A new graphic novel by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, “A Drifting Life,” is a semi-fictional autobiography of the post-World War 2 manga scene, and perhaps the thickest (856 pages) I have ever read.  Bracketed between the end of World War II in 1945 and the Peace Treaty in 1960, this story is about Hiroshi Katsumi learning to become a manga artist, [...]

A lot of writers try to write a 50,000-word novel as part of the National Novel Writing Month. I didn’t do that as I was too busy working on an essay, restarting a short story that stalled out at 30 pages a few months ago, putting together the BBR for October and this month, and leaving behind the midterm [...]

With the run up to the midterm elections, I been swamped with political fliers in the mail. The San Jose mayor’s office is up for election this year with two current council members competing for the privilege of running the 11th largest city in the United States. It’s turning out to be a pissing match between [...]

The beginning of a new semester at school can be a crazy month. I need two classes to graduate with an additional associate degree in computer programming — my first associate degree was in General Education in 1994 — that I been going to school part-time for the last five years. Unfortunately, the two classes I’m [...]

August has always been a slow month for me. Maybe because it’s the lazy dog days that seem to stretch out forever, that I’m getting older as I celebrated my 37th birthday, or I just read too much fiction. I did read a bit of non-fiction but didn’t finished any of them in time for [...]

This month was a bit more offbeat than usual as I got my new MacBook laptop and spent much of my time making it my only computer out of the half-dozen computers that I own. (That is, of course, when I wasn’t sweating it outduring the heat wave.) My productivity for web programming and writing took a hugh [...]

This month Book Bag Review is a bit unusual since what I read was more like an intellectual unwinding from a busy semester. Granted, I only took one math class since the three computer programming classes that I wanted to take got cancelled due to low enrollment. Statistics was not the hardest math class that I ever [...]

Although I’m only taking one class this semester, April was a long month of pain. The chapter five and six test in my Elementary Statistics class was supposed to be the hardest test to date and things would get easier after that. Assuming that you passed the test. I was one of five lucky students [...]

This month was the second anniversary of my Mom passing away from breast cancer. It was harder for my Dad since she died only two days after his birthday, and this past year was even harder as he lost five relatives since most of his family are in their 70′s and 80′s. One of the [...]

I normally read about four or five books and a dozen magazines each month. This Book Bag Review covers January and February since I was so busy that all I read during that time was six books. The highlight of January was attending the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco for the first time and studying for a Microsoft certification [...]