Resented by some in New York and beloved in Los Angeles, O’Malley is one of the most controversial owners in the history of American sports. He remade major league baseball and altered the course of history in both Brooklyn and Los Angeles when he moved the Dodgers to California. But while many New York critics attacked him, O’Malley looked to the future, declining to argue his case. As a result, fans across the nation have been unable to stop arguing about him – until now.

Brilliance Audio

A sensation across Europe—millions of copies sold. A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.

It’s about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden . . . and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.

It’s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet’s disappearance . . . and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age—and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it—who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism—and an unexpected connection between themselves.

It’s a contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent novel about society at its most hidden, and about the intimate lives of a brilliantly realized cast of characters, all of them forced to face the darker aspects of their world and of their own lives.

Editor’s Note: This was probably the most enjoyable book of this type that I have read in five years.  I can’t wait to get “The Girl Who Played With Fire”, his next book.

First Look and Listen – The Beatles Remastered Original Studio Recording

When this fabulous box set arrived, I just had to drop everything and put it on my stereo system. My system is a retro 150 watts per channel Marantz amplifer driving my monster Polk Studio Monitor speakers. This configuration is designed to deliver the sound just as it was recorded in the studio along with the volume and clarity of actually being in the recording studio.

Those of you listening to music on anything but a truly good hi-fi stereo sound system (this means equipment from the 60’s and 70’s that weighs a ton) you don’t have a clue to what you are missing.

Cranking up these remastered recordings brings you into the studio hearing what was intended for you to hear by The Beatles. Nowhere else will you experience having The Lads rocking and rolling in the privacy of your own home.

With the purchase of this stereo box set you receive 217 songs, that are remastered and contain truly deluxe packaging that holds true to the original released albums and liner notes plus many new unseen images of The Fab Four.

By my calculations, they have already sold a billion dollars worth of these box sets both the stereo and mono versions since September. Let’s see if any other rock group can match this feat nearly 40 years after they have disbanded. Hmm, that would be in about 2049 for The Rolling Stones.

During these dismal economic times, I recommend you spend some of your hard earned money or unemployment checks on this box set to bring some long needed cheer into your life.

Senior Editor, Nexus Reviews

A guide to building and operating energy-efficient, ecologically sensitive IT and Facilities infrastructure.

Conventional Data Centers can have a huge impact upon the environment, using massive amounts of energy and water, emitting pollutants, and discarding huge quantities of machine waste. Their insatiable demand for energy and often inefficient designs make Data Centers expensive to operate and prime targets for future environmental regulation.

Fortunately, it’s now possible to design a Data Center that consumes fewer resources, costs less money to run, has a longer usable lifespan, and can even highlight a company’s social responsibility. Grow a Greener Data Center shows how.

Douglas Alger makes the business case for greening Data Centers and presents technologies, design strategies, and operational approaches to help any company improve the energy efficiency and “eco-friendliness” of their IT hosting environments. He provides multiple strategies for “greening” each phase of a new Data Center project–selecting a site, designing and building the facility, and choosing hardware–as well as tips for retrofitting an existing server environment.

Alger explores IT and facilities technology areas as well as broader green building practices, including building material selection, electrical system design, use of alternative energy, cooling system design, cabling media choices, fire suppression options, water conservation practices, landscaping strategies, recycling programs, e-waste management, and more.

* Explores how to green each phase of your Data Center project including site selection, physical design, construction, and hardware selection
* Offers green strategies for all Data Center technologies including power, cooling, cabling, fire suppression, and virtualization
* Presents IT and facilities design (and retrofitting) strategies that can save hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in energy costs
* Reveals financial incentive programs to help pay for green Data Center initiatives
* Outlines Data Center efficiency metrics and environmental building assessment systems used worldwide to rate how green a facility is
* Highlights the lessons of dozens of case studies and real-world installations pertaining to energy efficiency, green building projects, and Data Center technologies
* Addresses broader green business practices including proper e-waste disposal, water conservation, and fostering alternative transportation

For songwriters, composers and performers, this trail-blazing blueprint to crafting and understanding quality lyrics will prove a bottomless source of advice. Written by a nationally acclaimed songwriter, The Art of Writing Great Lyrics covers everything from communicating through song, defining styles, and collaborating with a partner to studying the market, making a great demo, and getting started on a songwriting career. Full of creative exercises, writing do’s and don’s, and a handy A to Z checklist for reviewing new songs, this insightful and highly motivating guide helps songwriters in all stages of their career to be at their creative best and make the right decisions.

Learn five Pink Floyd tracks note for note with Jamie Humphries. This excellent 2-DVD set will guide you through the bluesy rock licks of Dave Gilmour, one of the greatest Strat players of all time! Tracks include: Money; Shine On You Crazy Diamond (part 1); Another Brick In The Wall; Wish You Were Here and Comfortably Numb. A guitar workshop with note by note tutorials to five tracks by Jamie Humphries. This is a two DVD set with three hour of lessons with tabs.

You also get web support where you can download Pink Floyd jam tracks.

Monte Schulz’s prose novel opens in the spring of 1929, as the 19-year-old consumptive farm boy Alvin Pendergast attends an ill-fated dance marathon he’s too sickly to participate in. After a year of his life has been stolen by a sanitarium, Alvin knows he’s relapsing, and dreads not only the drudgery of his family’s homestead, but a return to the hospital. In this state of mind, an invitation for a late-night slice of pie is too seductive to pass up and before he knows it, Alvin crosses the Mississippi River and finds himself working for a slick con artist named Chester Burke.

Alvin is no match for Chester, who’s not merely a con man, but a gangster from Chicago, following the bootleg liquor trade through the small towns of America’s middle border. With Alvin in tow, Chester’s insouciant disregard for life serves him well as he embarks upon a series of bank robberies and senseless murders. All summer long, Chester assumes the role of a dark angel on Judgment day, cleansing the scrolls of those whose sad fortune had drawn them across his path. Too ill to flee, too morally weak to object, Alvin resigns himself to what seems like certain doom somewhere down the road. Fortunately, Alvin finds another companion on his journey, a lonely, eccentric, and grandiloquent dwarf named Rascal, whose own infirmity binds his and the farm boy’s destiny together. Drawn deeper and deeper into Chester’s murderous frolic, they come across a curious assortment of characters, from small town businessmen and religious kooks to wayward girls and dance contestants, spiritualists and sideshow freaks. Caught between Chester’s villainy and Alvin’s own physical deterioration, the young farm boy must make a decision: stick with Chester, who would surely kill him at the slightest hint of betrayal, or muster the courage to stake his life on faith in Rascal’s clever plan to save them both. Tired of being afraid, Alvin finally grasps the need not only to outwit the gangster but to find another road to travel. What he discovers about the meaning of home offers a solution to escape and freedom.

This Side of Jordan is a thoroughly American novel told in the voice of a lost generation hurtling toward the Great Depression, and evokes a long ago America of crowded Main Streets and tourist camps, miles of cornfields, rural churches, and musty parlors. It ends on the fairgrounds of a traveling wagon circus that beckons gangster, farm boy, and dwarf toward a startling resolution, and a hard-fought absolution for the two young, frightened collaborators. The narrative of this novel has the momentum of a freight train, but told in the seductive, rhythmic tradition of Southern lyricism reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote, and filled with vivid, outsized literary characters. If Jim Thompson and Carson McCullers went on a collaborative bender by kidnapping Holden Caulfield, Perry Smith, and Ignatius J. Reilly, they’d have come up with something like This Side of Jordan.

This is it! One of the most important and ambitious undertakings in comics history — a high-quality reprinting of everything cartooning genius Robert Crumb has ever published. This series of volumes will knock you out with its sheer scope and thoroughness. This premiere volume, “Early Years of Bitter Struggle,” chronicles the genesis of one of the most fascinating careers in America’s popular arts, featuring the unique collaborations of Robert and Charles Crumb, the earliest appearances of Fritz the Cat (including a Robin Hood parody), “Treasure Island Days” (a reflection of the young Crumbs’ fascination with the Disney movie), numerous previously unpublished strips, sketchbook work, full-color covers of comics he drew for his own amusement, and much more! Finally back in print, this volume is a must for every Crumb fan.

Editor’s Note:

Having been a huge Crumb fan,  I thought it is important to look at his early work first. Yes he could draw, but at this point he had not reached the top of his craft in terms of drawing skills. However, his ability  to fill the speak balloons with satirical comment on  life in the US was very well developed and is the essence of Crumb. We will not review all issues in this series but will pick one or two more to illustrate milestones in his craft.

When I Grow Up – Juliana Hatfield

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Copyright 2008

This book ranks as one the most enjoyable and honest books that I have read in 2008. Juliana exhibits a clear writing style which reveals her deep love of music as well as her pain, self-doubt and shyness. At the same time she shows the reader a very strong willed young woman determined to make her music and please her fans without any hint of whining about the often crude realities of playing to her fans in small rock club venues.

This is a must read for all Juliana Hatfield fans and any beginning musician starting their musical career.

The Liveboard offers three modes of operation - depending on your degree of baseball obsession:

Simple Mode:
Set your “Home Team” and the Liveboard will automatically display your team’s action whenever they begin a game.
Full Mode:
Adds another level to the Liveboard Simple Mode by automatically displaying any game currently in progress while your Home Team is not playing. The Liveboarddetects a current game within your Home Team’s division first, if available.
Cycle Mode:
Automatically cycles through the major league, displaying any and all games in progress.

Vroop: