Dear people posting reviews in the iTunes store

Writing "click yes if you agree" is not only a sure way to get me to click "no," but it will also give me incentive to invent time travel, pop back to a few years before you were born, and expose your parents to targeted low-dosage radiation, sterilizing them and making this world a modern, annoying-reviewer-free utopia (with only a mild bit of paradox).

So keep it up. Really.

The Bruce Sterling book you really should read (but likely haven't)

Over at Making Light, Patrick Nielsen Hayden linked to this IO9 article*, in which Sterling talks about Web 2.0 and assorted problems with it. It's a good piece (and, I suspect, not nearly as informative as the entire speech was, but without a transcript, I'll take what I can get).

But if you really want to see Sterling's futurist mind at work, you'll want to read Shaping Things, his 2005 nonfiction book from MIT Press. It's a tiny (128p) pamphlet filled with brilliance, tracing human design history through the epochs of artifacts, machines, products, gizmos, and (most significantly), spimes. It takes into account fabbing (naturally, given the MIT connection), RFID, and all sorts of other things, and is witty and fascinating. And it even has a bottle of fine wine as a major focus, because, well, why not?

The design of the book is as essential as the writing, as key words appear in different colors and sizes. It's gorgeous, as well as informative.

You'll read the book in a hour, maybe two. Then you'll read it again, once your head stops exploding. It's that sort of book. You'll never look at a bottle of wine, or at the words "utopia" or "oblivion," in the same way again.

*Yes, I have IO9 in my Google Reader feed, but it's such an active blog that I find I usually only read the first few articles at the top of the feed, mark the rest as having been read, then catch any highlights posted elsewhere, or shared by other Google Reader folks**.

**I also can't tell you how vital the Shared Items option is on Google reader. Love that feature. I do have my Shared Items going into my Facebook feed, but you can find my shared items on a public page (and add it as an RSS feed from there, if you're not using Google Reader as your RSS reader), or drop me a note offline and I'll add you to my otherwise-unused gchat contacts list, which will also add you to my Google Reader Shared items group.

*snort*

One of many reasons I love Spring Training (aside from the obvious one, which is that the Mets are generally far enough away from their inevitable collapse that I can feel optimistic) is that you get lineups with people like Oliver Perez batting second.

Personally, I want to see more stuff like this happen during the regular season, just to keep things interesting.

*grumble*

The copies I reserved of the new books by Ken Scholes and Paul Melko have been listed as "In Transit" for over a week, according to the Minuteman site.

*sigh*

I appear to be getting my copies from the previously-unknown MInuteman Library branch in Idaho. And the books are being sent by aurochs