Month: January 2011

I hardly ever re-read anything. I like the thrill of the new too much. If you know what's coming next where's the suspense?

I think I have a new trend starting – abandoning books …

But that’s happened twice now over the last couple of months. I think my fixation with David Weber has been broken by a certain Jack Campbell. On the one hand, you have David Weber who is occasionally brilliant with well structured and decently paced books. However, there’s also the David Weber who buries the good stuff in his books in a mire of non-interesting, non-important filler. I gave up on Shadow of Saganami after 300 pages out of a 1000 and I don’t think I’ll go back to it.

That’s one danger of spoilers actually. The giving up with it was born partly out of looking at the sneak preview chapter at the back which is taken from the next book and then me looking up some of that in wiki. Because of that, I have a synopsis of this book and the next, without having to wade through the filler. After 300 pages, nothing had really happened.

On the other hand, there’s the Jack Campbell set of 6 books which I raced my way through. They’re about 350 pages in each, all structured around Big Fleet action happening in a star system as the Lost Fleet is making its way through. And by Big Fleet, there’s several hundred warships in this Lost Fleet. These books keep it simple and the filler is kept to an absolute minimum. Combined with the star system based action, that means the pacing is excellent. Hopefully there will be more to come from this one.

Hey ! How about this Red Mars book ?

It’s part of a trilogy of about 5 parts (where’ve we heard that before ?) by Kim Stanley Robinson. You can tell there’s a huge amount of research gone into this trilogy in the engineering and planetology detail that forms its core. There’s a lot of good stuff here and it hangs together well with the “could this work ?” feeling always being positive. However … a good story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Occasionally a bit of the middle gets shunted to the start to kick start the beginning.

What KSR forgets is that End thing. Red Mars ends with an excellent cliff hanger and from what I remember of Green Mars, that ends well too. The last book is a major disappointment though, as it’s a collection of travelogues inside the KSR Mars solar system. There’s no real End here, although you could say that’s the point in a Life Goes On kind of way. However, it feels like the trilogy could have finished after 2.5 books as the last is mostly filler with the Actual Story Detector reading negative all the way.

Anyway, I’ve given up on this one because :
a) I’ve read it before (and enjoyed it)
b) There’s better Mars books (will read the Ben Bova one again sometime)
c) I could see the travelogue signs creeping into Red Mars

There’s the conflict between wanting to know what happens in it and not particularly wanting the tedium of finding out. That’s one reason I read a few books in between attempting a Turtledove WorldWar book. I’ll put this one in the A to Z but it may well get replaced by something like Return To Mars or something else beginning with R.

Next book is Titanicus by Dan Abnett, where the God Machines walk on Orestes. It’ll be the second book I’ve read by Dan Abnett but whereas the first was centred around the humble Imperial Guard, this one tackles the opposite end of the scale where you have huge war engines 100m tall striding across the battlefield.

I started it last night and am already well over a hundred pages in.

Right – I have a job to do and it’ll involve raiding a village under attack to recover supplies.
Will Raid For :
Food
Mini Eggs
Pizza
Or to listen to the Hot Swedish Girls.

Heh heh heh – last car I got, I didn't actually test drive. Which probably told Carcraft that I really needed to get rid of the last one … The Honda looks interesting. The Mazda RX-8 would have been good too, if it hadn't failed the Cricket Bag Test.

It's a shame the high street lost Zavvi/Virgin. HMV were always more expensive and now they've lost the competition, they've got no incentive to give proper prices. Most of my recent stuff has come from Amazon because High St shops don't seem interested in stocking what I want to buy.

Everyone I know that owns a Honda would buy Honda again adn loves their car. Same for Mazda owners I have found. You have to take a test drive to see what a car is really like though (as I ma sure you are aware!).

I like buying music and films online and don't miss browsing in shops at all really. Just as well seeing as HMV are such a useless shop with no customer service ethos unless they are taking money off you (and sometimes not much then). I'm definitley and Amazon/Play/CD Wow/ The Hut/Zavvi person these days, which is just as well as I buy quite a bit of media and everytime something is a quid or more cheaper – it soon adds up over a year! I was quite shocked when I worked it out!

Busyish evening tonight.

I’ve known since last Thursday that I had a duff headlight, thanks to the only Brizzle driver to let me know with a flash of his lights. But I’ve not really had a good opportunity to get it fixed until tonight. So the plan is hatched :

Nip over to the Mall.
Have a peek in Bristol Honda at their CR-Z car
Acquire a headlight bulb from Halfords
Have a rummage in the shops

The snow around here has turned into lots of dampness (I could hear the rain over Suzanne Vega’s 99.9 degrees F album) so another Cunning Plan ™ gets hatched.

And yes – the person who just went “OH NO !” and hid at the mention of a Sleepypete Cunning Plan, I heard you and I have my eye on you.

Not that cunning actually. More a means of getting a headlight bulb changed where there’s decent light and something over my head. That’s right, the downstairs car park at the Mall. Sheltered from the wind too, as close to garage conditions as I’m likely to get. Headlight changing is boring so I’m not going to say much about it, let’s just say that many of the swear words in common use today were invented during jobs like this.

Modern car engineering can be summed up as :
1 – Everything is crammed in to save space
2 – Things are designed to stay put
3 – Things are not supposed to be removed
4 – Owners should not question “£10 for part, £50 to fit” bills

2 and 3 combined to make changing simple stuff an exercise in frustration as you’re putting it back together. Add in number 1 in that list and you have a recipe for bruises. Still, the Focus is much easier to work on than the Puma. I’m very glad none of the bulbs blew on the Puma as I didn’t have a clue how to get in to where it kept its bulbs.

Next car ? I have the nagging feeling that the Focus is at the top of its Long Slippery Downhill. You know, the time when something mechanical has been running perfectly until … And then the problems start piling up. The signal this time has been the inlet manifold last year, which took the car off the road for about 3 weeks before it was fixed. It’s done about 62k miles so I should have at least another couple of years out of it. Definitely another few months because there’s still a loan outstanding on it.

Meh – rambling again. The Honda CR-Z is looking like the favourite at the moment … My favoured cars tend to be those that fit around the driver like a glove. They’ll subtly let the driver know what’s going to happen before it does and will obey their every command with the minimum of fuss. The Puma was great for this, a taut, light chassis and responsive engine made for a leather glove of a car. The Focus has more power but is also heavier … Think boxing glove … (Nah – that’s unfair, think batting glove)

The Honda looks fairly promising and would definitely satisfy the geekiness being a hybrid. The nagging drawbacks though are :

Underpowered – 0 to 60 is quoted as 10 secs. I’m used to better.
(Puma was 9 secs, my Focus is 8)
Chunky – good for that “glove” feeling but …
Cramped – I didn’t get the chance to look in the boot but I reckon it’ll fail the golf club test*
Would entail that “just driven off the forecourt” 50% loss of value

*Golf Club Test : Can you fit a golf bag in without having the back seats down. I’ve not had my golf clubs out for years but I still think it’s a good test. When I was looking at the Mazda RX-8, it got vetoed because it would have been downright evil to get a cricket bag out of … (Let alone shopping or tellies)

Oh – any trip to the Mall usually ends up as an excuse to wander around there for a while hunting bargains. (And shoes, although I ended up disappointed there AGAIN). It does cost less to buy things like blu-rays and music online but there’s something about hunting through looking to see what’s on offer. I much prefer scanning shelves to clicking “next” a hundred times on A N Other online shop.

Iron Man 1 and Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr version) escaped from a shop today. Iron Man’s a blu-ray upgrade, as I know someone who’s wanting to pick it up on dvd …

So – headlight fixed, potential next car checked out (jury’s out). Now chilling out to music, listening to a few randoms before Queen’s A Night At The Opera (the album where Bohemian Rhapsody is not the best track …) comes on 🙂 Since zeroing the play counts, iTunes seems to be turning into a fan of :

Iron Maiden, Little Boots, Chris Rea, Gloria Estefan, Murray Gold … Must weave some Kate Bush, Alisha’s Attic and Goldfrapp into that mix.

It's not as good as the mad muppets that made Farscape into a classic. It was better than what we got from the Star Trek people 🙂

I always thought the first Commander did ok. Watching it again, I seem to be detecting a fair bit of "wrong step here, I'll lose my command" last chance-ism in there …

PS Wanting to watch the 4 series of Andromeda again.

I'm afraid I am not a Babylon 5 fan at all. While I think the overall story was quite strong there was far too much I didn't like about it. It took me years to get past season 1 as I found it too cheesey (mainly the Commanders' fault) and the acting was not great. However, I'm glad you enjoy it (along with several of my friends) When I got past season 1, it did get much better 🙂

Looks like an old problem could be back :

Sound issues …


The link is what I wrote about it before but the summary is that every few minutes (at worst), there’d be a blip of a second or less where the soundtrack on a dvd would go silent through the new kit.

Thought I’d cracked it by switching to a couple of good HDMI cables but it seems to be back. Ho hum. I suspect it’s me fixing another connectivity issue that’s resurrected this one, so I’ll be managing 2 evils :

1 – silent blips in soundtrack
2 – headscratching over how to get blu-ray player to talk to amp to talk to telly.

The combination will occasionally refuse to connect blu-ray player to amplifier and I suspect fixing that (amp getting confused over which inputs to use) has caused this one. I’ve done some tweakin’ with the software setups and I’m now doing the evaluation thing again, listening out for those silent blips. 1 Babylon 5 episode so far and no blips. Good sign.

Telly off air (except the Ashes !) has been very bare of stuff to watch lately, so I’ve fallen back on rewatching some old stuff. The 1990s saw some absolutely brilliant episodic sci-fi come to the telly, some of which was so good it got ripped off and retreaded into things like Star Trek. (Deep Space 9 continually ripped off Babylon 5 stories and arcs).

The current catch up is Babylon 5, which spanned 5 series and a heap of TV movies. There was an attempt at a spin off, called B5 Crusade which got killed off due to the networks being numpties. Too much interference and when they didn’t get their own way, B5 Crusade was killed off just as it was starting to ramp up.

Anyway … Babylon 5. It’s about a space station named after the series, which is a melting pot for all of the various races inhabiting the universe the series is set in. It’s blessed with a series of strong characters and there’s enough scope in the writing to inject snippets of humour into the interactions between those characters. It was made between 1994 and 1998 on a shoestring budget, so there wasn’t the ability to use Star Trek quality visuals in the programme. In the early days, it was a farm of Amiga computers generating all the images. Saying that though, what they do with the visuals is startlingly impressive.

Low tech can beat high tech if you know what you’re doing.

And they definitely knew what they were doing. B5 was the first sci fi series to have a Grand Plan covering what they intended to put on screen. It was originally scheduled to run 5 series (110 episodes), however the networks interfered and the main storyline got squished into 4.

Right – one of the better episodes of season 1 is ramping up so I’ll get back to “evaluating” 🙂 Babylon 5 : second best scifi series of the past few decades. I’d be watching the best (Farscape) if my sister didn’t have some of its dvds !

A couple of years ago, I tried one of the challenges that wings it’s way around the blogosphere. It was an A to Z on books challenge and a fairly tough one, looking for 52 books to read in a year. Here’s how I did.

I got about half way through both the A to Z on authors and A to Z on titles. Figured it would be fun to try again this year, although I’m going to make it easier by just going for 26 books, with the A to Z being titles and authors. One book every fortnight should be doable with the cricket and gaming providing big distractions 🙂

I’ll keep this post as a running tally, with the labels helping me keep track. I’m through 3 books already :

A – for (Dan) Abnett – First And Only (added Jan)
B – for (Jim) Butcher – Storm Front (added Feb)
C –
D – for (Aaron) Dembski-Bowden – Helsreach (added Feb)
E – for Exiles Trilogy by Ben Bova (added May)
F – for Feersum Endjinn by Iain M Banks (added Jan)
G – for Ghostmaker by Dan Abnett (added May)
H – for (Simon) Hughes – A Lot of Hard Yakka (added Jan)
I – for Inversions by Iain M Banks (added April)
J –
K –
L –
M –
N –
O –
P –
Q –
R – for Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (partial in Jan)
S – for Surface Detail by Iain M Banks (added June)
T – for Titanicus by Dan Abnett (added Jan)
U – for (HMS) Ulysses by Alistair MacLean (added May)
V –
W – for (Chris) Wraight, author of Battle of the Fang (added September)
X –
Y – for (Charles) Yu, author of How To Survive In A Science Fictional Universe (added August)
Z –

The Iain M Banks book was fairly tough to get through, mainly cos I didn’t really know when it was going to get good. It meandered badly through the early stages and finished itself off in an awful rush. Not his best. Hopefully Surface Detail will be better, I’ll be looking to pick that up when it comes out in paperback later in the year.

First And Only is from an omnibus book called The Founding by Dan Abnett. It’s set in the brutal Warhammer 40k universe and tells the story of an Imperial Guard regiment that just escaped when it’s world was taken by Chaos. I was impressed enough with this one that after finishing the first book inside, I’ve ordered a couple more from Amazon after being disappointed with the appallingly low stock at Waterstones.

(The high street retailers will certainly fail if they don’t stock what we want to buy)

I’ve been involved in the cricket world since I was about 13, so reading A Lot Of Hard Yakka by Simon Hughes was a very curious look into the world of professional cricket although the meat of it was from 10 years before I started playing. Fun to see the parallels between the professional world and the amateur world I played in, I have a feeling I played in better facilities than they occasionally did. I could definitely identify with the self doubts and the confidence issues expressed in the book. Every sportsman will suffer confidence crises and there’s a certain level of negative feedback implicit in that. Low confidence and doubts make your run up less sure or your reactions slower, which makes it far more difficult to land the ball on the spot or to whack it to the boundary.

It’s not a diary of match results, you can get that from Wisden. It’s a very interesting look into the mindset and life of professional sportsmen and written far more intelligently than what people lured into getting the average footballer’s life story (ages 18 to 23 with the speed they come out nowadays) will get.

Next on the list is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars. I read this one a few years ago but I’m stubbornly reading it again. I’ll probably only read the first of the trilogy as this is by far the best. And there’s a fair bit of planetary and astronautic engineering in there that always gets me interested.

I’ll add in more books as I go (and probably move a few around too!). Hoping to hit 26 this year 🙂

Was pleasantly surprised by the change in landscape yesterday that happened while I was buried in pooter game …

Before starting – dark & grey. After finishing – all white.