Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Taken from various folk (including gummitch and peake), and cut due to length: a list of award winning SF and fantasy, with the volumes I've read in bold.

( The Reading List )

Several of the unreads are on my to-be-read bookcase...

Interesting to note that things thin out a bit when we get to the end of the list. Also to note that the books get bigger...

(It took me a while to remember that "...and call me Conrad" was an alternate title for "This Immortal")

Paddy McAloon's "I Trawl The Megahertz" is an underrated masterpiece, an album of melancholy and bleak despair enlivened by hope of light. This is McAloon's response to the debilitating illness that temporarily robbed him of sight.

The title track is a 21 minute spoken word piece, a calm female voice reads snippets transcribed from short wave radio, turned into poetry, accompanied by music.

Hers is the wing span of the quotidian angel,
so her feet are sore from the walk
to the well of human kindness,
but she gives you a name and you grow into it.

And echoing the poetry of the stars.

They are listening for smudged echoes
of the moment of creation.
They are listening for the ghost of a chance.
They may help us make sense of who we are
and where we came from;
and, as a compassionate side effect,
teach us that nothing is ever lost.

It's wonderful.

I know I have talked about this album before, but the title track just came up on our massive random play list, and made me sit back for 20 minutes wonderful minutes.

I've suddenly noticed that LJ is now using the Mozilla RSS icon to indicate feeds. It's rapidly becoming the accepted alternative to the misleading old orange XML block - especially now that Internet Explorer 7.0 will be using it.



So links to feeds now look like this itphasechange. Score one for a common UI for the web.

If you were worried that your copy of Windows XP Home would suddenly become unsupported by the end of the year, you can take a calming breath now.

Microsoft has announced that it will be supporting all versions of XP for two years after the release of Vista.

Not really surprising.