Ken Newquist's Blog at Lafayette College
The January Dancer, by Easton, Pa. native Michael Flynn tells the story of an alien artifact chased across the galaxy by an assortment of heroes and villains, it’s a slow, rambling sort of space opera that was strongest in its opening chapters, but managed to keep me engaged from chapter to chapter. The most curious … Read more
Netflix has a blog post up discussing their distributed approach to using Amazon’s AWS service, and how they weathered its April 2011 outage. It’s a good read, especially for anyone whose interested in scaling up their apps for use with AWS.
On Saturday I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with my daughter as part of the Easton Area School District’s enrichement program. Nate Swart and his daughter were there as well, and together we did a whirlwind tour of the museum (mostly because the girls weren’t interested in hanging out and reading about particular … Read more
The Quiet War is science fiction novel after the Earth has gone through the Overturn — a catastrophic climate event brought about by global warming. A new world order, based around conservative green values, emerges and attempts to restore the planet. Meanwhile, humanity has spread to the Moon, Mars and the outer planets. These outer colonies … Read more
Baseball is very much in the air in ITS. The “catch crew” is eager for the snow on the Quad to melt so we can get back to our occasional games of catch, and we’re eager for the first pitch to be thrown at Coca-Cola Park later this spring.
Digress.it is a collaborative editing and discussion plugin for WordPress that allows users to add comments to individual paragraphs in a post. We’re piloting as Scribe at Lafayette. These videos on Vimeo provide a good overview of how to make the best use of the plugin, from planning out documents to making comments. They’re well … Read more
Courtney Bentley gave me a heads up about this one: Cars 2 character turn arounds. These are 3D models of the major characters from Cars 2, which you are all but destined to see if you, like me, have a four-year-old in the house. I took my daughter to see Cars in the theater when … Read more
With the new year I decided to undertake a new project: Picture a Day. The goal is to take one photograph a day and then publish them to a public repository — in my case that’s Flickr and Facebook. I have to admit I’ve been a little hit or miss in my photo taking — … Read more
I got an iPhone in December and I almost immediately dropped it. Shaken by that experience, I got an Otter case that has a rubber grip around the sides and back, as well as a reinforced shell that wraps around the outside of my phone. It makes my phone look like the Hummer of iPhones, … Read more