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Posted
by Amazon Customer Reviews
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/themoneysit08-20
MOVIE MAVEN reviewed:
| | 1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:  DIDO AND AENEAS, October 30, 2006 "Dido and Aeneas" is one of my favorite operas. I only wish that I could see it in, preferably, a venue intimate enough to capture its beauty and passion. I own 5 different cd versions and only the one with Von Otter and the one with Hunt Lieberson come close to this one. This is a truly magnificent accomplishment: Every singer is perfect for his or her role, the chorus is wonderful and the orchestra under Haim cannot be topped. Some, I've read here, find the tempos too fast or even rushed. I find them brisk and exciting. Graham and Bostridge cannot be beaten.
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iRiver T10 MP3 Player
Posted
by TheTechLounge - Recent Articles: Multimedia: Portable Media Players
http://www.thetechlounge.com
The iRiver T10 is a flash-based player with what iRiver bills as a "sport ready' design. It's got a chromed metal "sport clip' to keep it attached and the body of the player is sturdily built. These are both good qualities to have when you're waist deep in blackberry bushes trying to retrieve a wayward golf disc. Of course, sturdiness alone is not enough to compete in the portable media player market. Consumers demand features! And sound quality! And maple bars! Does the iRiver T10 have what it takes to succeed? Well it doesn't have maple bars, but tell me, which player does?
Sony BCG-34HRMF4 Battery Charger with LCD Display and 4 AA Ni-MH Rechargeable Batteries
Posted
by Amazon Customer Reviews
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/themoneysit08-20
Angela Ott reviewed:
| | 2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:  For the price, it is ok, but..., October 29, 2006 the batteries that come with it(mine at least) lose their charge even when not in electronic item.
I bought this charger so that I could always have batteries for my mp3 player and my digital camera. I bought duracell batteries in the AAA size that I use with this charger and they hold their charge fine, but with the Sony AA batteries that come with it, they totally lose their charge too quickly so that everytime I have to use them I have to charge them fully before I can even if I had already charged them when I put them away. I have heard of batteries losing their charge in electronic equipment even if that equipment is off(that is why I don't keep in in equipment), but not when it is just in a plastic case.
Also, the screen that registers how full the batteries are I don't think is accurate. I was charging some batteries once and I was switching the ones that were "full" with ones that need to be charged and I missed one that was done charging and when the charger turned back on it said that that battery was only 2/3 full even tho seconds before it was saying it was full.
Overall, for the money, the charger could be alot worse. One good thing is that, like many of sony's items, it is a very attractive design. You cant tell by the picture but the plastic lid has a kind of glimmer, like car paint.
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The Perilous Fight - America’s World War II in Color
Posted
by Amazon Customer Reviews
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/themoneysit08-20
Art reviewed:
| | 8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:  Different Perspective, Hardly Anti-American, October 28, 2006 Toss the tiresome cry from the right in the previous review aside. This video is about World War II through an American lens. It provides an interesting, FACTUAL, balanced perspective of World War II as it was viewed by Americans on the home front at the time, largely through letters and film of life at home and for soldiers in the field. Contrary to popular belief, not all Americans were supportive of the war throughout the entirety of their country's involvement in it. People got tired of losing their sons, husbands, and fathers, as well as the many sacrifices they had to make to support the war effort. That fatigue is reflected here, as well as Americans' biting the bullet about these things because they knew this was a war that had to be won. This is not a 'this happened in this battle and that happened at that battle' kind of set. If you want that kind of a a comprehensive DVD set about WWII, you are better off with the excellent but pricey "World at War" set. If you want a lot of jingoism and unquestioning flag-waving, this is not the set for you, either. This DVD is highly recommended.
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iRiver Clix 2GB Multimedia Player
Posted
by TheTechLounge - Recent Articles: Multimedia: Portable Media Players
http://www.thetechlounge.com
The one company that, in my opinion, stands out as the small market iPod alternative is iRiver. For the last few years iRiver has steadily developed a string of interesting personal media devices which, while not as popular as the iPod, are every bit as stylish and cool. Today I've got my hands on the iRiver Clix 2GB. This simple looking player jumps into the flash-based player arena to take on the likes of the iPod Nano as well as offerings from Samsung, Toshiba, Sandisk and others.
Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Two
Posted
by Amazon Customer Reviews
http://www.amazon.com/
Linda Oskam reviewed:
| | 2 of 8 people found the following review helpful: Life is too short for unreadable books, October 24, 2006 The October 2006 book for my reading club: nearly 300 pages of a writer who is considered as a serious candidate to be a future Nobel Prize winner. But I was not impressed, it even irritated me (something that seldomly happens with books): pompous style, unclear contents, long sentences that just list events/things/persons. I thought that the problem might be in the translation, but when I tried the Spanish version it was just as awful. And since life is too short for unreadable books I stopped after 2 attempts and 67 pages (which meant that I gave it a serious try).
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Saturday
Posted
by Amazon Customer Reviews
http://www.amazon.com/
Linda Oskam reviewed:
| | 6 of 7 people found the following review helpful: One ordinary day turning extraordinary, October 24, 2006 On Saturday 15 February 2003 Henry Perowne, a middle-aged London neurosurgeon and dedicated husband and father, wakes up in the middle of the night and, while standing for the window, sees a flaming plane on its decent into Heathrow. He cannot sleep anymore and sits downstairs with his blues-guitarist son Theo to wait for the news. It turns out that the plane made a safe landing. When he finally goes to bed again he makes love to his wife, falls asleep and wakes up while outside the preparations for the protest march against the Iraqi war are ongoing. He takes his car to the squash club, but on the way there gets hit by a car with 3 young thugs in it. The leader of the three, Baxter, wants to beat him up, but when Henry mentions the signs of Huntington's disease that he has clearly seen in the guy he backs off. The rest of the day goes by relatively ordinarily: he plays squash, goes shopping, visits his demented mother and goes to a rehearsal from his son's blues band. All the while we see the world through the eyes of a reductionist neurosurgeon, explaining events from the perspective of brain functions.
But they haven't seen the last of Baxter. During a nice Saturday evening get together with his wife, children (his daughter Daisy is in for a visit from Paris to show the proofs of her first book with poems) and grumpy, alcoholic father-in-law-cum poet, Baxter and one of his friends show up again. The evening takes a number of unexpected turns, not in the least because of Baxter's mood swings which are caused by the Huntington's disease. In the end Henry shows that he is a true doctor who lives up to the oath of Hippocrates even in the most difficult of circumstances.
A great book. Henry is in a sense a very ordinary man, even though better off than most people, but he fully realizes this. I can imagine that some people may get bored or irritated by Henry's way of reasoning, but I thought it was amazing that the author (not a neurosurgeon himself) could dive so convincingly into the mind of somebody who has it all and then threatens to lose it.
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The Return of the Dancing Master
Posted
by Amazon Customer Reviews
http://www.amazon.com/
Linda Oskam reviewed:
| | 2 of 2 people found the following review helpful: Neo-nazism in Sweden, October 24, 2006 Stefan Lindman is a policeman in southern Sweden. In the same week he hears that he has tongue cancer and that his ex-colleague Herbert Molin is brutally murdered. As a way to forget his cancer he uses the sick leave between the diagnosis and the start of radiotherapy to investigate the murder of Molin, who is slaughtered and left behind with a pattern of footsteps that gives the basic tango steps. He works alongside Giuseppe Larsson, the official leader of the investigation. Together they first discover that Herbert Molin was a convinced nazi until his death and they unravel a network of neo-nazies. But the murderer of Herbert Molin comes from his past. Already quite in the beginning of the book we meet the murderer, but his exact motives remain unclear until the end of the book.
The first book that I read after the Kurt Wallander series. And even though Stefan Lindman is no Kurt Wallander, he is an interesting enough character and the theme of the book (neo-nazism in Sweden) is interesting enough to read this book in a few days. Despite this, there was something missing: the plot did not grip me like the last few Mankells that I have read.
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ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB PCI-E Preview
Posted
by TheTechLounge - Recent Articles: Hardware: Video Cards
http://www.thetechlounge.com
The Christmas shopping season is nearly upon us, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that ATI would choose now to launch a new mainstream video card. ATI's Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB PCI-Express video card is being launched today with immediate availability, selling for $199 and competing directly with NVIDIA's 7900 GS 256MB. The X1950 Pro sports an Engine Clock of 575 MHz and 256MB of GDDR3 clocked at 690 MHz (1.38 GHz DDR).
Dell Ultrasharp 2407WFP 24″ Widescreen LCD
Posted
by TheTechLounge - Recent Articles: Multimedia: Computer Display
http://www.thetechlounge.com
For the past few years, Dell has been the king of LCD monitors, especially for those who are on a budget. That isn't to say their LCDs are low quality, however, they just ship very high volumes and can afford to have very competetive prices. Dell's UltraSharp 2407WFP 24" LCD is certainly monstrous, but as the saying goes, bigger isn't always better. We'll put this bad boy to the test to see if it's worth dropping the cash on.
