Can customers easily find your business?
I enjoy walking around Wangaratta: clean air, exercise, time to let my mind wander. But often, my thoughts are interrupted when a car pulls up and one of its occupants asks for directions to a particular business, service, or event. Sometimes, I know where the business is and send the driver in its general direction. […]
Questions a web designer might ask you.
Hi all, When a potential client contacts me, these are some of the preliminary questions I am likely to ask. 1. What does your business do? 2. How long has it been operating? 3. Do you currently have a Website? If yes: What is or isn’t working for you on it? Do you want a […]
Converting an existing website so it can be viewed on a mobile.
I finally bit the bullet and decided to convert a website that had not been built with mobile phones in mind to one that could be easily viewed on a mobile. This means that the pages are now responsive and resize when viewed on a mobile. It was one of the first websites I had […]
Review of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments
Unless you only get your news from a Donald Trump-authorised news source, you would know that The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s recently released sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. I loved The Handmaid’s Tale when I first read it a few decades ago. It had great world-building and created a believable brutal vision of a right-wing theocracy in […]
Review of Jonathan Franzen’s Purity.
Although this blog is mainly about science fiction, I sometimes read non-genre literature to see what the other side is up to. Jonathon Franzen is one of my favourite non-genre authors. This is a review of Purity, the fourth of his novels that I have read. Purity’s plot revolves around secrets, with one secret being […]
Review of A Refugee’s Rage by Anthony J Langford
I very much enjoyed being challenged in my thinking by the two novellas in this collection. It contains two very different stories: Caught Between Love and Loss, and the title story, A Refugee’s Rage. Caught Between Love and Loss This story begins as if it is going to be a story about Richard, a guy […]
Quick review of The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
The Windup Girl is one of the most imaginative dystopian science fiction novels I have read. It has fantastic world-building and is peopled with flawed characters who primarily look out for themselves. The novel is set in a future Thailand in a near-apocalyptic world, where the Thais try to cope with climate change, rising sea […]
Quick review of When the Floods Came.
When the Floods Came is a well-written and imaginative take on an apocalyptic future. The novel is set in England, where a virus has wiped out most of the population. A few people live in isolated pockets using technology that is slowly running down. The main focus is a family who live by themselves in […]
A uni essay about two of the most influential books I have read
I wrote this personal essay for a subject in my BA in Internet Communications. It is about the influence of two books, 1984 and Stephen Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane, on my reading and writing. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. […]
Whatever happened to the technological singularity?
This is a copy of a speech I wrote for a writing subject in my BA in Internet Communications. Whatever happened to the technology singularity? I am here tonight to ask what happened to the technology singularity. We don’t seem to be getting any closer to being dragged into its event horizon. I desperately want […]