01.31.08
Posted in books at 5:42 pm by mridley
I’m generally not a big fan of sci-fi books, but my friend Allen suggested a while back that I check out Frank Herbert’s Dune. Since I consider Allen to be someone who knows me fairly well and of good taste, I ordered it from Amazon and gave it a read. I found that I enjoyed it. While I’m not much for space aliens and laser guns, I found that Dune was much more about international (in this case interplanetary) economics, politics, governance, and religion. That sort of thing does interest me. The fact that it happened to take place on a foreign planet and involved space travel was somewhat irrelevant. The cultural commentary was thought provoking and very relevant to contemporary life on Earth.
Since I enjoyed Dune, I decided to read the next book in the series, Dune Messiah. I enjoyed it as well, although since the political relationships and economic power groups had been established in the first book it wasn’t as thought provoking in that way. Dune Messiah was more about plot, and I didn’t find it as engaging. It read more as a epilogue to Dune, albeit a long epilogue. I suspect I will not go on to read Children of Dune.
After reading the first Dune book, I happened to catch the movie version on television. The book was way too complicated to have all of the nuance captured in the movie, but I think it was a reasonable adaptation. The ending was a bit unfaithful to the book, but in all it’s worth watching as long as it’s in addition to, not instead of, reading the book.
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Posted in tech at 7:33 am by mridley
My desktop PC has 4 hard disks. One of them has been unplugged for some time, as it died a long time ago. The other 3 have been in use for a few years. Unfortunately, one of my data drives has failed completely and the other is on its last legs with a lot of data errors and corrupted files. I could replace the storage, but it’s time for a new system and I am trying to figure out what I want. Possibly an Alienware system, but I haven’t decided.
In the meantime I’m less stressed out than I might otherwise be, as the stuff I really care about is securely backed up on Amazon’s S3 service. I realized I have never written about Jungle Disk which is doing them a great disservice, as I’ve been using the product since it was released. Jungle Disk allows me to map a virtual drive using WebDAV and back up selected parts of my system to Amazon S3.
After the trial period, Jungle Disk costs $20 and includes free lifetime upgrades. The actual storage costs are billed to my Amazon S3 account. There are plenty of online network disk storage services out there, but none of them have been right for me. Some of the content I want to back up is quite large. My music collection is on the order of 50 gigabytes. With most services, storing that amount of data would be cost prohibitive. Because S3 is so inexpensive, I’m able to backup everything I want and still pay under $10/month for the storage.
Not bad for some peace of mind.
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01.07.08
Posted in books at 5:37 pm by mridley
As I wrote here a few months ago (1, 2), I picked up a copy of Mona Lisa Overdrive for some light reading while I was in California. I finished the book in a few days and was reasonably entertained. I still have yet to read Count Zero. A while back, I’d read Pattern Recognition and enjoyed it a lot. I really like books along the lines of Pattern Recognition or Cryptonomicon which are more “technology fiction” rather than “science fiction”. I saw that Gibson had come out with Spook Country, a sort of sequel to Pattern Recognition. I liked Pattern Recognition and I like the “technology fiction” genre, so I picked it up.
Unfortunately it didn’t grip me in the way that Pattern Recognition did. I am not sure why not. Perhaps I didn’t find the characters as likable or compelling. Perhaps the specifics of the mysterious plot unveiling didn’t interest me as much as in his previous book. Or perhaps it was due to the often very short chapters and skipping back and forth between characters and points of view.
In any case, for die hard William Gibson fans it’s worth a read. But I didn’t find it all that gripping.
Tags: William Gibson, Spook Country, Pattern Recognition
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Posted in life at 9:37 am by mridley
Alas, life has gotten busy again. I haven’t had any time for updating the site since November due to starting this new (and awesome) job. But I’m finally getting settled in so hopefully I’ll have time for some interesting commentary (or whatever the point of this site is) soon.
Also cutting into my web writing time, I’ve gotten into the habit lately of old fashioned paper journaling. I’ve never put much of my private life on this site, for a variety of reasons. But I do enjoy actual journaling. I bought my friend Jessica an old fountain pen off ebay for Christmas, along with ink and a Moleskine notebook. I was familiar with the Moleskine zeitgeist (check out Moleskinerie if you’re not), but I hadn’t used one. So to be sure they are as cool as everyone seems to think they are, I got myself one before giving it as a gift. A notebook is a notebook, but they are pretty cool notebooks. So I have been inspired to make the most of mine by journaling in it.
Of course, that also made me want a fountain pen of my very own. I used to have several, but over the years I don’t know what became of them. I found an ebay store in the UK that sells astonishingly cheap fountain pens so I bought one. Alas my timing wasn’t the best, right in the middle of the Christmas season, so it hasn’t arrived yet. Hopefully it will this week. If it’s of reasonable quality I’ll post a link to the ebay store, as you can’t beat the price.
My holiday season was somewhat uneventful. Just the usual hanging out with people, a few parties, etc. I do have a few interesting things planned for 2008. I’m off back to California in a week until the end of January for work. I’m hoping this trip will go a little more smoothly than my November trip. Also, while I don’t believe in New Years resolutions, I am planning to join the gym by my house when I get back as it’s time to get in shape. And I have some volunteer work lined up with an interesting organization, SHARE of McLean, that I’m looking forward to.
2008 is off to a busy start. But for me, busy is good.
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