The whole New Sun, Long Sun, Short Sun series. Very rewarding and much of it only makes sense when you've read all of it. Then you'll want to read it again to pick up all the clues and references you missed the first time around :-)

As I said to one of my kids - My youth was charecterized by what you could do, fly to the moon, travel at insane speeds, do fantastic stuff. His youth is charecterized by what he's not allowed to do. Sad indeed.

My friends had no lawn darts so they came up with a game that involved a piece of foam rubber on each shoulder and an old open face crash helmet. Throw a dartboard dart high in the air and try and 'catch' it by letting it stick in your crash helmet as it comes back down. What could possibly go wrong!

Been there done that, gave my IPod away in disgust and put Linux on my Mac. Naturally Apple couldn't care less about that and only geeks will be interested at the moment. However they should care, I was trialling Apple hardware at work; the trial has been abandoned and when friends and colleagues ask my geek opinion I no longer recommend Apple.

That's a matter of opinion. I may not be representative of the general public but for a variety of reasons OS X doesn't work for me so my Mac Pro got set up to dual boot OS X and Kubuntu. While I am a geek I was surprised to find the wife and kids almost always choose to use Kubuntu day to day, even though the default is OS X. In fact about the only thing the kids use OS X for is Lego software.