My friend Richie Partington is on the American Library Association's 'YALSA' committee which presents their 'Best Books For Young Adults' list (See the List). He also sends out a popular email bulletin called 'Richie's Picks,' in which he reviews the best in Young Adult fiction. I am the webmaster for Richies Picks.

Which is lengthy prolog to explain why I get to read books before they are released...

Claws, by Will Weaver is stunning. The current reviews focus on the thumbnail view of the book. Jed Berg has it all, then things go south. Then they start to get better. But we know better, or rather, we should know better. When an author quotes Chekhov on the fly leaf it is a big sign. When an author has his characters discussing the catharitic properties of tragic literature, it is another sign.

Claws delivers on Eudora Welty's premise that the ending to a (short) story should both be a complete surprise, while also being completely inevitable.

Read Richie's review or just go to Amazon and order it! (note: no affiliate link)

The Testing Range has always been a personal test bed for rather ugly bits of crap. I had other places (journals online) for prettified writing and stuffs... But now Testing Range is being used...people come here for the skinny on my reality. This format, subject to change as it is, contains all the relevant links from the old home page, plus gives me a place to post updates. I first set up Bloxsom in March of 2002, posted a half dozen quasi links and then moved to some other momentary infatuation.

 

 

 

 

 

Schuyler Erle and I have been setting up community network mapping at Maps.nocat.net. We have the ability to geocode addresses and generate possible line of site along with pretty pictures. This pretty picture shows the profile between The Testing Range and Steve Chalem's link at Holly Ridge, 8 1/2 miles away. We will be presenting a talk on this process at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in April.

I had the opportunity to go to Etech last year...it was amazing. I hung out with the freenetworks.org geeks and we ran around wearing our 'Anarchist, Criminal, Parasite' shirts. And I met Cory Doctorow of boing boing and Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law professor, author (Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and The Future of Ideas), lead attorney in the inexplicitly denied Eldred vs. Ashcroft case to Free The Mouse, and one of my personal heroes.