Moonfall – Jack McDevitt

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One sentence review: What every “scifi” action movie wants to be when it grows up.
I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone interested in an action/adventure space romp with just enough scifi to keep you interested and keep things realistic.

This book was an enjoyable action adventure set in a heavily science-informed setting, with enough excitement to make me want to skip work and keep reading. It’s the kind of book that would be an amazing movie, except that they never do movies like this right. The words “Lagrange Point Station” wouldn’t make it into the movie, nor would the discussion about improvising a spacesuit and how warm it is in the sunshine of space. The entire “cautionary tale” aspect of it would be utterly removed to add in a few more minutes of screen time for explosions, and they’d find a way to get some zero-g sex in there too. It’s better as a book, believe me, movies can’t be as big as your imagination.

I did include the word “realistic” there, and this one does a great job of it with a few minor exceptions that sort of make it feel a little Hollywood, but I’m willing to forgive them. For the most part the characters were believable, the events manage to be surprising (although the broad strokes were predictable, like almost any action story), and the pacing quite enjoyable. Public figures? Check. Political Intrigue? Got it. Explosions of horrific magnitude? hells yes!

So what’s the verdict for this one? It’s a great read, but I’m not certain that there’s anything to be gained from reading it a second time. I’m actually tempted to create a new category called “give it to someone who might like it” and toss it in there, but in the end I’d rather give it to powells and use the cash to by some other book that I might want. Sell, but maybe read again someday from Library or digitally.

Aftermath – LeVar Burton

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LeVar has a fondness for Science Fiction, and why shouldn’t he? He spent so much time on the set of Star Trek that he must have some interest. But what kind of influence does that have on a person?

Not a science-y one, if this book is to be taken to heart.

Setting: Post-Racial-War in America, circa 2009-2019
Most-Uttered Sentence: “Fuck I’m hungry and cold and where the hell are my GODDAM PANTS?!”
Most Pressing Problem Aside From Lack-Of-Pants: All public and private nation-wide infrastructure has collapsed.

So we have a scientist. She has invented a magical (I mean, scientific!) box that, when hooked up to a brain, spurs that brain into overdrive utilizing all the “unused” 90%. What does this do? Well it cures cancer of course! And any other ailment you might be experiencing. Presumably you are just under-utilizing your own biological resources and she has managed to harness them.

This box is delightfully small and has been developed over a number of years by: ( ) team of scientists, ( ) pharmaceutical company, (x) herself

Yup, she has managed to invent this box on her own working for a small research institute. Her goal? To find some investors in the medical community to help her get this device into the hands of anyone in the world that’s sick or dying. How noble!

But, being that this is Science Fiction, where do you see this going? If you guessed, “Oh I’ll just invite a few powerful big-wigs to my private lab and show them how awesome it is and promise that they’ll even get one of their own if they just invest a little money and then I can sell it cheaply to everyone in the wooooorld…” you guessed right.

Refreshingly real don’t you think?

I mean, someone who has spent that many years working in the field of Science™ would surely know what the reaction might be when inviting a number of rich and powerful people to your secluded office and telling them of your secret invention.

After all, some of them even seemed interested in her device! (did I mention that it cured cancer?)

The book, past that, is mostly the story of a few characters on personal journeys that end up converging to solve one riddle and save our Intrepid Science Practitioner. Their stories, while interesting in themselves, don’t come together in way that really pushes the meaning behind the book home.

One more thing: Our lovely Intrepid & Stouthearted Science Practitioner has omitted from her written research some curious side-effects from her human studies on the device, namely the fact that a small percentage of people (read: one) BECOME TELEPATHIC. Naturally, she decided to try the device on herself to see if the TELEPATHY was a side effect on her as well. Which it was. How else do you think our Motley Character Posse got together in the end to save the day?

TELEPATHY WINS. EVERY TIME.

CONCLUSION: SELL

Best quote from the book, as thought by a 10 yr old:

Amy saw that someone had stuck a white cross in the ground in front of the tank, a memorial to the insanity of war.

Book Reviews, the first five…

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The cleansing begins with 5 rather abrupt reviews. I hope to be more in-depth later, but I was able to grab some things off the shelf that I already knew the answer to, so let’s get them out of the way.

The Second Coming – John Dalmas

Read about 2/3 of it a while back, was pretty bored, no interest in picking it back up. I was really interested in it based on the blurbs and such, a combination of my love of post-apocalyptic storytelling and “debates about modern faith and spiritual philosophy” seemed like it a nice prospect. In the end though I found the characters flat, the pacing not quite right, and just was generally meh. I sort of wish I’d finished it, maybe I’m missing something, but I just don’t strongly enough believe that that might be true to try. Into the “sell/donate” pile it goes.

Grunts – Mary Gentle

This book was great fun. What’s not to love about a horde of orcs magically gaining military technology like Hueys and RPG’s? Discussing a Dark Lord and a Hind gunship in the same paragraph just makes me giggle.
Ultimately though it’s a single-read book. I don’t feel like there’s much more to get out of it, and even if there was I’d be more than happy to have a digital copy, so this one is going in the sell/donate pile as well. If you like military fiction, fantasy, or just an amusing read go grab it from your local library!

Northworld Trilogy – David Drake

Started reading, got about half way, gave up. Direct to the sell/donate pile. Ponderous and slow, I couldn’t tell if it was military fiction or fantasy. In either case, despite the use of battle suits and technology it’s definitely leaning towards the fantasy side of the scifi/fantasy question. I love Norse mythology, and this book seemed to draw quite a bit from that, however it was in this weird middle-ground between retelling/re-imagining and just borrowing some of the interesting bits. Ultimately I think it just felt too fantasy for me.

Gil’s All Fright Diner – A. Lee Martinez

Another fun book, which had it’s share of good quips, one-liners and amusing concepts. “Armageddon with a side of fries” is an amusing concept, and it was well enough executed, but it just felt like it lacked depth. Definitely not something I’d read again, which is how it earned it’s place in the buy/donate pile. Probably not a good book to be in general YA, but the writing feels a lot like YA. Got a giggle or two though, I’ll certainly admit!

Lord Valentines Castle – Robert Silverberg

This series came pretty highly recommended, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of it, but this first book goes to the sell/donate pile. The pacing is slow, except in some random places where it feels like more time should have been spent but wasn’t. The lost king’s journey of re-discovery, this book is very much fluff fantasy through and through, although I am interested in the characters enough to want to know more.? I may even read it again someday, but I’ll be more than happy to do so with a digital or library copy.

Wow, those were abrupt reviews! I think it’s time to pick a more interesting or challenging book to review rather than picking the low hanging fruit.

Vimmification Part 1, upgrades!

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Setting up a nice clean vim install for myself. Tired of my vim feeling bloated and slow, so I’m rolling my own config distro with just what I need.

Step 1: I need the latest version! Snow Leopard ships with 7.2 instead of 7.3, and I just don’t find being outdated to be acceptable. Fortunately macvim to the rescue!

MacVim is a nice OSX GUI wrapper for Vim. Adds that little bit of polish on over the top. Fortunately it also comes complete with it’s own Vim 7.3 install! And its “mvim” terminal command is apparently smart enough to know that it should act like normal terminal vim if called from an alias of that name. So to get the latest macvim set up and linked, all we need to do is: (Assuming you’re using brew, which you should be.)

brew install macvim
ln -s /usr/local/bin/mvim /usr/local/bin/vim

This leaves us with one problem however. The system installed /usr/bin/vim comes first in the default $PATH. In order to get the correct version simply by typing “vim” we need to reorder /etc/paths to put /usr/local/bin ahead of /usr/bin. Once that is done and saved, reload your shell, fire up vim, and you should see version 7.3.

Alright excellent, updated version of Vim ready to roll. Now that wonderful “set relativenumber” line in my .vimrc will no longer throw errors. Time to start setting it up the way I like it.

Cleaning Up the Bookshelf

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New project! I have over 1000 books listed in my Delicious Library. Time to clean them up a bit.

“But Josh” you say! “Getting rid of BOOKS? Surely you can’t be serious!” But indeed I can be, and don’t call me Shirley.

New, before you think that I may be completely off my rocker, we’re going to take a very considered approach to this problem. Consider that there are several types of books on the shelf:

  1. Books that will be read again, or kept barring anything short of the house being on fire.
  2. Books that have been read, and might or might not be read again. These could also read/kept digitally rather than physically and it wouldn’t really be a bother.
  3. Books that haven’t been read yet.

So we can ignore books of type 1, those are staying around. Type 2 books are where the big opportunity is, and books of type 3 are going to get read and fall into either type 1 or 2.

This revolution will be bloggerized! If critical decisions must be made about books that means reviews of books. It’d be a shame for all that knowledge and decision making to go quietly into the night, so it will be recorded here, both by myself and by my lovely wife Bevin who has volunteered to help with this daunting task. This should also help prevent any future incidents of “oh look, a book by that author I like, I should get that” for books that have already been judged. Unfortunately we’re starting with the low-hanging fruit, so there will probably be mostly negative/meh reviews first, unless we find a hidden gem in the unread pile.

XARGS!

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I think I’m having some weird conflicts between installed gems and bundled gems. Well, why do we NEED installed gems really? What’s easier than wiping out your gemset in RVM? Why this of course:

gem list | awk ‘{ print $1 }’ | xargs gem uninstall -aIx

And bam, meteor-style mass gem extinction. Bye all you nasty gems.

This took me a little bit of figuring out though. Why do I never remember the xargs command? Very useful in these sorts of situations. Yeah, I loves me some command line some days.

C’mon TSA, let’s do it!

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There’s been all this hubbub about the TSA and their “Would you like the naked irradiated pictures or the free gropes?” policy. So far I haven’t had the fun of going up against either. This disappoints me.

Yes, that’s right. I said “disappoints”. I’m looking forward to it! What’s wrong with me? Why, I wear a kilt of course! The options are endless!

“We’ve got an opt out here!!“… Oh, so you want to play that game?

“Oh, don’t be coy about it. I know you just want to see what’s worn under a kilt.” might get a blush, but I want to go with something more like ? “A kilt check? Sweet, haven’t had that done in a while. Usually I only let redheads in peasant outfits lift my kilt, but you look like a cute enough fella.”
I was really hoping that the last time I flew I’d get it. “Hey, I know I haven’t seen my wife in 2 months, thanks for helping me get warmed up!” might have been fun. In the game of “how to make a government employee blush” you really have to step up your game these days.

Actually the most fun would be just to go with “We’ve got a kilt check here!!“, but you do have to be careful calling too much attention over too wide an area. I think it’s better to make just one single agent a little nutty rather than go after the whole bunch.

So c’mon TSA. I’m flying out of SJC next Friday. Gird your loins for battle, ’cause laying your hands on mine is only gonna be fun for one of us!

Been living simply…

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This morning I was given an hour to pack up all my stuff and move out of the hotel room I’ve been in for 4 months.

I got it done in 20 minutes. That feels great. My entire life in a duffle bag and a backpack. I want to live like this all the time. Right now I feel like I could go anywhere, just pick up my bag and hike off in a direction. This feeling could get addictive.

Could it really be like this? What would it take to live with no more? possessions? than what you could carry with you. Would that be doable? It might be fun to try!

Hover is dead, long live Hover.

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Seriously, stop using mouse hover to do things already. I just found out that xkcd isn’t the only comic I read that uses mouse-hover text to continue the joke. AFBlues does it too?! Argh!

Sorry that I use an iPad. Or an RSS reader. Why must you punish me? Abusing your fans isn’t usually considered to be good form, but if you feel you must then I guess I can’t stop you. And don’t even get me started on websites that make use of it. (Pointing at you FaceBook, even though I don’t use you anymore.)

Hover was never a good metaphor, and in this era of feed readers, touch interfaces, and ? super-smart mobile devices, it just isn’t viable at ALL.

Blog updated..

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I know, I never use it anyway. But here it is. Blog theme updated, WordPress version updated, all kinds of fun!

I really do plan to write more, but it’s hard to do when you can’t really talk about the things you’re working on or the fun things you’re doing. 🙂