Review of "The Mourner" by Richard Stark

"The Mourner" is another in the Parker series of novels by Richard Stark (one of the pseudonyms of Donald Westlake). Parker is once again faced with the task of pulling off a difficult heist. In this case he has even more incentive to succeed in liberating a valuable statue as he's being blackmailed with evidence of a previous crime.

The Mourner sets out at a fast pace early on and doesn't slow down. If you like a quick, fast read that involves a good dose of action and suspense then The Mourner is for you. While the books are a little dated in terms of age Westlake's writing is skillful in avoiding getting caught up in a specific era and unnecessarily dating the book. Overall I'd recommend grabbing a copy of The Mourner it offers a quick enjoyable mystery as we follow Parker in the pursuit of yet another major heist.

Leopard - Useful new feature Webclips

One useful feature that is included as a native part of Leopard is the ability to build a custom widget that is displayed in Dashboard. In Safari v3.0 a new icon appears in the toolbar
(a pair of scissors with a dotted box) that once clicked on allows you to select an area of the current web page to be monitored. Once you've selected the area you click the ADD button which puts a new Widget on your Dashboard. There are limited formatting options at this point in terms of the type of box that the web clip is displayed in. One thing that would be useful would be the ability to label the Widgets.

Overall, a small feature that previously you needed to use third party software and a couple of hacks to have this functionality. At this point I'm still experimenting with web clips having setup two 1) to monitor the current inventory of refurbished Macs on Apple's online store and 2) to monitor the ongoing auctions of vintage Macs on eBay.