book review: Shatterday

Just finished up reading Harlan Ellison's Shatterday, a collection of (apparently) some of his best short stories.

I take it that Ellison stuck to writing a lot of short stories; he's very good at getting a point across concisely - most of the stories in this collection are 20 pages long or less.

He writes some sci-fi/fantasy and horror, touching on aspects of the human condition.

I'm not used to reading short stories collections; on one hand this type of book really lends itself to reading bit by bit; but on the other hand the experience does not offer the same type of immersion as a long story. I felt a little bit like I was back in English class from high school, reading short stories and abridged versions of things.

I can't say that I thought everything Ellison did in that book was golden, but there were certainly some thought-provoking stories within with unusual twists.

On the other hand, I'm glad that I got the book at the library; while Ellison is good, I do not think I would have been happy with having paid $15 for the trade paperback.

Next in the que - another collection by Ellison.

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touristy weekend...

One of my best friends from back home came out to spend the weekend, and we hung out all day friday, saturday, and sunday.

Really good catching up and finally doing some of the touristy stuff in the city that I've never gotten to do yet. Saw the space needle, the EMP, rode the monorail, saw a band do a show, and finally started to sample many of the watering holes around town.

Can't complain at all.

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Love for Missy Elliot

Under Construction:

Listening to it again, and really liking it...very, very well done album all around; every song is good. I think it is one of her better ones (though really, just about everything she does is good).

Not many filler tracks on the album, the only thing that sometimes get a little old are the tracks where Missy goes and speaks her mind - I appreciate her perspective and all, but it can get boring hearing that all the time.

Anyway, still a very solid record, almost 5 years later...I think this one should still be good another 5 or 10 years from now as well...

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I have a marker in Korea!

Apparently I have been marked as party of the family on their ancestral site. My name has been marked as "American Dan".

Awesome.

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flight of the conchords

Just heard this band on the radio during the drive to work.

Funny stuff.

They seem to be keeping this website current here:

http://www.bebo.com/Profile.jsp?MemberId=1937162361

There are songs to listen to on that site; I highly recommend "Business time" (it's totally in the style of Barry White / Chef / and the ladies man character from SNL).

Books Read: Spider Kiss

Working through the several Harlan Ellison titles I picked up earlier from the library.

"Spider Kiss" is the story of the manager of an Elvis/Jerry Lee Lewis type singer who becomes hugely famous in 1961. The book's perspective on fame is pretty dark; what struck me is how universal the theme of fame & corruption/darkening of the soul is. Certainly writers of today's celebrity scene have no shortage of material to work with, but Ellison has summed much of it up very well, and had done so in 1961.

On the other hand, I didn't quite get the author's claim about just how evil and depraved his star's excesses were...in today's day and age (and probably from the 70's on), it became almost expected for rock stars to be drugged out, misbehaving, overspending, womanizers (or man-izers).

Power-hungry, single-minded machiavellian meglomaniacal ambition? Also kind of expected for success in Hollywood/entertainment, no matter what the carefully cultivated exterior image may be.

Regardless, a quick and entertaining read.

I'm reading "Shatterday", a collection of short stories by Ellison. About 100 pages into it now, ~230 to go. Will post on that at some point later this week, if I finish it...

Raves: Rammstein

A couple weeks ago, I left my ipod shuffle in my pants pocket. That's not usually a problem, except that my wife put those pants in the washer & drier (not knowing my ipod was in there)...suffice it to say, that ipod no longer works.

So, I've been re-discovering many of my cd's by listening to them in the car. I pretty much have nothing more recent than 2004 - era stuff, but that's okay.

Anyway - Rammstein "Live Aus Berlin" is fantastic!

They're a solid band and I hope to see them next time they're touring in the US.

switch 100% to Linux at home?

This is always a tempting thought to me; especially as home Linux distros keep increasing in usability & convenience.

Per one of my earlier posts, I'm less & less locked in to any one software suite - more and more of the things I do with my computer at home are browser based...Firefox & Opera run well on any of the major OS' out there.

Some things I like on OS X that I can't get (exactly) on Linux:

- Garageband
- Itunes
- Ableton Live (but I can get this for Windows)
- iPhoto

Options on Linux that should cover me for those things above:

- Hydrogen, Rosetta, (indeed, there ARE audio creation software options for Linux)
- Amarok (in many ways better than iTunes)
- use WINE to get some version of Ableton Live working
- Picasa or digiKam on KDE (in some ways better than iPhoto)

Things on Windows that I like & can't do anywhere else:

- Sync with my pocket PC (on OSX you can get "the missing sync", but that's ~$40 in additional software costs). Doesn't seem to be a good Linux option for this yet.
- Games - My PC is the main source of my video gaming entertainment; I like strategy games like Civ IV, RTS' like Rise of Nations, and action games like Quake IV. While it's possible to have some Windows games work in Linux (usually major releases from id Software, among others), that's kind of the exception, not the rule.

That's about it, however.

My iBook G4 is still quite healthy and working well for all I need it to do. I don't see it going anywhere anytime soon.

After having had such a strong impression made on me from using the mac so much, (hassle-free, responsive, no viruses, only need to reboot once every 2 weeks or so, etc), I was totally inclined to consider upgrading to a Macbook Pro (or equivalent) whenever time for upgrades drew near.

However, I'm now reconsidering that. It might be cheaper (and arguably, just as effective) to get a well-spec'd Linux-friendly laptop, and dual-boot (with Linux as the default, of course), keeping a small-ish windows partition open for gaming.

No rush to really figure this out, as my mac is working totally fine. But, as much as I like OS X, I'm still a little unsure if it's really worth the premium in hardware cost.

On the other hand, if virtualization technology improves further, then in the near-future (if not now, with a healthy-spec'd computer) it should be possible to run several instances of different OS' within one OS, so the whole issue of needing to dual boot to get the best apps across different platforms could be moot...you'd have to worry about ensuring you have Linux-friendly hardware, but that would be about it.

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quiet, quiet friday

The wife is away on a trip back to Korea, and it was a long day of pouring over excel sheets with rules & targets that seemed to be ever shifting.

I don't know what I really should be doing, but blogging about it seems like a good idea.

At some point it might have seemed strange to me that my choice way of spending free time is by using my computer to look at things on the internet when it seems that so much of my daily work is using the computer to look at spreadsheets, emails, and things on the internet.

But here I am.

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Things I like or am re-appreciating, lately

1. Quake IV...action-packed game that still runs well & looks fantastic on my noisy old (by gamer's standards, anyway) PC.

2. Firefox...runs well on Linux, OS X, & Windows - reliable for fun & work; extensions are useful!

3. ScribeFire extension for Firefox - I can do all my blogging in here without even needing to visit the blog page.

4. Jalepeño peppers - they make so many dishes taste that much better

5. Web-based apps...between syncing my bookmarks, calendar, email, read rss feeds, to do lists, project managment, documents, passwords (yeah, the security on that is still a lot questionable), blogs, & photos - the bulk of stuff that I'm mostly doing on a computer is now all through a web browser. I like that, and the fact that everything is so light-weight your hardware has little impact on it.

(well, I do most writing & spreadsheet stuff on office software...gaming & music software are unique non-web related apps).

So the browser is the OS? I used to think that was crazy talk but I'm nearly living it...

6. Libraries...although I mentioned it before, it bears saying again...free books & information is a wonderful service.

7. Civ IV - a very well designed game that is addictive & deep; yet simple.

8. Gomez - wonderful band from the UK that produced 3 solid albums in the late 90's and early 00's. Their 4th wasn't as good. They made a 5th one that I haven't listened to very much yet...probably still not as good as their first 3 but seem to be improving.

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Paprika

Wanted to relax after a VERY long day - I was up at 3 am to take the wife to the airport.

So, after getting back from a long day at work, I put in a frozen pizza and turned on this movie - I had picked up a copy while I was still in Asia.

While the subtitles were not correct, a quick google search proved to be very useful. Unfortunately, they only worked for about the first 30 minutes of the film; I followed along with a text file that was open side by side with the main movie window...the broken english subtitles on the disc helped me keep my place.

Anyway - the film itself was beautifully animated, and the story was trippy, broad, yet suspenseful and engaging. The pieces with elaborately detailed collages of different people's obscure dreams (nightmares?) all coming together are really wonderful eye candy. Anyway - I feel it is worth a look if you have time or inclination to obtain (read: download) it. Apparently it had a very limited US theatrical release between Nov. 2006 and the end of May 2007 across different regions. A real US dvd should be available at some point, but I've no idea when - have not seen mention of it yet.

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updates to picasaweb albums...

New pictures for your enjoyment:

http://picasaweb.google.com/daninbusiness/CatsOnComputer

(apparently there is a "benefit" when macbooks run hot)...

http://picasaweb.google.com/daninbusiness/Sept1418

(Fun with fire trucks, other random pictures from the weekend previous)

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on my own for a little while

The wife is headed to Korea for ~ 1 month. Guess I may have more time to myself for a little bit; I could try & do something productive with this...

And/or, I could also go out more & get to know more of Seattle.

We'll see how this plays out; but I do intend on getting some writing done, amongst other things.

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bowling night!!!

My company has sponsored a group of us to play in a bowling league in the neighborhood. Tonight was the first night, with 3 games played. I bowled a 150, 186, then 118.

One would think that I'd improve as the evening went on; I hope that I can stay a bit more consistent (in a good way) as I get used to playing more...this will be a 12-week activity; this could well be the most regular/steady bowling that I've had in my life. Hopefully some good/improvement will come of it.

It was fun thusfar!

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Final Fantasy III is torturing me!

Trying to make a final push and wrap up my game of Final Fantasy III, which has been dragging out ever since I got a Nintendo DS back in March...it's been a really, really fun game to play, but getting to and beating the final boss is an exercise in patience and frustration.

I've come way too close now to just give it up; on the other hand - it's at the point where pushing on just feels like work, and not like a fun game or escape...

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Virtual Machine on my home PC

Looks like I might get to do a Solaris (the operating-system) related project at work. As such, I'm going through the process of installing it as a virtual system on top of my Linux system via VMware.

I'm impressed with how well Virtual Machine works - it's a really cool idea.

I had read about it on the web and how it would be "the next big thing", and that does seem to be believeable; especially as multi-processor CPU's become standard.

I haven't actually tried running this OS on its own yet; I'm a little doubtful how well it will ultimately work on its own within Linux....my home CPU is just a 1.8 gig AMD Sempron - that's a single-core budget CPU, and while it still totally is doing fine for the most of the tasks I throw at it, perhaps it will be a bit much for any sort of decent day-to day operations...suddenly it feels like I have a reason to upgrade...

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A scanner, darkly - dystopian movie weekend!

Just finished up viewing the film adaptation of "A Scanner, Darkly". Interesting and depressing. The visual style in the film was pretty unique, however. I'm still thinking about that one; haven't really made my mind up on it yet. Like many other Linklater movies, it was very dialog driven, and there wasn't really a distinct action-filled climax (though, with careful editing I'm sure someone could rig something up)...

Last night, we watched the movie "Ultraviolet", featuring Mila Joviovich (from the Resident Evil movies, among others)...cool that much of the "futuristic city-scape scenes" were at least based on footage that was done in Shanghai. The story was sorta forgettable, and the action scenes were pretty much "inspired" by the Matrix and John Woo movies and Blade and many, many other films I've seen before.

Anyway, it wasn't a total waste of time.

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site maintainence & no more .mac...

Well, my .mac membership expired a few months ago and I haven't missed it...certainly not worth another $80 for everything that I can already do for free (and more transparently) via google & yahoo's free services.

So I won't miss it.

Too bad that Apple can't get their shit together as far as .mac goes...but they seem to be focusing on making their ipods attractive (and are doing a good job with that), so good on them.

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dan finishes "Overclocked"

Cory Doctorow has done some fine work, and his writing is easy to read, interesting, and hard to put down once you've started reading it.

While he often uses titles that are plays on other famous sci-fi titles (I, Row-Boat & Anda's Game come to mind), his content is unique and stands well on its own.

Anyway, his stories were really interesting and had some cool twists in them that I don't want to give away here - I totally recommend checking it out.

You could, literally, check it out from your library, purchase a copy at a bookstore or on Amazon.com, or download it for free from Cory's website.

Totally worth the time.

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Dan's reading situation

Further to my last post about my rekindled love for libraries, I've actually finished reading one of the books I checked out and even went ahead to check out some more.

I've been inspired a bit by the feature that's running on AVclub.com by a critic who bought a box of bargin-bin sci-fi books and is reviewing one or two a week.

While I'm not buying any books (yet) to do this on my own, I've found a lot of good stuff at the library (and had been introduced to some new authors by a very helpful clerk at Barnes & Noble the other day...)

Latest report:

Shadow of the Giant, by Orson Scott Card

I'm a big fan of his; and I've read everything he's published in Ender/Bean series of books he's done. I was in China when this book came out in 2005, and it was pretty difficult to find a copy in Hong Kong (or on the internet...and I wasn't willing to pay for Amazon shipping)

So I finally get to read it now. I burned through it, as I usually tend to do with his books.

Basically, I think that he did a pretty good job of tying all the loose ends of the series together.

And although the book is set ~100+ years in the future (?), due to the far-flung political nature of the conflict going on, he's had to adjust a bit for events that have happened in the past 7 years as he's worked on this series - the result is still pretty cohesive.

Card's personal religious and political views do seem to make an impact on the writing, and it makes for a pretty unique perspective - he never mentions the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at all in this novel, but the gentle respect for religion while still pointing at the many political realities intertwined with it are interesting.

I'm a bit sad that the series is over, but this does mean that I'm "free" to go on with some other books...

On deck:


"Overclocked" by Cory Doctorow

I really liked "Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom", I read Cory's blog, and I'm a big supporter of his anti-DRM philosophy. Overclocked is a collection of short stories by Cory. I'm on page 45 right now, in the middle of a story called "When Sysadmins ruled the earth"...it's an after the bomb type story set in the age of google. Interesting.

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