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Category Archives: Books
This morning came awful early
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 reason [...]
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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 [...]
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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?
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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 [...]
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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.
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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 [...]
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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 Adobe [...]
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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 [...]
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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 ever [...]
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Review: Black Bottle Man