When my wife's alarm clock went off at 5:30 AM, she said to me, "When did you get in last night?"
Me: "3:30."
Her: "Yeah. I woke up at 2:30, and you weren't in yet. I thought, Those idiots*, and went back to sleep."
Those idiots were me and my cow-orker Craig, and the [...]
Category Archives: Books
This morning came awful early
Triple threat
I'm kind of a sucker for certain things:
Images of galaxies — I love the great whorls of stars that make up the visible mass of the Universe
The history of science, especially physics and astronomy
A clever title
So it was probably inevitable that I'd check this book out of the library today:
I'll let you know what I [...]
A blast from the past
"To see a horse in human flesh, descending on a hammock through the air, and as it nears your house" — wait, what's that about my house?
13 things I learned from books
But which books? See if you can guess… (Hint: They're mostly SF.)
The road to Hell is paved with frozen door-to-door salesmen, and no one knows why.
Forcing grunts to swear at their superior officers is a stupid way to build morale.
If everything is infinitely improbable, then everything is equally probable.
If the Fast Burn is [...]
On my to-be-read pile
It just keeps growing like a hydra. Here are the latest three books:
Not pictured: The last Bartimaeus novel; Rainbows End by Vinge; a graphic novel about Louis Riel; an epic poem; The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily; and a bunch I can't even remember right now.
Dragons of Babel, by Michael Swanwick
This novel arrived in the mail about a day before I headed west, after I'd waited the better part of two weeks for it (and even longer, if you factor in the fact that I pre-ordered it, but that's a whole 'nother story, as they say).
I started reading it on the train, and I finished [...]
Unpleasant realization
From the front matter of Steven Brust's Firefly fan-fic(ish) novel (found via Scalzi's Whatever):
For people who care about such things, the book was written in emacs on a box running Mandrake Linux, then I used OpenOffice to format it for printing. The final layout for online publication was created with Microsoft Word and [...]
I'm such a slacker
Ok, so here's the second half of the William Gibson Weekend story. Told as a Thursday Thirteen, because that way I can kill two birds with one stone.
That same night, there was a multi-author reading, titled "Encounters", on the Mainstage. Six authors were on the docket, though one couldn't make it.
Quoting from the [...]
Whirlwind Weekend
This weekend I: saw, and had a brief chat with, William Gibson; did nage-no-kata with the head of the Canadian Grading Board for judo, and also had a brief intro to the first set of ju-no-kata; drew Darth Vader in Crayola crayon; and heard the cutest version of the ABC song I think I'll [...]
Thin Air
…is the name of the Winnipeg Writers Festival, and this year one of the speakers is William Gibson.
I fully intend to be there for at least one of his events.