Author Archive
La Roux | 3rd Jul 2010
As I browsed through The Hype Machine Zeitgeist 2009, I came across La Roux. As soon as I heard the first song on her self-titled album coupled with the good reviews on The Hype Machine, I knew I should probably just go ahead and buy it. The Hype Machine helped me discover an artist I [...]
SkypeKit Hypocrisy | 2nd Jul 2010
Skype finally announced it’s much-anticipated new project, SkypeKit. It’s a new SDK that basically separates the Skype user interface from their underlying proprietary protocol used to make and receive voice and video calls. I was generally thinking this would be good news since it will allow Skype to be incorporated into other programs like the [...]
eMusic Review | 6th Jun 2010
When I bought my new portable audio player, it came with a bunch of free songs from eMusic. I have gotten these offers before, but in the past I did not bother cashing them in because the eMusic selection was pretty limited. Since I wanted to grab some new music to fill my new toy, [...]
Begin To Hope | 30th May 2010
I probably first discovered Regina Spektor years after most other people in the country. It was only a few months ago that I was captured by her song “Us” featured in the movie 500 Days of Summer. As I went searching for more of her work, I found that she was already a fairly well-established [...]
Sansa Clip Plus | 30th Apr 2010
My aunts gave me a gift certificate to Amazon.com for Christmas. I like to spend gift certificates on something I want rather than something I need (like a text book) because I don’t always get a chance to do that. I had been thinking about buying a portable music player to use in my car [...]
Cellphone Economics Revisited: One Year In | 26th Apr 2010
Last year I devised a plan to save myself a ton of money by revising my cellphone service. I was paying $576 per year (including taxes) for a mediocre cell plan from AT&T. I’m happy to report that my plan has been a fantastic success. Using this plan, I managed to pay $188.56 (including taxes) [...]
Rush Proxy Bookmarklet | 9th Mar 2010
Graham Walker, a tech-savvy ER Resident who blogs over at The Central Line, recently posted a really nifty little solution to a problem that plagues higher education. Many academic journals require subscriptions to view their contents, and although most school libraries offer proxy accounts to facilitate student access from home, these accounts are often cumbersome [...]
Ubuntu Artwork Pool | 17th Feb 2010
I created a Flickr account so that I could submit some of my more “artsy” photos to the Ubuntu Artwork pool. In order to qualify for the pool, all photos must be licensed as CC-BY-SA or CC-BY, and all my photos are licensed CC-BY. Ubuntu developers will be choosing photos from the pool to be [...]
Ender’s Game | 31st Jan 2010
Ender’s Game is one of those books that I’ve been meaning to read for a few years now, and I just never made time. It’s partly because I always imagined it was going to be too much sci-fi for me. I’m not sure why I tend to shy away from sci-fi books because I usually [...]
Breakfast of Champions | 30th Jan 2010
Breakfast of Champions is the story of Dwayne Hoover, a car dealer obsessed with the writings of a science fiction author named Kilgore Trout. Hoover has requested that Trout be invited to speak at his town’s art festival. As Trout travels to the city, Hoover undergoes some sort of mental breakdown. The story is definitely [...]
I'm Jonathan Blackhall, a 4th year medical student at RMC. This is my blog, where I ramble about technology, medicine, free software, and other random stuff. 
