Andrew Turbott's personal blog
Posts tagged apt
100 Books – nearly half of which I have read
Jul 19th
The BBC believes that most people have read only 6 books from this list:
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (SOME!) X
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X
34 Emma – Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres X
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan X
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson X
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome X
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton X
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks X
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Books I have read (X) = 48
However, books my wife Jen has read = 63
Original posting from Gareth C in Facebook
Will I be a Geek Dad? 20 reasons Jen thinks I might be…
Jun 22nd
Adapted from Kathy Ceceri (http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/06/top-10-ways-you-know-you%E2%80%99re-married-to-a-geekdad/)
1. I think that maintaining the computers, game systems and home network is just as important, if not MORE important than doing dishes or cleaning the bathrooms.
2. She never knows when she’ll walk into the dining room to find the table covered with a computer broken down into all its component parts.
3. I’m a packrat, keeping every spare cable, screw and or slightly damaged electronic part for a future project.
4. I am thinking of removing the TV, cancelling Sky, and replacing everything with a large screen computer because all the good shows can be streamed on the Internet.
5. I spend a lot of time maintaining my personal blog(s).
6. I have considered installing stilts under the legs of our bed so my comic book boxes can fit underneath.
7. Our kid’s college fund consists of boxes of first issues of my favourite comic books.
8. I would like to sit down with the kid and read through the first issues (when he or she is old enough to treat them with respect), college fund be damned. (Well, maybe not Preacher #1.)
9. Every computer in the house has its chassis half open…and is still running.
10. I may pause any movie at any time to make sure that the colour temperature and brightness are set just right.
11. I think nothing of having the laptop on the dining room table to share funny stories and pictures I’ve found with the family.
12. Our house is colourful, and not because of paint, but because of toys, models, and my collection of videos and comics.
13. I have dissected a new appliance just to see how it works…
14. At times I have debated the relativity of fictional characters and or logical outcomes to movies and television shows.
15. A Periodic Table placemat for our child would be neat (and instructional!).
16. I am more than happy to attempt explanations of obscure scientific answers to “why?” questions.
17. It pains me to limit the kid’s computer time.
18. She’s not sure if the new Lego sets are really for the kids or for me.
19. I want to build my own robot.
20. I spend lots of time “helping” the kid play videogames.
My del.icio.us bookmarks for May 18th
May 19th
These are my links for May 18th:
- Khet – strategy at the speed of light
- The Dice Tower – Home
- Purple Pawn
- Google Operating System (Unofficial Google Blog)
- Home – Home Server Land
- Greenbuild | Building materials | Building products | Building construction
- The Yes Vote – NZ Referendum on Child Discipline 2009
- Computerworld – News, Education & Headlines – Security, Storage & Networking – Information on Hardware, Software for Laptops & Desktops
- Insecure.Org – Nmap Free Security Scanner, Tools & Hacking resources
- Baby & toddler sleep – swaddling wraps, Go Go Bag & grobag baby sleeping bags, sleep sacks, Mokopuna, SwaddleMe, Miracle Blanket, new baby gifts, gifts for babies, baby shower gifts & Safe T Sleep – The Sleep Store, New Zealand
A very apt poem
May 8th
Philip Larkin – This Be The VerseThey fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.



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