Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Well, the new job seems to be working out OK. It felt quite odd going back to an employer I'd left more than two years ago. They've changed a lot, and certainly my time at Scient changed me a lot, too...

Pity about the commute. As usual the Monday morning District Line was slow and crowded - just enough room to cram in and finish reading Robert Charles Wilson's excellent collection of linked shorts "The Perseids" [Tor 2001]. i'm not entirely sure if reading disturbing dark SF/horror/fantasies on the Tube is such a good idea, but the writing was so god it was hard to put it down. so, now I'm on the back-up book, Michael De Larrabeiti's second Borrible novel "The Borribles Go For Broke" [Ace 1984].

And today I start a billable project. My first for nearly a year... Whoo hoo! A interesting set of problems in secure information sharing.

My friend Charlie Stross' first short story collection has just been published. If you like gonzo hard SF that skirts the event horizon of the Singularity, you're going to love Charlie's stuff. He got two shorts into last years Gardner Dozois Best SF anthology, and his current series of novellas in Asimov's is getting rave reviews.

Buy it through his Amazon.com affiliate link.

Well, it was a little late due to getting confused over dates when I went on holiday, but I've just sent this month's Application Development Advisor column off to my editor in Canada. Quite a productive evening in the end - over 1800 words written on application development with PHP. Luckily there a lot of good online resources, so I was able to use them to help me with writing about MySQL integration. Thrills, eh.

Of course that also means that I have to work on another in the next week or so. Probably on XML integration in Flash MX....

Still, it's now to bed with a good book. I should get the Borribles book finished fairly quickly. Not sure what to read next - the to be read bookcase is bulging after Eastercon.