Ken Newquist's Blog at Lafayette College
I don’t often get to say that I’m reading a book written by a friend but that’s the case with Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes. I know Mur from back at the dawn of podcasting, when she podcast Geek Fu Action Grip and I did Nuketown Radio Active. We later wrote columns for Knights of the Dinner Table Magazine. I haven’t seen Mur in … Read more
I read a tremendous amount of Stephen King as a kid and teenager, but I stopped keeping up with him when he finished the Dark Tower series. I do occasionally venture back to that old well, the most recent time being 2013 when I read Doctor Sleep, the follow-up to his classic ghost story novel … Read more
I spent the last week or so rolling out the 2017 editions of Lafayette’s i-World and i-Lingua badges. Evidence to support the various flavors of badges is collected using a customized Moodle instance (called, simply enough, “Badges”). Once graded using the corresponding rubrics, the badges are baked by Moodle and can then be shared with the … Read more
Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Summer 2017 will be held Wednesday, June 21 through Friday, June 23, 2017 at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. A pre-Hack/Doc documentation and coding sprint will be held Tuesday, June 20, 2017. Hampshire also hosted Hack/Doc in Summer 2011. Unfortunately I can’t be there myself because of a prior commitment. It’s bittersweet — this is the first Hack/Doc … Read more
The Fuller Memorandum continues the ongoing saga of Bob Howard, IT professional, British civil servant … and defender of Earth against arcane invasions. In the third entry in The Laundry Files, Bob’s boss has gone missing … and that probably doesn’t bode well for the planet. I haven’t gotten very far in the book, but so far … Read more
I’m finally reading Jim Butcher’s urban fantasy novel Storm Front, Book 1 of the The Dresden Files series. My friends have been raving about it for years, but urban fantasy isn’t one of the genres I typically read. I decided to branch out, and Butcher’s book seemed a good place to start.
Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, Winter 2017 was held at Lafayette College from January 10 through Thursday, January 12, 2017. Visit the event webpage for more information.
A Night Without Stars is the latest novel in Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth series of space opera / science fantasy novels. You’ll be excused if that’s not readily apparent, as the novel is far removed in both time and space from the Commonwealth as depicted in the series’ inaugural novel, Pandora’s Star. The book picks up where its immediate … Read more
Acceptance is the third and final novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy. The trilogy is reminiscent of a novelized version of the TV show LOST, complete with a strange land called “Area X” that’s fallen out of time and a covert agency that’s been setup to study it. Unlike LOST, all of the people who venture into the “anomaly” are volunteers; … Read more