Sat, 03 Mar 2007
Conan the Adventurer
Conan rocks. How can you not want to kick ass with Conan?
Campy pulpy fun.
Tue, 24 Oct 2006
Expanded Universe
Angry Heinlein worried about nuclear war, government, and the failure of kids today. If you’ve read Heinlein, you know it already. If you haven’t, there are better places to start.
West of Jesus
This was a weird one. It made me want to learn to surf and take acid.
However, my primary reason for reading this was a Prairie Home Companion sketch (the adventures of Ruth Harrison, Reference Librarian) which involved a hapless library client asking about a book in which Jesus carried a surfboard and being quickly told that the library didn’t carry “The Davinci Dude”. The next day, I saw a review for West of Jesus. So it goes.
The Illuminatus Trilogy
The Illuminatus Trilogy is one of my favorites, and it’s always a fun read. If you want to read a real conspiracy book, where the conspiracies are complex and intertwingled, and the nouns and verbs are occasionally invented, this is worth the time.
Sun, 24 Sep 2006
Not dead, just busy
Been crazy lately. In the last month, the following thing have happened:
I have been to Dallas, TX. and setup a new colocation site for Linden Lab.
I have a new girlfriend.
Linden Lab has suffered a network security breach.
At some point, my car’s battery died.
It’s been a hell of a month.
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track
This collection of Richard Feynman’s letters is a fantastic view into this man’s life. If you haven’t read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! already, then you should probably start there. These letters provide insight into Feynman, but if you’re not already a fan they will probably not be nearly as interesting. To fans of the man, however, they are fascinating reading.
Sat, 26 Aug 2006
Ready for Anything
Ready for Anything is David Allen’s second book, after Getting Things Done. As is well known by those who know me, I practice GTD more or less successfully, and find that it works reasonably well for me. Unfortunately, Ready for Anything was much more like the traditional “self-help” book than Getting Things Done was, and while I found a few nuggets of useful process it wasn’t really worth the time.
Sat, 19 Aug 2006
American Gods
What a pleasure. American Gods was a fabulous read. Dark and funny and sweet and sad.
Wed, 16 Aug 2006
A Man Without A Country
I’ve liked Kurt Vonnegut since high school, so I was excited that he’d written another book. I liked it well enough, but it was so short; more like a Harper’s article that had been stretched into a book by making the font larger.
I guess when you’re Kurt Vonnegut you can do that.
Sat, 12 Aug 2006
Internet Save and Restore
It’s about time. Instead of it being “your” computer, it’s “your OS image”. Walk up to a participating machine, log in, and your VM is demand loaded from the network, just like a laptop which has been resumed from sleep.
Lots of problems (for example, the prototype uses VMWare for VM, so no 3d acceleration, and it’s unclear what happens if you switch between radically different hardware platforms), but it is apparently a functional prototype.
Interestingly, they are using CODA for a backing store. I’ve been keeping an eye on CODA for a while; sadly, the rate of development on it is very slow, otherwise it could be a seriously awesome network file system. What’s neat about ISR is that they are using the VM to work around some of the CODA file system limits.
Details here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~satya/DOWNLOAD/isr-ieee-computer-july04.pdf
Atlas Shrugged
Okay, I am now done with Ayn Rand.
Seriously.
It was interesting the responses I got from people who saw that I was reading Atlas Shrugged; they ranged from visceral disgust to “oh, I read that… when I was 15” to “Everybody I know who read that book turned into an asshole. Are you going to turn into an asshole?” to “Wow. Did you get to the monologue yet?”. To which I can now respond “Yes, in fact, I read the 68 page monologue. I read the whole damn thing. And you know what? I’m done with it. Oh, and I don’t plan on turning into an asshole, but if you think I have, let me know, ‘kay?”
My favorite part was the industrialist ninja strike force at the end; being ruthless in business obviously equips you to be an elite commando in and out of the boardroom.
The sad part here is that the underlying message here is actually valuable, if very simple. Be independent. Don’t rely upon the graces of others to survive. Don’t feel obligated to obey the tenets of society. Do think. Those aren’t bad things to do. Unfortunately, this seems to get twisted around by the people who adopt these novels as holy text, and get transformed into one even more simple creed: be an asshole.
I mean, honestly. I’m beginning to think that Ayn Rand is in the same class of holy book as the Bible: the folks who are yelling the loudest about it haven’t paid attention to the source material. So much for rationalism.
The Fountainhead was a much more entertaining novel; however, Atlas Shrugged was worth reading from a “seeking to understand the loonies” perspective, which I seem to get into from time to time. Still, no crazy-cult books for at least a month.
Tue, 08 Aug 2006
I sold my TV
My television has been sold as of yesterday. Hurray! I am on my way towards having a lot more space in my apartment, as well as possibly never owning a stupid screen (vs. a smart screen) again. It’s been interesting how many people have suggested that selling my television is a symptom of insanity, or a political statement of some kind.
Wed, 19 Jul 2006
Toast
Toast is a collection of short stories by Charles Stross. As you might guess from the title, they invariably involve the end of the world as we know it; sometimes this means the end of life on Earth, other times it simply means the total destruction of what we currently consider reality.
Lots of fun, even if some of the stories now feel a bit dated.
Mon, 17 Jul 2006
Time Management for Systems Administrators
This ended up on the O’Reilly pile at work, so I picked it up and read it on BART. I think this book serves a useful purpose; it gets time management info in front of a group of people whom normally wouldn’t see it. However, Getting Things Done is a much better book if you really want to get better at managing your time. To be fair, Limoncelli recommends GTD in the Epilogue, so I think it’s best to think of this as a “starter book for people who hate time management books but need one anyway”. Especially if they are sysadmins.
Sun, 16 Jul 2006
The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint
More of an essay than a book, this is the cure for the dreaded PowerPoint presentation disease that infects nearly all corporates and colleges. If you give presentations, you should read it. If you suffer through presentations, you should read it, if only to learn that there is another way.
Glasshouse
Charles Stross has written another fantastic post-Singularity novel in Glasshouse. If you liked Accelerando, you will like Glasshouse. If you did not like Accelerando, well, you may like Glasshouse. In any case, you should read Glasshouse. All hail the panopticon dystopia!
The Fountainhead
If anything, Ayn Rand needs less bits on the Internet written about her, not more. The Internet appears to be the last haven of Objectivists; at least, they are a lot louder here. If you haven’t read The Fountainhead, it’s probably worth reading; all of the roles are caricatures and there is little surprise as to what happens, but Rand isn’t talked about because of her writing style.
Set This House in Order
Set This House in Order is one of the more inventive books I’ve read in a while; a very interesting description of how multiple personality disorder may be like combined with a solid mystery plot. Lots of fun, totally worth reading.
Microserfs
There’s a problem with reading a book that was really hot about 10 years ago; there’s not much to say about it now. I read this when I was in college, and re-read it recently. It resonated more this time around; probably because parts of my life now match parts of the lives of the characters more. I still like it, even though as Hoss says about Coupland: “You’re going along, and everything is fine, and then WHAMMO! Apocalypse!”.
The Prophet
My mom gave me a copy of The Prophet that belonged to my grandmother a while ago. I have absolutely no idea why I wanted to read this book; I am assuming that it was jotted down as being on a list of books that inspired an author that I enjoyed, or someone mentioned to me in passing.
Knowing absolutely nothing about it, I discover that it is a book of poetry. You have to understand something about my relationship to poetry: I can’t stand it. One of my high school English teachers once believed that part of my soul was missing because I didn’t like the poetry we were reading, and the papers I wrote indicated as much. I have never met a poem that I didn’t find plenty of reason to avoid.
So, it says something that I actually read The Prophet; admittedly, most of my motivation was that the book was my grandmother’s, and I wanted to see something that she had read, but I did finish it. Unfortunately, I have no idea what that actually means: I don’t want to read it again. I don’t feel that I got a lot out of it. So it goes.
Grease Monkey
Grease Monkey was a nice change of pace from the graphic novels I’ve been reading lately. The art detail is very good, and the stories are not bad for young adult/coming of age fare. I’d give this to a niece or nephew in a second, and it was a fun read for me.
Practical Cryptography
Bruce Schneier and Niels Ferguson have performed a miracle: they’ve written a book that helps explain cryptography to people who currently use it. It doesn’t assume a cryptography background, and is at about the same level as a good O’Reilly Press book. Given that the issues dealt with in this book are everywhere (cryptographic algorithms are in your DVD player, every Internet service has authentication and data validation issues, etc), I believe that this book is in the same category as Code Complete; if you are involved with software, you probably will be better at your work after reading this book.
Sat, 01 Jul 2006
Heading to Yosemite
I have been invited at the last second to go to Yosemite for the 4 day weekend. Given that I’m more or less quietly going crazy, 4 days away from mostly everything seems necessary. Apologies to those who I am flaking out on; it is a moral imperative that I get away for a little while now that the option has been offered.
Sat, 24 Jun 2006
Zodiac
Zodiac is probably my favorite Neal Stephenson novel. Not too long, tight plot, and the signature style that is in all of Stephenson’s novels. You should go find this one, also; despite its age, it has held up well.
Was
Was was actually… disappointing. It is all about the Oz myth, and why we need to make Oz in order to get by, and that was good. The writing was also good. Really, it held together nicely right up until the end, where it all kind of falls apart into goop.
Tue, 20 Jun 2006
Stack for email
Had a very nice dinner with Rand and Alexis tonight (boy, they know how to feed a bachelor) and ended up talking with Rand about GTD a little bit. He made the suggestion that processing email as a stack is actually a faster way to go than treating it like a queue, especially if you have a mail reader that does threading. The basic idea is that while it is best to achieve Inbox Zero sometimes you need to build some momentum. Having the recent stuff first usually means you can destroy whole threads quickly and easily which builds up momentum for the stuff that’s been lingering around. In the worst case (which is simply the “didn’t make it to Inbox Zero” case), at least you’ve processed the most recent items (including the big rambling threads of doom, easily identified by their 5+ replies) which are usually the ones that are time critical.
I configured mutt to do this by putting this in my .muttrc:
set sort=threads
set aux_sort=reverse-last-date
which is handy. Obviously, GUI mail readers can do this with a simple click of the Date Recieved sort bar.
Mon, 19 Jun 2006
Make Emacs take the full screen height
I’ve been on a rather serious Emacs kick lately. One of the things that always frustrated me a little bit about EMACS is that the X11 variant wouldn’t make itself the full size of the monitor at start up without help from the window manager. This is fine and all; after all, I could always make the window manager do the right thing. At least until now.
Now, I use Carbon Emacs most of the time, and MacOS X doesn’t let you muck around with the window manager. However, after a bit of digging, I figured out how to make Emacs re-size the initial window (in emacs-speak, the initial frame):
; Put initial frame at the top left of the screen and make it full
; height, assuming we're not in a terminal.
(if window-system
(set 'initial-frame-alist
; Check out the elisp documentation on Backquote to
; understand the `( ,() ) construct.
`((left . 0) (top . 0)
; This attempts to automatically determine the emacs frame
; height by computing it from the screen resolution. We
; subtract 3 chars to account for the minibuffer and window
; decorations.
(height . ,(- (/ (x-display-pixel-height) (frame-char-height))
3)))))
There you have it. That only took me 4 hours to figure out. The tricky part was understanding the backquote notation (it lets you have a quoted lisp structure that you can “un-quote” parts of in order to have them be evaluated). Now that I have shared this information, of course, I feel better about spending the time on it. Besides, I get happy every time my emacs starts up and then makes itself the right size, as if by magic!
Sun, 18 Jun 2006
Some time has passed
Had this message come up while trying to get an old Cobalt Cube 2 online:
Checking root file system...
fsck 1.37 (21-Mar-2005)
/dev/hda2 has gone 47349 days without being checked, check forced.
/dev/hda2: |================================== - 60.6%
Yikes! That’s some old bits.
Sun, 21 May 2006
Bay to Breakers
Ran the Bay to Breakers today with Michelle. We ended up finishing in 1:40 or so, which was not bad, especially considering that I had to stop twice and walk off my knee bring cranky. As expected, 12k was a bit out of range; I knew that my knee tends to start to have trouble at around 40-50 minutes of running now (up from 30, so the training is doing something right), so I’m gonna call this a victory.
Mon, 01 May 2006
Collect gets an A
I’ve told myself I’d not get into GTD navel gazing. However, since it seems to be the natural order of things, I’d best get on with it so that I can get into such glories as what I really think about my President and Linux rules, OMG PONIES!!!. Slightly more seriously, it made sense to evaluate my plan every so often; in this case, about 6 months.
Here’s the deal: I rock at the GTD collect step. I am the HPDA master. My email flow is solid. My inboxes are well used. I very well may p0wn the Allen himself at getting my thoughts onto paper and out of my head. I even manage to have my total number of inboxes down to a reasonable number (5).
After the collect step, though, things get worse. Much worse. This isn’t the end of the world; after all, in a linear system you’re better off being better at the earlier parts than the later parts. I think that it’s time to focus some energy of the next part: processing. I suck at it. I don’t think I’ve ever actually sat down and asked “Is this actionable? What’s the next action?”. I usually dump things onto my project lists and hope that I’ll figure it out later when I review. This is phenomenally stupid; the whole point of processing is to take care of things up front.
I think that part of the problem is that I don’t do processing as a separate task. I should be treating it as a task in its own right to be done mindfully and in isolation. After all, if I don’t have the time to process stuff that I’ve collected, I certainly don’t have time to do anything with the results.
Mon, 20 Mar 2006
England, returned
Just got back about 3 hours ago. Totally fantastic trip, completely knackered, will write more later once I get a chance to collect my notes.
Thu, 09 Mar 2006
England tomorrow!
Okay, so, tomorrow I’m going to be flying to England. Clothes? Check. Passport? Check. Reading materials? Check.
Guess we’re good to go, then.
Be back in 10 days.
Thu, 02 Mar 2006
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
But wait, you say! This isn’t some wacky scifi novel! Who the hell is posting this entry, and what did you do with Mark? Yes, it’s true, I do in fact read other things. Mark Twain, for example, is a writer that I always felt I should read more of, but have never gotten around to. So I read about good ol’ Huck Finn, and let me tell ya: if you haven’t read this book since school, go get a copy. It’s funny, and hard, and touching, and funny, and why am I trying to convince you to read Mark Twain? You already know he’s good! Go read him!
Sun, 26 Feb 2006
England soon
I’m leaving for England in 12 days. Yikes! For some reason it seemed farther away. So much to do before then!
New York
Went to New York City for President’s Day weekend. What a fantastic city. Saw Lady Liberty, the Met, the MOMA, Battery Park. Wandered around late at night looking for donuts with Tyler. Found donuts and people who add sugar to milk.
Photos (not mine) here and here.
A Fire Upon The Deep
First Vernor Vinge novel I’ve read; really good, and obvious inspiration to a whole slew of current authors (Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, for example, seem to share some of Vinge’s style). Anyway, I really enjoyed it, and will probably go hunt down some of his other stuff before too long.
Masks of the Illuminati
Another Robert Anton Wilson conspiracy-fest. Not as good as The Illuminati Trilogy, or even Schrodinger’s Cat.
Sat, 25 Feb 2006
Step up or go home
Went to a party with Hoss and saw some people I hadn’t seen in a while (Annie and Jenn). It was fun, but I was tired and burned from drinking last night with work friends and having to do emergency work at the colo this afternoon while hung over. The depth of my exhaustion became evident when a particularly hot girl showed up and I just couldn’t deal; it was obvious that either I had to step up and talk to her or go home, and it was just as obvious that talking to her was going to be impossible.
So I went home. Lesson learned: I shouldn’t let myself get this fried, since I will never know when hot girls might arrive.
Thu, 23 Feb 2006
Son of a Witch
While I really enjoyed Wicked, I didn’t think that Son of a Witch was nearly as good. For whatever reason, it just didn’t work for me. Liir wasn’t a very interesting character, and Candle was just kind of boring.
All in all, really disappointing.
Thu, 16 Feb 2006
Portland
My January trip for 2006 was to Portland to visit Nicky, Gaby, and Randy. The weekend started with an email from Nicky saying “Bring ski gear, clubbing clothes, and a bathing suit”. It rocked; we went snowboarding, went out late, and took advantage of Gaby’s hot tub.
Sweet. Portland is a fun town.
Sun, 12 Feb 2006
The Atrocity Archives
Fun and totally worthwhile, but not as good as Charles Stross’ other books. There were too many IT references and too much stuff going on which I thought interfered with the story a little bit. Still, far better than most of the scifi I’ve read and Charles Stross is now one of my favorite authors.
Iron Sunrise
Good sci-fi adventure yarn; perfect airplane reading. Time flies and you’re having fun! You should read Singularity Sky first, though.
Sun, 05 Feb 2006
Example of Google censoring China
I admit, I was one of the stupid fuckers who believed that Google just might, maybe, manage to somehow avoid being evil.
Sat, 04 Feb 2006
A Short History of Nearly Everything
A Short History Of Nearly Everything, despite its grandiose title, is an easy read. It is not, however, discuss easy ideas. Want to know a little bit about quantum mechanics? Want to know why E=mc2 matters? Curious about how DNA works? This is the book for you.
The Long Walk
Change of pace for me, but excellent. The author and six fellow prisoners escape a Soviet labor camp in 1941 and walk from Siberia to British India in order to find freedom. Stunning and moving. Link.
Fri, 03 Feb 2006
Snowboarding to clear ones head
Going to Tahoe with Benjy and Rick; maybe I’ll have some spectacular insight with respect to my current personal suck.
Arg! Rick just called, and we’re going to be delayed; doesn’t sound like we’ll get up to our hotel until 1am. Suck has been increased.
Tue, 31 Jan 2006
Final conversations
I may have just had my last conversation with Amanda. This was the “Hey, we can’t fool around anymore because I’ve been on a date with someone else” conversation. It’s unclear to me how many people have this conversation, but if you haven’t, don’t. It sucks.
To everyone who told me that it was a bad idea to post-breakup undefined ex-thing: you told me so. I didn’t listen.
Honestly, I don’t know that I should have listened. As with the whole relationship, the part that happened after the breakup was also sweet, and I’m not sad about it. I just hurt now, still, again, etc.
Things didn’t work out. What the hell is that supposed to mean, really? In our case (oh, but there is no us, not any more), it meant that we had issues, and we couldn’t make the time to resolve them (vet school and startup company will do that to you), and so instead of slowly dying, we ended while we still thought well of each other.
A friend from work gave me a mnemonic for the stages of grief: Always Drink Alchohol Before Doing Anal. Yes, normally there are supposed to be five stages, but we added one to the front, leaving Alchohol Denial Anger Bargaining Depression Acceptance. I have no clue where I am; probably Depression. Or maybe just drunk.
Sat, 21 Jan 2006
Singularity Sky
More Charles Stross happy singularity goodness. Not as mind blowing as Accelerando, but still really good. Beware the Critics…
Wed, 18 Jan 2006
Ringworld
Just finished reading Ringworld, and found it entertaining. What was most interesting was the idea that material science would be the way the future would be impossible to imagine (indestructable spaceship hulls, impossibly strong custom materials that block neutrenos, etc). It gave me the impression that at the time it was written material science was the new hotness; similar to how current sci-fi treat nanotech and extremely pervasive computing as the way the future becomes impossible to imagine (see Accelerando, anything about The Singularity, etc).
Sat, 07 Jan 2006
My book queue is full!
I just counted, and I have 27 books sitting in a pile that I want to read. Therefor, I am instantiating an emergency “no more books” rule for myself until I’ve actually read some of them.