Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Via nwhyte and others, from the recent Locus survey. Bold for read, normal for unread and italic for unfinished.

( click to expand )

Fifteen books that will always stick with me?

That's a tricky one, seeing how much I read. However there are some books I keep coming back to, keep rereading. So, without further ado:

1. Hardwired - Walter Jon Williams: Written as a homage to Zelazny, this is cyberpunk as country-and-western song, with Cowboy riding panzers across a balkanised USA accompanied by Sarah and her weasel.
2. The Saga of Pliocene Exile - Julian May: All four books, taken as one here. May mixes Jungian archetypes with The Ring Cycle (and a dose of pure 50s SF) to deliver a remarkably fun science fantasy series that takes mitteleuropean myth and drops it into deep time.
3. Don't Look Down - Jennifer Crusie and Bob Meyer: a romance author (albeit snarky) and an ex-Green Beret men-with-guns-save-the-world writer collaborate on a delightfully funny romantic thriller. Contains Wonder Woman bondage scenes.
4. Vacuum Flowers - Michael Swanwick: a picaresque journey around a far future solar system, where changing your mind is as easy as slipping on a new shirt. Underneath it all is the question "What does it mean to be human".
5. Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud: McCloud's look at the semiotics of sequential art is also one of the great textbooks of design. It's better than Tufte if you're working on the web.
6. The New Dinosaurs - Dougal Dixon: Dixon's speculative evolutionary books take a turn into a world where dinosaurs didn't become extinct.
7. Managing Internet Information Systems - John Udell: This is the book that built UK Online. It's also as relevant today as it was nearly 15 years ago.
8. Computer Lib/Dream Machines - Ted Nelson: The book/s that pretty much made me who I am today - and shaped the trajectory of my career through the intertwingled worlds of engineering, computing and writing.
9. Neuromancer - William Gibson: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." Enough said, this is the seminal cyberpunk novel.
10. Between Planets - Robert Heinlein: A favourite juvenile, with Heinlein mixing colonial politics with the story of a violently suppressed revolution. The Venusian dragons are one of his finest creations.
11. The Ophiuchi Hotline - John Varley: Another solar system picaresque. Here it's Varley's Eight Worlds that is centre stage. A fine book for a 13 year old islander to read (if you want to blow his tiny little mind). Clones, invincible alien invaders and the hierarchy of life. Humanity is learning its true place in the universe, and it's a particularly lowly one...
12. The Terror - Dan Simmons: The most recent book on this list, but a powerful and extraordinarily well-written slice of secret history that delves into the lost years of the Franklin expedition. Simmons mixes Victorian rationality with the myths of the Esquimaux to deliver a post-modern, post-colonial take on the monster story wrapped up in a homage to Edgar Alan Poe.
13. The Shockwave Rider - John Brunner: The most optimistic of the futures in the Club Of Rome quartet, this mixes Toffler's Future Shock with the Whole Earth Catalog (and the Point Foundation) to give us a book that defines the modern security industry.
14. The Bridge - Iain Banks: This is the book that should have an "M". A never ending bridge, a Glaswegian barbarian, and the nameless life of a man on the road to disaster converge in three parallel stories. And it's got knife missiles!
15. Moominvalley in November - Tove Jansson: The best of the Moomin books doesn't contain the titular family, off at sea fulfilling Moominpapa's dreams. It's a sad, wistful novel that's really a tale about growing up and finding your own way in life. No wonder it's the most adult of the Moomin novels.

That's a start. You can find most of what I read on my LibraryThing.

As I get ready for the next week at MWC in Barcelona, here's my list of 25 random things. I often wonder if these are really an attempt at crowdsourced social engineering, so if you're planning on using this information to get into my bank account, I suggest you look carefully at the 25^th fact on my list.

1. My family has been on Jersey for at least the last thousand years. I will have been living in England for 25 years this September.

2. My only industrial injury is a scar on my left arm where I once dropped a hefty piece of test gear.

3. I am unaccountably fascinating to rodents. Mice stare at me. I've got witnesses, too.

4. I used to climb limestone sea cliffs for fun. Even when the tide came in.

5. There's a portion of my career I describe as "designing exotic weapons for the military". I have the published papers to prove it.

6. I became a journalist because someone knew I wrote fanzine articles.

7. marypcb and I met in a Usenet newsgroup. We lived less than a mile apart at the time.

8. I used to wind inductors out of copper central heating pipe and make coax out of scaffolding poles. That's what you get for working with HF radios at 30KW...

9. I have possibly the only car in London with an In-N-Out Burger bumper sticker.

10. People think I only use Windows, but I actually have three different Apple Macintosh machines of different vintages that I regularly use.

11. I used to do track work on a Welsh narrow gauge railway. Blackberry bushes are not my friends.

12. There are two different fossils on my desk - a fish and some coral.

13. Several of my book reviews from SFX have been used for pull quotes, in the US and the UK. Unfortunately they don't have my name on them.

14. When we were children my cousins wanted long curly hair. Amazingly they are still talking to me when it turned out that I'm the only one in my family with long curly hair.

15. According to the Dopplr Raumzeitgeist I am on average as fast as a squirrel.

16. During the Dinner Party Wars in my student days I cooked lobster thermidor. From scratch. With fresh lobsters. I ruined the big saucepan, too.

17. I don't have a Wikipedia page about me. Not that I want one.

18. My office soundtrack is currently a Seattle rock and alternative radio station. I quite like hearing the breakfast show over lunch.

19. I have seen 9 different Cirque De Soleil shows, including all but one of the fixed shows in Las Vegas. That's only because it's just opened.

20. While I haven't broken the bank at a casino, I am infinitely ahead of the odds.

21. My mailbox currently contains over 6GB of messages. It's probably a good idea that I run our own mail server.

22. I have three visas in my passport. Only one of them is valid. One of the others I can't read.

23. After planning to have an LP^th birthday party for several years, I singularly failed to actually hold one.

24. I have played over 150 games of FreeCell on this PC without a single loss. I take it as a challenge that there is only one game of FreeCell that can't come out.

25. None of these facts can be used to social engineer my passwords.

I've spotted this meme in various places.

1. Started your own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland¹
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sang a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea²
14. Taught yourself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitch hiked
23. Taken a sick day when you're not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors³
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught yourself a new language⁴
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo's David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt⁵
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight⁶
46. Been transported in an ambulance⁷
47. Had your portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkelling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theatre
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favourite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviare
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had your picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox
89. Saved someone's life
90. Sat on a jury
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Read an entire book in one day

¹Disneyland Paris, that is.
² Not difficult when you grow up on an island
³Again, not difficult when much of your family has been on the same island for the last 1000 years!
⁴C#, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby. They did mean programming language, didn't they?
⁵Ah, but which Old Faithful? I suspect the meme is asking for the one in Yellowstone National Park, but I've seen the Rotorua variant go off...
⁶Again with the island thing...
⁷I was actually extracted from the hard shoulder of the M3 in one,

I had a run through that list of foods that's going around, and there's very little on it that I haven't eaten (and only one thing I wouldn't eat at all - if smoking counts as eating!).

( That Simon, he'll eat most things... )

No natto on the list, though...

inamac wondered about the following user interests I have in my user profile.

Ammonites: Fossils are wonderful things, and I used to have quite a collection of ammonites of all shapes and sizes. There's a beach just east of Watchet on the Somerset coast where you can walk on the shingle and pick up grey stones that are full of ammonite fossils - fossils of the mother-of-pearl that still glistens and glows in rainbow colours after all these millions of years. It's a beautiful place (with the added bonus of the occasional passing steam engine!).

Range Murata: Range Murata is a Japanese character designer who has worked on several highly influential anime series. I first came across his designs when I fell in love with the superb series Last Exile, but I've since also seen his work in Blue Submarine Number Six and Solty Rei. He has a very distinctive style, and it's one that's not the standard anime look and feel.

Exotic Tea: I like tea. We have a whole shelf of the stuff in the kitchen, everything from good old fashioned Yorkshire tea to traditional British blends and on out to some of the more interesting US teas from companies like the Republic of Tea. My usual start for the day is a green tea blend with honey and ginseng, though I may switch that for a nicely spiced black chai. I'm currently exploring white teas, as well as single estate Darjeelings.

Scranletting Ticklepenny Corner: Cold Comfort Farm is a delightful novel, and both marypcb and I have dropped quotes into our interest list. Hers is "one o'they Ford vans". Stella Gibbons made up lots of agricultural terms for the book, and "scranletting" is one of them. It's what Seth was doing up in Ticklepenny Corner before he first meets our heroine. I'll make a claim for the book as SF, too, as it takes place after the Anglo-Nicuraguan War of 1947, people have personal aeroplanes, and folk are shocked to find that rural telephone boxes don't have video.

Virtualisation: Probably the most important change in the way we do enterprise IT. It's a way of using one server to support several server operating systems - saving space and power. Go green, virtualise!

Lego: The all purpose metaphor for our times. Little mass-produced plastic bricks that fit together and make all sorts of wonderful things. That and, even after all these years, it's still fun to play with.

Superfluous Technology: The term may have been popularised by the Plokta krewe, but the truth is, you haven't seen superfluous technology until you go into a technology journalist's office. The shelves will be overflowing with spare kit, boxes of software, and all sorts of bits and pieces. I currently have four PCs on my desk, along with a several phones and a couple of small form factor web browsing devices. Now make that an office shared by two technology writers (who usually cover very different topics). That's where I work. A recent conversation between marypcb and me involved trying to track a hard drive that we knew was somewhere on the shelves. It was just a question of which one...

Inspired by a recent posting by deedop, I spent some of yesterday afternoon at ladymoonray's party asking people what game they'd play with Death.

Answers ranged from the obvious chess, via a range of games of chance, to a hefty game of Settlers of Catan. Me, I'd be playing a multi-deck game of Munchkin. One of the more entertaining suggestions was listing all the films that have used what I think of as "The Gorn Rock".

What's your game?

Here's an interesting tree map graph of this page's structure, mapping the HTML that makes up everything you can see. Go here to make your own. The nodes are colour coded as follows:

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Quite fascinating. I obviously have quite a complex template in play! That and the tables I occasionally use...

Original linkage from Chris Green

Make your own Hollywood Sign here. Then Danny Blue will sell it to someone...

Link via Vicious Imagery

I don't normally link to this sort of thing, but it managed to tickle the old funny bone in some sort of a way...

So: Stereocats. Especially the iCat.

Link from the hunkymouse