDERS HANNIBAL RISING OFFER” and with their snail-mail address in the body of the email. So, being a huge fan of these books, I immediately sent off an email from my private email account. A short time later I received the following from
postmaster@randomhouse.com:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

bantomdell@randomhouse.com

Final-Recipient: rfc822;bantomdell@randomhouse.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1

Okay, so I’m thinking that this email has gone out to a multitude of folks on the Borders email lists, and the server is a bit busy, so I wait a couple days and tonight I try again, this time from my Gmail account (just in case the other was somehow filtered). Nope, no go… Same response. Now it has been 72 hours or so since the first try and I would certainly have thought that a company as large as Random House could find a sysadmin who could keep a mail server running long enough to survive this contest, but apparently not. Either that or — for the neocon-spewing conspiracy nuts in the crowd — the server is quietly scarfing all of our addresses and then rejecting the data to make it look like it failed. Either way, I’m astounded at the apparent incompetence.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Scott — Tue, 23 May 2006 00:05:41 +0000

Happy Birthday to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the greatest detective stories ever written: Those concerning the exploits of Sherlock Holmes.

EarthCore

Scott — Sat, 18 Jun 2005 19:55:59 +0000

EarthCore is, according to the author:

“[T]he world’s first podcast-only novel: you can’t find it in stores, you can’t download the full audio, and the only way to find out what happens is to subscribe to the podcast. This novel is a cross between episodic modern-action fare like “24″ and classic sci-fi movies like Predator and Starship Troopers.”

While I had seen it mentioned on various podcast sites, it wasn’t until I heard Drew whatshisname, from the Dawn and Drew Show, say that he was hooked on it that I decided to give it a try. He was right, it is good, and I am hooked! Over the past couple days, I have listened to the first 20 chapters, and it is just getting to the heart of the matter!

The book/podcast is hard to classify, but the author’s description above is as close as one can get. I believe this was once a print book which may not have been widely distributed, but now that the author is reading it and distributing it in podcast form, hopefully it will finally get the attention it deserves!

Jump on over to his site and add the RSS feed to your favorite podcast-aware aggregator and join in the fun.