Barnes And Noble, Bellevue

I spent a few hours at the Barnes and Noble in Bellevue last week. I picked up the following (Buy Two, Get the Third Free!) at US prices, which, given the favourable exchange rate, ended up being a pretty good deal.

Bel Canto because it sounds and looks interesting, and seems to have garnered a lot of positive reviews.


Stardust because the movie adaptation is currently playing at the theatres.


Kitchen Confidential because two of my brothers recommend it. One of them is a chef.


BTW, my five-year old and I got into a tiff. Because there were no children books to his liking (and mine), and he didn't want to leave the bookstore empty-handed, he started to pick up anything and everything for purchase. After several terse "No"s, the silly boy took off from me. I found him at the opposite side of the store, flipping through the pages of a magazine. He spent his timeout back at the hotel room closet.

The ZEOS zeitgeist

Flipping through a 1993 issue of PC/Computing magazine brought back a flood of memories of my computer distribution days (at a now-defunct wholesaler). This was when OKIDATA, NEC, AST, Hayes, Harvard Graphics, Nanao, Conner, CompuServe, and Quarterdeck ruled the roost or were players in their respective areas.

Lotus and WordPerfect were already on the wane and Dell was on its ascendancy.

So many sales calls on so many by-gone products and brands.

Even the magazine bit the dust. Remember Creative Computing and recent victim Byte? There I go again lamenting the passage of time—sorry. The November 1993 issue pictured here had 546 pages, and if page count is any measure of the peak of a New Idea, then the Golden Age of home computing had played itself out fifteen years ago.

There was one familiar name on the masthead of that magazine, that of Penn Jillette, penning [!] an article about Uma Thurman and public-key encryption. Penn's one of my favourite entertainers. No Bullsh!t.

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ZEOS—The Company That Didn't.

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Conner—Can you make that an MFM drive, please?, RLLs are so yesterday.