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Grin with cat attached
| Today I are mainly | Jul. 2nd, 2006 05:43 pm | |
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Sitting in the lounge (well, stretched out on the sofa) reading "The strange rebirth of Liberal England". Even with the aircon it's not cool; it's hovering around 26 but it's definitely topped 32 in the rest of the flat, so I'm quite happy with the result. I've also managed to clear away the backlog of washing up and laundry, so it's not been an entirely lazy day - although the paperwork remains untackled. I'm now contemplating the next attack on my "to read" list, which is actually quite scary. From where I sit, I can see the following unread non-fiction: The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Writings Britain Unwrapped: Government and Constitution Explained Open Sources Europe: A History Take it Personally Another World Is Possible If... Multitude The Blank Slate Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions A Theory of Justice Your Rights Just Law The War We Could Not Win The Cunning of Unreason Godel, Escher, Bach (part-read) John Stuart Mills: Essays Mindware And that's the *little* bookshelf. Oh, and I could say what Amazon emailed me to recommend this morning, but I'd have to put that in a filtered post. Suffice it to say, "eeek!". | ||
| A slight confession | Jul. 1st, 2006 04:33 pm | |
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Not *all* of my sleep trouble recently has been down to the heat. Neal Asher has a certain degree of blame to accept, too. Having read his "Gridlinked" recently (drawn in by a sense of perversity, being given the impression by the cover art, title and synopsis that I was in for some real quality pulp) and found it to be extremely good sci-fi, I again found myself browsing my bookshelves for something "light and accessible". Well, Asher's Polity novels are very accessible, and extremely readable, but "light" is probably not so accurate a term. And they don't let go; Line of Polity is 650 pages but I found myself very hard pressed to stop turning them. The books' strength, I think, lies in Asher's ability to sustain suspense and mystery; in a universe of AIs, FTL travel, "runcibles", forbidden tech, and the odd (and I do mean odd) immense and/or inscrutable alien entity, you can never be sure quite what's meant or what will happen next - and yet this doesn't cause confusion so much as fascination. Most books can have entrap you in the "one more page" trick 10 pages from the end; this one caught me half-way though, and I found myself closing the book to gauge just how far I'd got to go. One thing I like about reading books by new (to me) authors is you don't know their rules yet. Do all their "leading" characters survive to live happily ever after, or are they actually happy to slice&dice them in the name of unpredictability? Do they succumb to the lure of the Deus Ex Machina; if so are they any good at it? So far Stross, MacLeod, and Asher, from each of whose work I've read at most 3 books, stand out the most strongly as excellent "new" authors with fascinating pet universes; I hope they can continue to do so. (Stross I know is somewhat bored of his Eschaton universe, despite its immense promise; Asher could quite easily overdo the appearance of one Entity in upcoming books, and MacLeod appears to have killed most of his protagonists.) (As a side thought, the three authors listed above join Asimov in generally equating religion to the status of delusional anachronism in their work) | ||
| Things geeks do before breakfast | Jun. 3rd, 2006 10:12 am | |
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Make your home bookshelves searchable by pda/phone. (No more "do I already have this?" in bookstores) mood:
 accomplished | ||
| Jan. 27th, 2006 09:03 pm | ||
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| I've just started reading Gödel, Escher, Bach. It may be some time before I reappear... | ||
| Hrm | Sep. 30th, 2005 09:02 am | |
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Still cold-ridden; don't think I'll be getting any work done today (nose won't stop running long enough, for a start). New Pratchett out tomorrow, by the looks of it. | ||
| Decryptica | Feb. 4th, 2005 09:13 pm | |
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Schrödinger's Cat comment: http://www.livejournal.com/users/wechsl This occured most of the way through "Unto Leviathan". The character "Wexler" (which is how I used to spell my nick) appears only on that page, delivers those lines, and is never seen again. Very weird. Subversive Tortoise: http://www.livejournal.com/users/wechsl Subversion is a software version control system. Tortoise is a Windows client application for it. I'm introducing and documenting both at work. | ||
| And then, suddenly, in the middle of page 276... | Feb. 3rd, 2005 09:27 am | |
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"What the hell are you talking about?" asked a man named Wexler. "What's Schrödinger's Cat?" | ||
| Books 2005 | Jan. 7th, 2005 08:23 pm | |
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1) Extreme Programming Explained: Embracing Change; Kent Beck; 0321278658; 01/01-01/01 2) The Pragmatic Programmer; Andrew Hunt, David Thomas; 020161622X; 02/01-07/01 3) Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks; Brian Jepson, Ernest E. Rothman; 0596006071; 07/01- [safari] 4) Going Postal; Terry Pratchett; 0385603428; 09/01-11/01 5) Rousseau; A Very Short Introduction; 12/01-27/01 6) Kushiel's Dart; Jacqueline Carey; 0330493744; 14/01-17/01 7) The Stainless Steel Rat; Harry Harrison; 28/01-30/01 8) Unto Leviathan; Richard Paul Russo; 18141492701; 31/01-04/02 9) Nylon Angel; Marianne De Pierres; 1841492531; 04/02-06/02 10) The Little Prince; Antoine de St-Exupery; 07/02-09/02 11) The Silver Wolf; Alice Borchardt; 0006483852; 07/02-15/02 12) Cosmonaut Keep; Ken MacLeod; 1841490679; 16/02- -) Snort 2.1 Intrusion Detection, Second Edition; 1931836043; 21/01-22/02 (partial read only, but obviously far more than the proofreader) 13) Trading in Danger; Elizabeth Moon; 04/03-05/03 14) Iron Dragons: Mountains and Mayhem; Rose Estes; 06/03-08/03 15) The Silkie; A E Van Vogt; ??? 16) The Shadow of the Torturer; Gene Woolf ??/03- 17) The Anvil of the world; 30/03-?? PHP Certification House Atreides 20) The Orange Book; 6/05 - 21) Moving Target; 13/05-15/05 22) Dark Light; 16/05- | ||
| "Maus" author's take on 9-11 | Sep. 22nd, 2004 02:15 pm | |
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http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/gra | ||
| There are 6 billion people on this planet who are not George Bush | Jul. 16th, 2004 10:25 pm | |
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As such, while his political power and finances are disproportionate, we can still fill some of the gaps he has left by redirecting billions of dollars of funds from global medical and social projects into "faith based programs". One such example: http://www.livejournal.com/users/redcou (Similar sentiments are expressed in George Monbiot's "Age of Consent", in which he points out that the balance of power in any debt relationship is in fact in the hands of the debtor (as well as pointing out, as if it needed repeating, the utter fuckups that first-world "assistance" make of third-world economies.) | ||
| Read This Book | May. 5th, 2004 07:50 pm | |
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 The Age of ConsentThis book has been widely described as a "revolutionary manifesto", and that title is apt if initially disturbing. Monbiot advocates nothing less that a complete reworking of global trade and government, but incredibly he provides a coherent (if optimistic) method to achieve this. However, perhaps the greatest utility of this book lies not in its primary aim of global revolution, but in providing clear and studied explanations of many of the more confused myths of both market fundamentalism and the amorphous "global justice" movement. It also does a creditable job of clearing the much maligned name of Maynard Keynes, as well as highlighting the fact that many solutions to today's global issues have already been proposed, decades ago. This book will probably leave you, as it has left me, with a far more comprehensive understanding of globalisation issues, and confirmation of your suspicions that the world's corporations (and the governments that they have bought) really are the enemy. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. One key title mentioned in the book is Joseph Stiglitz' "Globalisation and its Discontents" - a book I've already highly recommended many times, and one that's well worth reading for an in-depth analysis of just how devastating the world's controlling financial agencies are to the whole world. Further titles that spring to mind repeatedly in reading this book are Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy - (starting with "Red Mars") which feature a global revolution (albeit not on this planet) and the battle to create a truly equitable world society. Karen tells me that "Speaker for the Dead" has some relevance to the first part of the book. | ||
| Coolest :) | Jan. 20th, 2004 01:55 pm | |
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http://www.esa.int/export/SPECIALS/Mars PS: Go read the Mars Trilogy ;) | ||
| Books 2004 | Jan. 19th, 2004 01:49 pm | |
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Although I've just joined ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} 50bookchallenge I don't imagine I'll manage that many in a year (too many other commitments), but I've decided I *will* log all the books that I *do* read.So far this year: 1 The Science of Discworld (04/01) 0091886570 2 The Science of Discworld 2 - The Globe (??/01) 0091888050 3 Guns, Germs and Steel (12/01) 0099302780 4 The Meeting of the Waters (??/02) 0743468538 [partial] XML in a nutshell (??/02) 0596002920 [partial] Content Syndication with RSS (??/02) 0596003838 5 Red Mars (25/02) 0586213899 6 Green Mars (5/03) 0586213902 7 Blue Mars (15/03) 0586213910 8 Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (22/04) 0140035206 9 Rommel?: Gunner Who? (23/04) 0140041079 10 Monty: His Part in My Victory (24/04) 0140045031 11 Age of Consent (29/04) 0007150431 12 The Future of Politics (06/05) 0007101325 13 Viral Politics (10/05) 1842750224 [abandoned] 14 The Wee Free Men (12/05) 0552549053 15 A Hat Full of Sky (14/05) 0385607369 16 The Hacker Ethic (18/05) 0099426927 17 Defensive Design for the Web (25/05) 073571410X 18 Designing with Web Standards (27/05) 0735712018 19 Captive State (??/06) [incomplete] 20 Shadowrun: Who hunts the hunter? (11/07) 0451453697 21 Shadowrun: Never trust an elf 22 Shadowrun: Shadowplay 23 Saga of the Exiles Book 1 (21/07) 24 Feet of Clay 25 Thief of Time 26 Masquerade 27 Firewalls and Internet Security (2ed) Repelling the Wily Hacker 020163455X (ongoing) 28 London: A Short History (04/09) 0297607154 29 Light 0575074035 30 Seven Wonders of the Industrial World 0007163053 (10/10) 31 Going Postal (14/10) 0385603428 32 The Struggle For Europe (19/10) 1861974639 33 You Are What You Eat (08/11) 0718147650 34 The Way of Wyrd (16/11) 0099477904 35 Night Watch (19/11) 0385602642 36 White Wolf (21/11) 0552146773 37 How to draw anything (23/11) 1899606009 38 The fundamentals of drawing (26/11) 0572028792 39 The Earthsea Quartet (27/11) 0140154272 (1 of 4 books read so far) 40 Political Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (03/12) 0192803956 41 British Politics: A Very Short Introduction (06/12) 0192854593 42 The European Union: A Very Short Introduction (08/12) 0192853759 My Amazon Wish List is probably the best indicator of what I *plan* to read. There aren't likely to be many O'Reillys on my lists, as I generally read them piecewise through Safari [partial] means I've read > 40% of the book | ||