• The Past Through Tomorrow – Robert A Heinlein – This is a collection of Heinlein’s short stories. As one would expect, some are better than others. They are also very much intertwined – stories make reference to other stories, characters pop up in others, etc. If you like Heinlein, this is definitely worth a read. If not, there are probably better introductions to his work.

• Halting State – Charles Stross – This was the first book of Stross’s which I’ve read, and it’s a definitely solid work. In a nutshell, some folks knock over a bank in World of Warcraft (except, it’s not exactly WoW). There are Chinese hackers, international intrigue, etc. Very decent.

• Boneshaker – Cherie Priest – I actually thought this was a bit overrated. Had I read it in isolation, I would have thought it to be solid and a good read, but given how much people hyped it, I expected a little more. The nutshell story is that this mother has to go rescue her kid who ran off into a disaster area, and it’s all steampunky with airships and such. The tech is not overstated, but it just simply didn’t grab me.

• Foundation – Isaac Asimov – This, on the other hand, lived up to the hype. It’s a bit surprising that I hadn’t read this until now. That said, I can see why people think Asimov and Heinlein’s works are a little boring – Asimov writes like a scientist, and Heinlein writes like an engineer (funny that). As one might expect, I don’t have much of an issue with this, and rather enjoy the style. Anyway, this series was a bit of a coming home for me – I can easily see the roots of a lot of my favorite tropes carried back to this series. Traveller, 40k and Battletech all tie into this.

• Daemon and Freedom(tm) – Daniel Suarez – This is a two-part series which takes place in the very near future. It is similar in technical grittiness to Heinlein and Asimov, though from the background of a programmer and systems engineer who handles complex networks – and realizes just how easily they can be broken. This is the type of stuff which keeps me up at night, especially the first book. The second book veers off a bit into the more fantastical, but the first is very solid, and the hacks documented therein are real. I highly recommend it if you like thrillers, and want a little window into the world of what it is like trying to secure infrastructure.

• Ubuntu Kung Fu – Keir Thomas – This is a technical book packed with lots of easter-eggs to get the most from your Ubuntu installation. Read it with a notepad to write down those things with which you want to play. I’m actually quite happy for book like these because there are so many packages in the repositories these days that you wouldn’t have much change of finding some of these unless you were looking for them – or read a book telling you about them.

• Healthy Soils for Sustainable Gardens – Brooklyn Botanic Garden – My mother in law actually gave me this to read and venture my opinion. While I cannot really comment on the factual nature of it as I am no authority, I think some of the hints and tips are worth knowing – if you can handle the overwhelming anti-technology crazy hippie bent. (Don’t use tillers, they’re evil and waste gas! Don’t use chemical fertilizer! Stuff like that).

• V For Vendetta – Alan Moore, David Lloyd – This is actually the first time I’ve read this book, and I actually saw the movie first. The movie was actually a decent adaptation of the book. There’s a bit of character development interlude which breaks up the main plot which was edited out of the movie, and I’m not sure it really lost anything for it.

• Watchmen – Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons – Okay, this one I read some years ago before the movie came out, and I agreed with the common wisdom about how groundbreaking it was. I was very happy to see it made into a movie, and thought the movie was very well done. Then, I read it again, and realized that they left that whole “genetically engineered psychic monster of DOOM” out of the movie – and I didn’t really notice. So, I think that (aside from too much big blue penis..) the movie is actually slightly better than the book… and the musical selection was awesome (and that doesn’t come with the book).

Of course, this wasn’t all the books I’ve read, but I’ll do a separate one about gaming books.

I’ve updated the blog to WP 3.8.

I also had a bit of an overloaded meltdown a couple of weeks ago. Basically, the working theory was that we weren’t going to work on the house or do anything until after the potatoes went in (which happens about the second week of July). At least, this is what I thought. After the list got stupidly long, and it had to be done sooner, rather than later, I basically just stopped doing everything outside work, working on the house, and being a fire commissioner. This made Liz sad, because she was looking forward to brewing beer, and I had told her not to get me any brewing stuff for my birthday, since I would not have time to use it and it would just take up space. I think that put a bit of a point on it, so she agreed to let me set the pace of things, and not set deadlines, and try to slow down. So, theoretically, we’re actually going to be able to do things like brew beer and sit and read…

At least, once the peas are picked and the potatoes are in. We picked and processed about 4 gallons of peapods today, and we’ll do our first picking of garden peas later this week. The replacement tomato, pepper, squash, etc. plants are all in (next year we’ll wait until the second week of June to plant them).

Fire stuff continues to be stupidly busy, with 3 meetings last week, and while there right now aren’t any this week, I expect there to be 2 by the time the week is out.

As I mentioned, I’m basically not gaming. Essentially, I’m not going to schedule anything recurring until it’s been a year and I’ve actually had at least one night free a week for a year where I can just read and play video games. I’m still buying game books, as I tend to collect them, and like to just read them, etc.

I upgraded everything to Jaunty, fixing the XFCE bad window placement problem by giving new windows focus. While it is not ideal, I spent several days poking different window managers and basically being disappointed by them. KDE4 is too unstable, GNOME is not configurable enough, and FVWM would take too much work to make it not make my eyes bleed. E17 is too unstable (though I may try the official E17.org Jaunty builds)

There’s more, but I think I’m going to break here for tonight. I finished reading Watchmen (there’s a pile of other books I need to review, and will do once I unbury them in the mess which used to be my office), and am now on to V for Vendetta.

Oh, as of right now, I’m planning on hitting Carnage, and will likely be bringing some homebrew. Since it’s not a regularly schedule thing, I likely will be able to find the time. If anyone else is going, let me know – especially if you want me to run something.

1. Dread
   This is a horror roleplaying game I bought though IPR. It’s very interesting in that it uses individual questionnaires for each player where the player describes things about his character. It’s kind of like the whole “the character sheet is a love letter to the GM telling him what you want out of the game”, but taken to the next level. These questions are designed to be leading like “What caused you to get in that fight last year”, which establishes that there was a fight and then opens it up for the player to tell something about his character.
   Another interesting facet is the use of the game Jenga as a conflict resolution mechanic. The idea is that it induces psychological stress on the characters and that affects the game.

1. The Official Handbook Of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
   This was actually quite good, provided you like a book which attacks socialists and hippies, which I do.

1. Iron Empires: Faith Conquers and Iron Empires: Sheva’s War
   I actually learned about these from buying Burning Empires. They have a very distinctive visual style, which I happen to like. The stories seem very familiar, reminding me a lot of some of Heinlein’s work. This is not a bad thing, just gives you an idea of the type of books they are.

1. The Gunslinger Born
   This is a beautiful, dark, well-written comic. Of course, it it based off the backstory from The Dark Tower series, so the story is pretty well established, rich and solid. This just fills it out a bit more and adds some very nice visual imagery.

• Of course, this brings up my book stack – this is what is currently on my bedside table:

Books

• I have some reviews of books which I’ve recently read, and plan to post about those.

• I’m also not going to worry about posting larger pictures in my blog… after all, kylecassidy does it all the time, and it doesn’t bother me, so I presume it doesn’t bother any of you folks.

• I’ll also be posting from Cold Wars, including photos, since I got a nice tiny little camera for Christmas, so I’ll actually carry it around in my pocket and take pictures.

• I’ve also got some stuff to post about my Dell Mini, minimal Linux distros, VM’s, and other such hackerish things.

I think that’s it for tonight – I’m headed off to Cold Wars this weekend, and I need to figure out what I want to play (lots of zombie games this year, with a bit of other interesting topical things, like BSG and such).

Anyway, have a Socks:

Socks!