The Blog With No Name

I have no willpower. I admit this. I recently stayed up WAY too late reading the new Harry Potter book, and I did it again last night (this morning) reading The Speed of Dark, by Elizabeth Moon (another fine recommendation from the Bujold mailing list). What a great book. It’s set in the future, but not too far (2030s maybe?), and it’s told primarily from the point of view of Lou Arrendale, a slightly autistic man who was born just a few years too soon to benefit from an autism “cure” that has essentially eliminated the condition. He and a small group of other autists work for a pharmaceutical company where their skills in mathematics and pattern recognition aid in software development (I think…not too clear on that to be honest). Their new boss wants to “cure” them, but do they want to be cured?

This was completely riveting.

I have to give Amazon.com credit. I did *not* pay for standard shipping, opting instead for the free deal. I expected the book to arrive some time this week. But no, lo and behold, there the box was on Saturday, June 21. Whoo-ha! I read it intermittently during the day, got through a few hundred pages, then settled in for a marathon session around 9 pm. Finished at 2 am. Definitely liked it, I would say it’s probably my #2 favorite (Prisoner of Azkaban is #1).

If you expand this entry, you will (maybe) see SPOILERS! You Have Been Warned…
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I turned off the option to show graphics, unless they come from the same server as the page I’m visiting (i.e., no DoubleClick-served ads while I’m on a Yahoo page) and the increased speed is PHENOMENAL! Whoo-hoo! Mozilla is da bomb.

I have gone back to Mozilla, 1.3 this time, after discovering that I could access Yahoo (for some reason, I was having a lot of trouble doing that with Mozilla previously). Do YOU use Mozilla? WHY NOT! It’s free, it’s infinitely customizeable, it has pop-up and ad blockers built in (not to mention a password-protected password manager), AND it is so standards-compliant it hurts. It’s skinnable too, but that doesn’t do much for me. Although that brushed-metal skin did look nice…

mozilla

The kiddies are out of school (almost) so we’ve been playing in the pool. Hard to read a library book if you have even the least chance of getting a bucket of water dumped on you, right? One book I’ve gotten through recently is “In Search of Kim,” by Peter Hopkirk. Hopkirk is a newspaper journalist who has loved Kipling’s novel since forever, and decided to trek around India/Pakistan looking for all the landmarks/people/etc mentioned in the book. He also discusses several possible real-life models for some of the characters (Col Creighton, Lurgan Sahib, Mahbub Ali). Fairly interesting, especially if you love the novel, but the writing was rather dull. (Much more fun to read Kim again!)

Boy, this is embarrassing. Almost a month with no entries. We spent a portion of this time in Pennsylvania, driving around in the mountains, so that’s my excuse. ANYway, here is another set of books you must read. The Greatwinter trilogy, by Sean McMullen, is set (mostly) in Australia 2,000 years in the future, after nuclear war, global warming, and genetic engineering gone awry have taken their toll on the earth. “Souls in the Great Machine,” “The Miocene Arrow,” and “The Eyes of the Calculor” make up the trilogy.
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