I came across Tidhar’s work via Escape Pod, where he has had a couple of stories read. While none of them particularly grabbed me, they made mention of this collection of short stories based around fantastic characters from the Jewish cannon, which intrigued me enough to pick up the work on Kindle for a couple of pounds, and it was very enjoyable; I’ll be looking out for more works from him in this world.

I first read Morwood’s ‘Horse Lords’ saga in secondary school, and can remember debating them with a friend, as we were properly starting to get into fantasy fiction. Looking back, he introduced me to a lot of good fiction.

I bought this because of a fan effort on twitter highlighting the plight of Morwood and his partner Diane Duane who had had their bank account emptied by a fraudster, and while the bank would be refunding the money, it wouldn’t be in enough time to meet that months bills, so they’d organised an eBook sale to raise some cash. I’d read scads of Duane’s Star Trek franchise fiction a few years later (thanks Tomesy!), and loved Morwoods works so I bought one of each of their self published works.

Initially I’d hesitated in buying this as it was effectively a prequel, and focusing on the establishing of the Horse Lords at that, where my interest had always been in the magic of the world. It turns out I shouldn’t have doubted Mr Morwood!

It has a sequel, Widowmaker, and to be honest it appears like the two were one book split to make two (odd in eBook world), or at least it did to me. Going back to his site, it appears both of these ‘prequels’ have been pulled for editing and re-issue in October, so perhaps there’s something in that. To be frank, I’m a bit grumpy about that; if I’d have known before starting I’d have held off reading until the reissue (not that he’s under any obligation to provide that to me F.O.C. of course), now I need to decide if I’ll reread the new edition *and* I need to wait for the sequel! Its a hard life..

First of the 2012 Hugo Nominees! Listened to thanks to the fine folks at Escape Pod (I’ve finally got round to donating, too), but you can also read it online at Clarksworld Magazine.

It was a lovely, odd piece. Still thinking about it and not sure what it had to say; I suspect this will haunt me for a while, in a good way. Lovely imagery.

This is a great start to Hugo season!

Next up in my Watt-Evans binge, I thought this was next in the sequence of books I had in the Esther series, turns out I’d missed a couple, one of which I had.

This one was darker than the ones I’d read before (although the more you think about the situation of the Cyborg in ‘Cyborg and Sorcerer’s', the darker it gets..), with two main protagonists. I was expecting to get tired of his prose style, as this is the third of his I’d read in as many months, but it actually got me more more interested in reading the others. I’ll probably read another author next anyway, but with an eye on the next in the series (Blood Of A Dragon IIRC). After that I’ll actually need to buy the next one as I’ll have read my backlog of his work!

Back when eBooks first started coming out (after Project Gutenburg, but before the Sony Reader devices, I think – the early noughties perhaps?), fictionwise made quite a stir by publishing out of print works from lesser known or genre authors, and a lot of short stories (way before the Kindle shorts), at very decent prices. I went through buying works by W.T. Quick, Walter Jon Williams and Lawrence Watt Evans, for about £3 each (less with bulk buy and subscription discounts, if I recall). I even put a web page together about what devices I used and what tools (this was long before Calibre came along and made eBook conversion easy (reminds me, must donate).

I bought all the Lawrence Watt Evans books they had, but didn’t get round to reading any of them. My recent rediscovery of one of his books in the loft though, reminded me, and I’ve been working my way through them since.

I think I avoided this one originally because I didn’t fancy the premise, but it took a turn I hadn’t thought of, and got me interested in the whole Esthar world again. It turn out I’m reading them slightly out of sequence, so I get tantalising hints of back story from other characters.

I’m going to read through the others I have and then buy the rest (via fictionwise if I can buy them without DRM, via Kindle if not..

Alas, my maths just isn’t up to this. I’m horrified at how much my calculus and algebra have declined, and they weren’t exactly my strongest suite to begin with.

I have the eBook thanks to an OReilly deal, and the Library at work bought a copy for me that I can go back to if I need to, so I plan to pick up a few of his suggested remedial reading books on Calculus and see if I can get back up to speed. In the meantime, I’ll release the dead tree version back to the Library to let them lend it to people who can make better use of it!

However, as I read it, it definitely grew on me, and I found myself thinking a lot about it during and after reading. Some, for certain, is how much it speaks to me now; Japanese and Chinese culture form a major part of the book, and the interrelation between the two, especially in martial arts, is something I’m thinking a lot about at the moment.

The book deals with the invasion of Malaysia by the Japanese in 1940, and how the mixed race protagonist and his British ex-pat family deal with this, as the main character is taken on as an Aikido student.
In parts uplifting and harrowing, it reminds you of the atrocities of that regime in the second world war, and the central dichotomy of the civilized, yet brutal culture (as one of the characters points out though, this is very similar to Chinese and English past history), as well as the ennobling and empowering effects of embarking on a martial arts ‘way’.

I’ll be thinking about this book for a while to come, and I commend it to anyone interested in this period of time, and the complex interactions between China and Japan.

Amusingly, it doesn’t look like my nominations met with much synchronicity with the rest of the voting members. On the plus side, I get a load of fiction from authors I’ve not read before via the Voters Packet (hopefully), which after all, for me, is kinda the point.

The Guardian ran an offer in conjunction with AudioGo slightly less than a year ago now, I think, which offered return visitors to the Gruniad’s website a code for downloading a number of LeCarre’s audiobooks, five in total, including the Smiley’s people saga.

It was so popular that AudioGo had trouble keeping up with the demand, by their own account. I was able to download them all no trouble though, and was pleased by the fact that, as the company appears to be the consumer arm of the BBC Audio department, all the files were in MP3 format. I’ve since used them for the Pilgrim ‘Afternoon Play’ series (they only have a few, but highly recommended), and they’re reasonably priced.

Anyway, the number of podcasts I listen to means I don’t always have much time left over for more audio books, but a combination of decorating, and starting to regularly cycle into work (11 miles each way, stopped over the winter but back in the saddle again now, one day a week) meant I was able to get some time for this.

When I started I thought it was a small paperback like his famous ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ that started the series, but realised at one point I’d been listening to it for a while; checked again and found 29 MP3 files varying from 30-45mins – the book is 700 pages long in paperback!

I’ve only read two of LeCarre’s works, this and ‘Tinker’, and while the first was good, this was better, partly because of the verisimilitude of the characters and the east Asia area the protagonist is in. As a colleague says, ‘its all meetings, and detail – you’ve got to pay attention!’, so it can be dry and hard going at times, but wonderfully evocative, and never lost my interest despite that – quite the feat.

The end of the book is clearly waiting for the followup (which I also have, thank you Guardian/AudioGo), as it more pauses than ends, in a very downbeat way. My audio player (the excellent MortPlayer ) automatically started the next one once I’d finished this, but I think I’ll listen to some of the HP Literary Podcast’s readings of Lovecraft’s stories in between for a break!

Lent to me by james_, as well as very kindly gifted a signed edition by the author herself!

This is her new urban fantasy series, the basic premise being that every mythical creature you’ve ever heard about (or read about in the trashy conspiracy magazines) is real, and that an organisation exists to hunt them down. Her twist is that her protagonist has rebelled and is actually more of a protector. In between ballroom dancing contests, and working in a strip club (do judge the book by its cover, in this sense, although no sword).

I confess that I was holding off this because the initial pitch didn’t appeal, and because so many people do urban fantasy with focus on the leather coat wearing bisexual werewolf magicians who are having kinky affairs with vampires (seriously – four series I can think off of the top of my head!). I should have known better from Mira Grant.. The tone is tongue is firmly in cheek without becoming absurd or breaking disbelief (any more than the genre does you understand), and in the snarky tone of Whedon and Butcher (hard to get right, I’ve found).

Looking forward to the next one, I must admit, and will help tide me over waiting for the next Dresden novel..

He proceeded to do so, rebelling against the party line to do it. I would like to thank him publicly for doing so, and for representing me in that regard.

A few days later, I received an email from him, which explained his, and the Liberal Democrats position in more detail. As at the time he hadn’t got anything on his website and I thought the email gave a more nuanced view than some of the polarising opinions, I thought it was worth publishing here;

15 March 2012

Dear Mr Constable,

Thank you for contacting me to let me know of your concerns about the
Health and Social Care Bill.
I voted against the Bill last September, when it left the House of
Commons. Although the Bill by then was better than the version
originally proposed by Andrew Lansley, largely through the efforts of
my colleagues, I did not believe it had been improved sufficiently to
get public support and confidence.
In the months since then it has been debated in the House of Lords,
and I acknowledge that much work has been achieved, notably by Liberal
Democrat peers, to make further improvements.

I am proud of Liberal Democrat amendments to the bill that ensure that
competition is not the focus, that there is a duty to reduce health
inequality and that there is a greater priority for medical research.
We will continue to have universal health care that is free at the
point of care. I also welcome the clause in the bill that will ensure
that never again will Governments be allowed to favour private sector
contracts when there are existing NHS providers.

However, I believe that the improvements are still not enough and
crucially the bill is now opposed by the medical professionals who
would have to implement it.

I therefore voted in the House of Commons on 13th March for the
amendment tabled by some of my Liberal Democrat colleagues saying that
the House “declines to support the bill in its current form and calls
for an urgent summit of the Royal Colleges, professional bodies,
patients’ organisations and the Government to plan health reforms
based on the Coalition Agreement”. I also voted for the main motion
calling for the bill to be dropped, when the amendment was defeated,
because I believe that the NHS is too vital for the welfare of every
person in Cambridge to be broken up by unpopular reforms.

Sadly, I was not on the winning side in that debate and vote.

There has also been significant discussion of the NHS Transition Risk
Register, and whether it should be released. I welcome the ruling of
the Information Tribunal that the Government should publish the NHS
Risk Register and wrote immediately on the publication of the report
to the Secretary of State for Health asking that the register be
immediately released. I had previously written in similar terms after
the Information Commissioner’s original ruling, and signed an Early
Day Motion calling for the Risk Register to be released. I hope that
Andrew Lansley will do the right thing on this issue.

I do believe that the NHS needs improvement and reform. Everyone in
this country deserves a first class health service which protects
everyone regardless of ability to pay.

The 1997-2010 Labour government made a number of reforms that
introduced private sector providers into the health service and paid
them more than NHS providers for the same service, including £250
million for operations that were never performed. In addition a
botched computer system that never worked cost £12 billion pounds and
the Health Service was left with a bill for £60 billion from PFI
contracts. Labour’s response to these failures was to employ
management consultants, the number of in the NHS rose by eighty per
cent in the years 2008-2010. The 2010 Labour manifesto also contained
proposals for greater involvement of the private sector.

We should be under no illusion that the previous government’s reforms
left the health service with health outcomes that are below the EU
average and near bankrupt hospitals. I remain convinced that there is
a pressing need for reform.

I believe that the only way to maintain free universal health care is
through bottom-up reforms which are fully supported by clinicians on
the ground.

I hope the Government will be able to improve the NHS over the coming
years, but I believe that the current Bill will not make the changes
needed.

Thank you for writing to me about this important issue.

Yours sincerely,

Julian Huppert
Member of Parliament for Cambridge

Wow. Not sure where to start here apart from move over, Iain. m. Banks, and I don’t say that lightly.

Becket has created a society that’s completely believable, with a back story to match. Its tautly written, and very dark in many ways. Its so good I’m having problems articulating it properly, because the more I want to describe, the more plot I might give away, without doing it justice. He makes superb use of language and unreliable narrators; something you need to understand is that the characters have been inbreeding for so long they are beginning to lose the use of descriptive words.

Its an amazing first novel, and I urge you to go out and pick up a copy along with his short story collection, some of which are available for free on his website.

It certainly didn’t hurt that A. got me a signed copy at his book launch!

I should have liked this, I really should; it had lots of things I like; magic/technology hybrids, mage wars, and so forth, but I just didn’t get on with it, and gave up a third of the way in. I suspect it may have been too similar to the Watt-Evans book I read before it.

I’ve been trying to pursuade myself to read Ackroyd’s ‘London, A Biography’ ever since A. bought it, but its the size of a Stephenson novel, and I know it will be packed full of facts, so I’ve never got round to it (can’t buy it as an eBook that I could find). When I saw he’d done a similar book on underground London, in he same vein of hidden facts and history, I asked for it for Xmas.

Now that I’ve read it, I’m probably not going to read London… I loved his magic realist, almost conversationalist style, and the odd facts dripping throughout the narrative, but I’m not sure I could read a large book of it.

Very interesting book, though, well worth the read.

I found this in the loft when sorting through books to sell, and realised I couldn’t remember reading it, so I (re)read it.

I think I liked it more the second time, as I appreciated his understated style, and the assorted ways he attempts to address the impact of the situation on the protagonist. In many ways a very bleak, amoral book. I’ve got a number of his works languishing unread in my eBook library; I need to dig them out and see if they’re all as amoral as this was – I have a theory as to his early works (not read much later).

In fact, in reading his website, this was his first ever novel, which is pretty good going.

Watt-Evans has always been, I think, an under-appreciated and certainly overlooked writer; I’m looking forward to reading more of his back catalog, and seeing how his style has matured – bear in mind this book was written early in the 1980s, and he’s not stopped writing since then! Similar, I guess, to Walter Jon Williams, another of my youth favorites that have matured well..

Thanks to James_ for lending me this until I read it. Just as with her previous book, I held off a long time because of my zombie issues, but knew I would crack eventually.

As with Feed, I really liked this book. With Feed she was breaking new ground, whereas here she has to follow up, which she does rather well. There are a number of twists in the plot that I just didn’t see (and one I certainly had). If I had any criticism at all, it was that I felt the main protagonist made too much reference to his instability; after a while I was “Ok, I get it”, but I trust that, Grant being the author she is, she’ll have had good reason for this, in the next book, if not now.

Also, next book; due this year. It had better be!

Its really hard to review this without spoilers. Just go and buy it already!

Asked and received this for Xmas (another one down!), and was rather looking forward to it what with the Movie(s) and the fantastic TV reinvention (is there anything, it would appear, Gattis can’t do?). Read about it from Gaiman’s blog, and was intrigued by the idea of Lee Child writing a Holmes mystery.

I found it a bit hit and miss, to be honest. It did expose me to a new society of Holmes fan’s that I’d never known about. The author’s I’ve listed above were the only stories I really enjoyed; I suspect I didn’t actually like the premise of people writing characters in the style of Holmes, as I wanted more Holmes stories (like Gaiman’s wonderful ‘A Study in Emerald‘). Cotteril’s was particularly good at the books stated aim, though, in a very unexpected way – the art reminded me of 1980′s ‘Dragon Warrior’s – in a good way!

Work’s library got this in for me by request; I’ve done a lot of work on a module (Storage::Nexsan::NMP) that I hope to release to CPAN soon, and I’d never got my head round software testing. All the books and articles, and even courses I’d been on stressed the importance of writing them, and then showed simple applications I couldn’t see the point of. Having now written a module (my first for, what, 8 years?), and broken it while adding new functionality, this book made a lot more sense to me, especially as it lays out when and what to test.

Ignore any reviews you see saying its old, or out of date; its the only book I’ve found that actually walks you through what and how of testing from the beginning, rather than assuming you know about testing and want to know how to do it in perl.

Thanks to this book, I now have, including some ideas on how to write functional tests for a module that needs a Nexsan storage unit to connect to for all its functions!

Now I just need the time to write some tests and play around… I’m resisting buying the print and eBook bundle right now, as work have this paper copy and access to the fantastic Safari Books Online, but…..

The BBC is being forced to hand over tens of millions of pounds every year to line Murdoch’s pockets. Murdoch’s cronies in government are determined to save this scheme — but together we can stop this outrage.

These unbelievable regulations cost our public broadcasters up to £100 million a year. Rather than being paid for their great programmes, they actually have to pay BSkyB to show their programmes.

In coming days, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt will decide whether to renew this dreadful deal and Murdoch’s scandals have put him on the back foot. Our pressure can stop this BBC robbery. Click here to send your message to Hunt now:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/stop_murdochs_bbc_robbery_2/?tta

These are our millions — handed over in license fees to fund British programmes, not to boost Murdoch’s profits. But an unfair system of “retransmission fees” designed by Murdoch leaves the BBC and other broadcasters with no choice. They are forced to pay BSkyB to show their channels, even though they add huge value to the satellite platform — accounting for 41% of all shows watched on BSkyB and vastly increasing customer retention.

Amazingly, Murdoch has argued the exact opposite in the US — there, he charges cable TV companies over $250 million a year to show his programmes. With the same deal Murdoch gets in the US, our public service broadcasters would have hundreds of millions of pounds extra every year to invest in great programmes. This money would allow the BBC to reverse its cuts to BB4 and local radio overnight.

Murdoch’s cozy relationship with our politicians has won him this outrageous UK scheme — but his power is starting to crumble, and together we can end it. Labour has already come out against this deal, and Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt is about to make his decision in his communications review — send your message now to make sure he stops this outrage.

SOURCES

Re-transmission fees in the UK: the case for change (independent report):
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/reports/pdf/RetransmissionandAccessChargesReview.pdf

How the BBC can stand up to parasitic Sky (The Guardian):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/02/maimed-bbc-parasitic-sky

Broadcasters union backs call for reform (BECTU):
http://www.bectu.org.uk/news/1408

Not sure how I came across this; I could have sworn it was via my usual source, Scalzi’s ‘Big Idea’ column, but I can’t find it there, so obviously not. Was given it for Xmas (book three down!), and was rather looking forward to it, following a post of ‘drabble’ style stories on, I think, subterranean press’s site, where he was features and I really liked his style.

Unfortunately, I was left with mixed feelings. I love the ideas in the book, the scope, the concepts, but I found the execution a little stilted at times. It came across to me to be something of a first novel, and perhaps in need of better editing – a case of trying to cram too much in, perhaps, and I admit to having some issues with suspension of disbelief in the macguffin.

I’ll certainly be checking out his next book, though. Very promising.

I’m doing this in the hope of a 2012 Hugo Voters Packet, I have to admit, but also in the knowledge that I could submit books and creative works myself for nomination if I got into the process early enough, so I did..

I’ll do another blog entry or update this one when I decide what to put forward. Doctorow, Stross, Grant/McGuire and Whatever have already chimed in for their areas, so its started already..

Update
My nominations are as follows;

Best Novel

Reamde Neal Stephenson Atlantic Books
Ghost Story Jim Butcher Penguin
The Wise Mans Fear Patrick Rothfuss Gollancz
Surface Detail Iain M. Banks Orbit
Rivers Of London Ben Aaronovitch Gollancz

Best Novella

A science fiction or fantasy story between 17,500 and 40,000 words that appeared for the first time in 2011.
Title Author Magazine/Publisher
Knights of the Rainbow Table Cory Doctorow Intel

Best Novelette

Clockwork Fagin Cory Doctorow Steampunk!
Balfour and Meriwether in The Vampire of Kabul Daniel Abraham Subterranean Online

Best Short Story

After October Ben Burgis Giganotosaurus
The Ghost of Christmas Possible Tim Pratt & Heather Shaw Podcastle
Rising Lion, The Lion Bows Zen Cho Strange Horizons
The Paper Menagerie Ken Liu the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Ties of Silver James L. Sutter the Beast Within 2: Predators and Prey anthology

Best Graphic Story

Fool Moon Jim Butcher, Mark Powers, and Chase Conley (Dynamite Entertainment)

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)

Wicked Girls seanan mcguire
The Fades BBC Three

Best Fancast
Any non-professional audio- or video-casting with at least four (4) episodes that had at least one (1) episode released in 2011.

Escape Pod
The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast
The Red Panda Adventures
Podcastle
Drabblecast

Actually yes, I had read this before.. Also, actually, it turns out I hadn’t.

In conversation with the Esteemable Mrs Kript, I mentioned that I had a couple of copies, one in a childrens edition, and one in a gorgeous leather bound never-meant-to-be-read edition, and she asked me which version it was, which led to my finding out about the penguin classics versions, and why specific editions are recommended, which I’m embarrassed to say hadn’t occurred to me. Fortunately, her degree in Literature trumps my A level, and she bought me a copy of the title …and other Christmas writings for Xmas, which I just finished the titular story, and aim to read at least one more of each Xmas as a new tradition.

My reading was also informed by watching Sue Perkins ‘Mrs Dickens’ over the festive period, which I’d had some knowledge of due to, again, conversations with A. while she was reading a biography of the same a few years back.

Its safe to say the the original has been much monkeyed with (apart from the Muppet version, which I will hear nothing against!), and it was richer and more interesting in its first edition.

Its certainly worth the wait, although I’m going to have to go back and reread ‘Spook Country’ to make sense of a lot of the last third, I suspect. It had a lot of the dreamy feel to it that spook country did, unsurprising when you consider that it features Milgram, but spilling over I found into Hollis’s character as well. I wonder if this was actually the same in pattern recognition, which is my perfect read for long haul flights as it captures the slight disassociation with the world you get from jetlag, as experienced by the main protaganist. Gibson’s interest in fashion (I read a comment on Stross’s blog that he designs his own clothes as a hobby) is unashamedly revealed here, and far more integral to the plot than in Pattern Recognition.

A few niggles; the love interest appeared tacked on rather suddenly, although convincingly enough woven in from that point on. Also, there is a tech howler that is so absurd that I wonder that he didn’t ask any of his more technical friends (given that Doctorow recommended the hi tech phone for Milgram (yes, Madhatter, the Neo is officially cool!), its doubly shocking. All I’ll say is taser and networks, and leave it for the reader to get to that point and go ‘he didn’t?!’ ).

Finally, I do think that we should stop referring to Gibson as a science fiction writer (for this trilogy at least), as the books are most definitely set in the now. While he does do so excellent futuristic touches, its just regarding that tech that, in his own words, ‘isn’t evenly distributed yet’, such as the blimp drones controllable via the iPhone (big in all the gadget shops/sites this year, and which I now really fancy!). Given I’m reading this a couple of years after original publication, this is impressive, but not science fiction per se.. Discuss.

I’m amused to suspect may be falling under his definition of ‘mall ninja’ though – I enjoy reading EDC sites, and reviews of quasi-military gadgets, which are no more than upmarket versions of existing tech, and unlikely to be actually used by military/law enforcement. I wonder how much of his reading of urban fashion being driven by military design and now vice versa is true, or his opinion, rather than the background to the book.

Podcastle featured two of these, and mentioned that if we wanted more, buying this collection would help show the demand. Kindle only, as far as I can tell (no, just checked and “Now available for Kindle , ePub from the Apple iBookstore, and Nook”, so eBook only), and at £0.89, I bought it as soon as I’d finished listening.

Can’t really describe them properly except to say dark fantasy. Go listen to the Podcastle readings, and buy the download, if you have a Kindle.

More Mr Nix! Write More!

I was actually going to buy this before receiving it as part of the Hugo Voters packet for 2011, and read it in instalments. I thought I’d blogged about it, but apparently not.

I’d forgotten that books like this are a few headline acts, a few no hopers, and some in between (and invariably not what you expect). It was the same here – I loved the George R. R. Martin story, disliked the Gaiman, and found a few authors I intend to check out when I’m short of fiction.

As always, the range of what the author considered a wizard was quite wide, sometimes interestingly so.

So.. Highlights;

Mike Resnick is good, but then if you don’t know that about his short stories by now there’s no helping you. Check Podcastle, Fictionwise..
Simon R. Green is channelling both Jim Butcher and Charlie Stross, enough to make me want to check him out in the future, particularly in the featured character, if anything further has been written.
Same with Jeremiah Tolbert.
Jonathan L. Howard reignited my interest in his anti-hero Johannes Cabal the necromancer.
Ursula k. LeGuin delights with an earthsea story I’d missed ‘ The Word Of Unbinding’. I’ll have to go back and reread the Earthsea trilogy now..
Marion Zimmer Bradley’s ‘The Secret of The Blue Star’ reminded me of all I loved in Vance’s Dying Earth, and Leiber’s Lankhmar series, but was so indulgent that I was turned off her story by the end. That and I saw the plot twist early on.
Rajan Khanna was seriously channeling Deadlands with the serial numbers filed off, but that works for me.

Couldn’t get through Beagle’s ‘El Regalo’ – this makes both the reading and the Podcastle Giant episode. I know I should like his writing, but that piece I just don’t. Can’t say exactly why.

All in all, a good hall and several new authors to check out, as well as reminders of old favourites. A good hall!

Unfortunately, his tools worked for everything but Contacts – the bit I was most interested in. Further investigation showed that Google had changed the way they provided for you to export your contacts, and the old link no longer existed (but they had put up a page describing what and why). Fortunately, WWW::Contacts came to the rescue, with a working way to get at the data via the API. In retooling his script to use this, I ended up rewriting it to use my preferred command line/documentation parser, to give a consistent interface (as recommended in ‘Perl Best Practices‘, which I’ve been dipping into a lot at work), this lead to me splitting each backup into a separate function so you can choose to back up all three or just one.

The script is up at my Github page; feel free to fork, submit patches or just download and use!

On a related note, the work into this, partly to look at using App::Addex to manage my contacts data (which I’ve wanted to do since RBS blogged about it in his last year’s advent calendar), made me realise what a poor contacts system the Google Contacts is, especially for addresses – the API and the CSV export has fields for address lines 1 and 2, post code etc, but the interface, and the data, is all stored in the first address line, line breaks and all, making it painful to parse into a more useful format (such as the excel spreadsheet I used to bulk order my Christmas cards from Moonpig this year) – a project for another time perhaps, unless Google improve the way Contacts stores/manages the address data.

Bought after a tweet from @griffers convinced me to take a look via Kindle; like him, bought and started reading the same night.

It starts with a probationary constable in the Met being tasked to keep an eye on a crime scene, encountering a ghost, and being taken on, somewhat unwillingly, by the Met’s only Wizard. Its a fun urban fantasy romp, with a great deal of humour on behalf of, and aimed at, the police force, in a surprisingly positive way – think Pratchett’s ‘Guards Guards’, rather than ‘The Wire’..

It uses the location of London wonderfully, and like other books based there, makes me wish I knew more about the geo-history of the region (must get round to reading Ackroyd’s ‘London’, one day – no one makes an unabridged audiobook version that I could find, and I can’t face the mammoth tome, and its not available on Kindle (yet, I suppose)..).

I very nearly bought the second instalment as soon as I’d finished the first (and another has just come out in hardback), but managed to restrain myself – I will be doing so soon, however, just having trouble justifying it when my print ‘to read’ list is a couple of books (and more as soon as I ask james_ for his promised copies of the Seanan McGuire cannon, which I’m looking forward to), and my ebook ‘to read’ is about a dozen items.

If you like urban fantasy or The Dresden Files, or have spent some time around London, this is a worthwhile purchase.

Also; has it really been nearly two months in-between blog entries? I’ve been cathing up on the Hugo short stories, reading technically and listening to audio books more, both the LeCarre ones made available by the Guardian in a week-long offer of all his ‘smiley’ books, and ‘Big Finish’ productions of new audio only Dr Who adventures with the past few doctors (pre new TV series ones). Mostly, these have been just OK, with the exception of the Gatiss written one (as you might expect!) with Peter David.

While on this note, in researching the above book, it turns out Aaronovitch also has written a load of tie-ins for Blake’s 7! Talk about a nostalgia hit! I didn’t even know they did audio dramas for that…

As I think I say every time I read a Neal Stephenson book, this is is best yet. Not for the brilliance in retelling western philosophy from scratch while writing a science fiction book and making it consistently entertaining, as in Anathem, nor for the breadth of vision and historical coverage in the Baroque cycle, but simply because its a very good techno-thriller, a proper ‘page turner’ in the best blurb style.

It reminds me a lot of his earlier collaboration, ‘Cobweb’, only with the benefit of Stephenson’s maturing writing style, and freer rein (one assumes) to indulge his love of detail and intricate plots (although I’m listening to the audio-book of LeCarre’s ‘The Honourable Schoolboy’ at the moment, and even Stephenson’s plots don’t get that intricate!).
Its also, I suspect, his post-911 book, in that it covers Arabic terrorism (actually many kinds of fundamentalism), and I wonder if he needed to write Anathem to give himself space to write this. An idle thought.

Its probably his most readable book since ‘The Diamond Age’, and even more so than with Anathem, I found myself unwearied in reading through it, and only stopped every couple of hundred pages to let me brain catch up. Definitely a good one to start someone off with Stephenson with; if they like this they’ll have their expectations set for his other works, and be pleasantly surprised by his shorter ones.

I now know a lot more about guns, as well, particularly Marakov holsters. Who knew you pulled the gun downwards!

I came to this, I think, from the blog of the estimable Cthulhu and all round arcane scholar Kenneth Hite. The H.P. Lovercraft Literary Society do a podcast where they do readings of Lovecraft’s short stories, and read-thorough with commentary on the longer works, and a mention of this, along with an dramatisation by ‘Dark Adventure Radio Theatre‘, along with an upcoming shortness of podcasts since I was burning through them at a rate of knots while decorating the garden room, led me to purchase the dramatisation and listen along with the literary criticism and information from the hppodcraft guys.

I have to say, this was an excellent way to experience this. I’ve read a little Lovecraft in the past (but much more influenced by him, such as Stross’s Laundry series, or Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s haunting space opera Boojum, which was dramatised masterly on The Drablecast Podcast and available to download from Wired, for some reason. God she’s talented..), but this really turned me onto Lovecraft.

The 30 min podcasts I could listen to in the car, and then continue on with the story when I was decorating. That the hppodcraft guys really know their Lovecraft, as well as a lot of literary and period detail really comes through and brought the story and author to life for me. It helped that ‘Shadow’ is apparently one of Lovecraft’s best works (indeed, since then I’ve listened to their readings of ‘Cool Air’, and ‘The Cats Of Ulthar’, and found the latter much better than the former), apparently.

I can’t, unfortunately, recommend the dramatisation, which is a shame. On the plus side, its very well narrated, has excellent multt-person cast, and the music is evocative. Unfortunately, in dramatising it, they changed the ending, which is unforgivable as far as I’m concerned. It certainly made for a good ‘radio play’, but I was disappointed to hear the real ending on the hppodcraft podcast (try saying that three times fast!), and realise the production had monkeyed with it. Its the same reason I don’t buy abridged books; the author wrote it that way for a reason, and if I want to I can make my own decision on what to skip. Anyway, that spoiled the listening experience for me. The fact that they took several days to delivery the MP3 file once I bought it, and only after my chasing didn’t help. I understand, reading between the lines, that the person who runs the site was at worldcon, but these things are supposed to be automated – if you can take my money, you can deliver the file.

However, the overall experience was great, and I’ve downloaded a ‘complete works of H.P. Lovecraft’ book; since its out of copyright its available all over the place FOC – I downloaded mine from Cthulhuchick.com (great name), as she’d done the work of assembling this from Gutenberg, and will be reading through ‘The Trap’ (the next one after SOI, they’ve even moved onto ‘Dreams in the Witch House” now, also with Kenneth Hite, so full circle there) so I can listen to their LitCrit.

In the end, I listened to it in the car over the past month of so, when August meant the usual podcast crop was reduced, and I could save them for cooking and exercise. I found it slightly stilted and disconnected, partly due to the on/off listening experience, but also because, as I learned at the end of the book, it had been abridged. I loathe abridged books – I can skip myself, thanks – even if done by the author (which this wasn’t, IIRC).
That being said, you can’t fault the man’s scope or ambition – the entirety of western scientific thought in one book, distilled!

There was a lot of coverage of this when it first came out, as the author was one of the people featured/running Podcastle, IIRC, and it appeared in a lot of my fiction feeds. One of the chapters was read on Podcastle at launch and it interested me enough to add it to my wishlist, and I was given it for my birthday this year.

A rather Deadlands-ish feel (if that doesn’t mean anything to you, think wild west with magic), and it started rather well. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel it completely sustained it all the way through, since I felt it lagged a bit at the end, and really risked becoming a ‘paranormal romance’ book, with all the sparkly vampires that entails (contains no vampires though, sparkling or otherwise). I know, I know, I read Urban Fantasy, and sneer at Paranormal Romance. Vi vs Emacs…

The author has left room for a sequel, and certainly at least one of the magical traditions is left to be explored. Not sure whether I’ll pick it up, though, when the alternative is Seanan Mcguire (aka Mira Grant).. I only have so much reading time, after all..

Two dead tree books in a row! Not broken the eBook spell, but its nice to format shift.

Its safe to say that this was highly anticipated – given the lead character had been shot and was dead as far as could be ascertained, and the entire nature of the world had shifted, I (and presumably a lot of other people!) were agog to find out what happened , thirteen books into the series! Given how quickly they posted announcements of the next book, and the fact that it took an extra three months over Butcher’s normal annual publication, I’d certainly say there was a lot of interest in the followup..

Now that I’ve finished it, I spent some time thinking about it. I’m definitely going to re-read this and Changes, the last book, as I pretty much inhaled both of them (although not as much as Madhatter, by all accounts!), and they deserve a more considered reading. That said, I’m not sure how this book has advanced the overall plot any. There was a point towards the end of book, when the character bemoans ‘but it was all for nothing’ and I kind of agreed with him. I’m sure Butcher has laid all kinds of seeds, and will use things coming out of this to advance the plot in many ways, and I have faith in this, but I’m having trouble seeing how right now, to the point that I’m not actually looking forward to the next instalment. I know that Butcher has joked that his job is tormenting Dresden, but I can’t see much feel good factor coming in the next couple of books, and I’m surprised how much I had come to appreciate the ‘good guy in a bad spot’ aspect – I’m honestly not sure the character is a good person anymore, and I’m intrigued at how much that was part of the appeal for the character and the series for me. Not that I want a David Eddings like ‘everyone is a nice person underneath’ scmaltz fest, but I read enough darker fiction that I appreciate the ‘triumph over adversity’ of Dresden.

On a unrelated now, interested that this appeared to be available on Kindle and Audible, as previously the series was only iBooks.

Of course, I’ll be buying the next one. So the year long countdown begins anew..

My nominations, then;

Best Novel
Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit)

This was hard; and came down between this and “Dervish House”. I think the latter is a better book overall, but I’ve had far more conversations with people about Feed, so thats what swung it. Apart from one of the nominations, all solid contenders though.

Best Novella
The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (Subterranean) – Read Online

Ted Chiang is to short stories what Neal Stephenson is to the long novel.

Best Short Story
“The Things” by Peter Watts (Clarkesworld, January 2010) – Read Online

Best by a long, long way.

Best Novellete Story

Missed this entire category, and realised with 6 days to go..

“The Emperor of Mars” by Allen M. Steele (Asimov’s, June 2010) – Read Online

Best Related Work
Writing Excuses, Season 4, by Brandon Sanderson, Jordan Sanderson, Howard Tayler, Dan Wells

Probably because its the only one I’ve had time to properly review. Although ‘Chicks Dig Time Lords’ had a lot of ground to make up before it even started, although, I’m persuaded after a conversation with james_ that I’m being unfairly judgemental..

Best Graphic Story
Didn’t have time to read any of these, so following the advice of the voting page, didn’t vote. Looking forward to reading them when I get time, though.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
Crikey, I’m out of touch. I’ve only seen Inception from this list, and we turned it off 30 mins in when it failed to grab us. Also the part one of the Harry Potter, since I first drafted this blog post, so that gets the nomination… A bit naughty, really, since I’ve not seen enough of the other to be a fair vote.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
Doctor Who: “A Christmas Carol,” written by Steven Moffat; directed by Toby Haynes (BBC Wales)

Wanted to go back and rewatch the Doctor Who’s. Liked ‘Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury’, but..

Best Editor, Short Form
John Joseph Adams

As, simply put, he’s the only one I’ve heard of, and has done two anthologies I want to read.

Best Editor, Long Form
Nick Mamatas

No real opinion here, but he wrote a book I liked years ago, so..

Best Semiprozine
Interzone, edited by Andy Cox

Voting for the home team, but I suspect the other magazines have done better – most of the stories appearing on Podcastle & EscapePod I suspect came from some of the others, but don’t have the time to go back and reference.

Best Fanzine
StarShipSofa, edited by Tony C. Smith

Can’t stand the guys voice, but its one of the best podcasts around. Problem is, its over an hour each episode, so I stopped listening to it. It won last year, so voting it up again this and meaning to add it back into my schedule. Assuming I can get past my irrational dislike of his accent.

Best Fan Writer
No opinion here, so skipped.

Best Fan Artist
Randall Munroe

Apart from the obvious, his was the only art I liked, and he draws stick men..

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

What? What? Thats another five books? I give up. I can’t read all of that & the Hugos in 6 weeks.

To be fair, they added this entire category in a couple of weeks ago – how fantastic is that for the Hugo Voter’s packet – astounding value, and its lead to more conversations about speculative fiction than I’ve had in years.

Heck, this post alone has taken about cumulative three hours to write..

Hugo novelette.

This was an odd little piece. So much of the world left unexplained yet tantalisingly believable, building on Brin, Scott Card and others I’m sure I’ve missed.

Hugo novelette nominee.

Odd one, this. Very shadowrun. Interesting take on things, but not as good as the previous two I’ve just reviewed.

Hugo novelette award.

This was lovely. A real homage to old and new mars stories, and leaves you with a pleasant melancholy. Now my pick for best novelette. I wonder what’s next?

Hugo Best Novelette. Now this was fun steampunk! Science fiction steampunk at that! Characterisation wasn’t great, but very in keeping with the style, so I forgive him that.

Best novelette so far (two down, three to go)…

Last of the Hugo Novella nominees! This grew on me as I read it, but left me with too cardboard a feeling for the characters, and no real understanding why they did what they did. Not sure if this was part of a larger story, but the lack of background made them all feel cardboard. Liked the mcguffin, though.

An enjoyable read this, with some twists and turns I didn’t expect. It tended more towards the the hard science fiction more than any of the others have done, and there was more emphasis on world building and the mcguffin than the other stories in the nominee list, but its none the worse for that, and certainly wants to make me read more of his stuff.

In other news; one 45 page novella left and nine days. I can totally do this!

Best Novella Hugo award nominee. Read online.

I think this is the best story I have read in the hugo’s, period.

It took me some time to get through it, more than the 150 pages (in iPad view anyway) would normally account for, mostly because it was hard reading at times. Chiang’s work explores the nature of raising an intelligent life-form, as as someone doing that, it really affected me at times, and I had to go do something else.

Just wonderful writing, imagination and insight.

Hugo Nominee for Best Novella. I actually read this in the ‘Stories’ Anthology edited by Neil Gaiman et al. Its an odd, quirky piece that I suspect I completely missed the point of.

Nice to know I read some of the fiction before it was announced as such, though!

Hugo Nominee for Best Short Story, podcast via the tor.com fiction podcast (I actually got it from the iTunes feed, but I think you can get it from the RSS feed from the site).

Boy, this was an odd one. ‘My Little Pony’ meets genetic engineering, means little girl’s nightmare.

Also; hah! Thats all the Short Story nominees, down now!

Hugo best novella nominee.

Now this was good fantasy. Got a little epic towards the end, but can’t complain about that.

It turns out that I’be not read any of the novella’s, so I’m seeing how many I can get through before the deadline.

Argh! Its a two parter! Bless Spectra and Connie Willis for adding the second part (in reality one book, as it finishes suddenly and on a cliffhanger so abrupt..!) to the Hugo voters packet, so I can read it later.

So.. this is an excellent WWII story, and despite it being about time travellers, I can’t really describe it as science fiction, although I’m not sure what else to describe it as, so fair play.

Reading it brought back all the memories of talking with my Grandmother about the blitz – she lived in London, and my Grandfather worked as a air raid warden and fireman – my Dad still has his fire axe in the garage somewhere. Amusing aside is that my Grandmother went by the name Connie to her friends, so this has all kinds of positive associations for me.
Lovely anecdote in the preface as well about the author interviewing people at the Imperial War Museum, in Duxford, which I drive past most days now.

My only negative comments, because the book is well plotted, believably written and beautifully researched (especially for an American author not steeped in the stories as anyone from the UK of a certain age is), is that the book starts slowly and at the boy character, Colin, is not a sympathetic one to start with, I found. Also, because I had so much cultural detail down, I found myself skipping over the descriptions to move forward.

Also, as this is only PDF and not ePub, I nearly had heart failure when I saw it was coming in at 500~ pages! Madhatter and James pointed out that the other books, in dead tree versions, came out about the same, so something to be said for e-readers fitting more text onto a larger page!

On another note;
The last of the Hugo Nominees for Best Novels – I did it! As I type this, I have the Escape Pod production of ‘Stone Wall Truth’ part way through in Snogdoggler on my phone, which is, I think, the last of the novellas, so its possible I will have read or listened to all the novel, novella and short story entries before the judging deadline.

With one exception, I can see why they’ve all been nominated. Great experience so far!

Penultimate Hugo awards book. Uninspiring.

I found this one less appealing than the others so far – it took me some time to get into it, and for an 80 min podcast, thats some forbearance. It had some interesting features, and the characters were well written, situation believable etc. OK, but not the kind of outstanding I’ve seen from some of the other nominees.

That was mid-may.

I received the code on friday, 24th June, after two weeks of daily phone calls, where Talk Talk variously claimed;

1. They had never provided service
2. My account was closed (yes, they closed it as part of their investigations, despite no instruction from me to do so, even though they also continued to provide connectivity)
3. I was actually with Talk Talk residential (who had never heard of me, and put me through to ‘new lines’)
4. I needed to talk to BT to get the ADSL ‘tag’ removed from my number.
5. My account number was actually for a ‘web address’ (sic) account (really – £18/month for a domain name?), not connectivity.
6. Their service ‘guarantee’ (as told to me by one of their call centre staff of 48 hours to call me back when registering a complaint doesn’t apply if the manager is busy (he’s in some very important meetings today!).
7. They could only issue a MAC code if the request came in by email (despite only one call centre person telling me this, and the others happily agreeing to do so, and having received a couple of emails from them about the process).

They also never called me back, despite claiming to several times (apart from on the last Friday, when they did, to be fair). They did send me a couple of emails, but then never answered my follow up questions (things like – ‘you said it wold take 5 working days, its been two weeks, is there a problem?’).

What was the problem? Well, a few years back, I’d changed my number. This hadn’t got updated on F2S’s records, for whatever reason, and when porting in they’d done the right thing and continued to provide service. Only, with all the records pointing to the old number. So, when they checked, my old number was indeed not with them, and they had no record of the new number on their system. I got this through bits of conversations from assorted call centre staff, all of which were keen to get me off the phone as quickly as possible, not involve a manager and generally fail to take ownership of the problem.

Thanks to Mike from AAISP, I was able to confirm that Talk Talk did have the tag on my line, and thanks to credit card statements and letters, I could confirm that it was business that were billing me and had my account.

It was only when the manager got involved, on the Friday (a day later than he was supposed to have called), that he actually checked (two minutes on hold, at most), and confirmed my story and issued a MAC code there and then.

I’m trying this code on monday, and am embargoing this post until I’ve migrated away from Talk Talk, just to be sure.

Avoid these jokers.

Update
Well, that was painless. Plugged in the preconfigured router I’d bought from AAISP, and it connected, and I was away. Slight problem in that the router login doesn’t work, but I’ll take that up with them tomorrow.

Download is *much* better, upload very disappointing – I’ll ask tomorrow, and also try later this evening at a less contended time.

Update 2
Actually, checking back to when I installed the BT faceplate, it turns out I’m getting better coverage all round. Hurrah!

Another Hugo nominee down. Lets hope it doesn’t rise up in the night to devour my living flesh.

Well, this was a humdinger and no mistake. So much of this was done right, from the ‘realism’ of the post-zombie-rising world, to the technology they used, to the characters, the fact that its actually both a technothriller and a presidential campaign book, plus the use of bloggers as bona fide journalists, its a really solid read.

I’m not a fan of zombie films – I only managed to get half way through the first episode of ‘The Walking Dead’ and its still creeping me out now, but, as both James from Catbus and Madhatter kept assuring me, its a really good read – and ‘not really about zombies, more of a political thriller’. Right…
When it ended up on the Hugo nominees, and I’d been given a paperback, I knew it was inevitable like the rise of the living dead (ahem).

Anyway, I’d head about this originally from my usual source, John Scalzi’s Big Idea column, and if you want to know what the books about, follow that link..

The book was so well put together, I know I’m going to be thinking about the implications for a while to come and not just because Zombies freak me out. The isolation in the way people have to live, the lack of a red meat diet, its all been very well thought out.

I’m definitely going to be checking out her other work (she also writes as Seanan McGuire, which I’m also assured is good). I’ll get to it once I’ve finished the backlog of Hugo and Campbell books (by which time it will be the next Hugo’s, given the amount of material).

So far, its a tie for me between ‘Dervish House’ and this. I preferred the style of Dervish overall, but thats like choosing between your two favourite chocolate bars.. It certainly deserves to win.

The next in Escape pod’s Hugo 2011 Novelette podcasts.
There was no way in which this didn’t rock. Its a retelling of John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ from the alien’s POV, and its masterfully done, with Watt’s understanding & communication of biology.
The rest of the nominees need to be outstanding to top this for my nomination.

Another of the Hugo nominees (next up is ‘Feed’ by Mira Grant, which I have in both paper and eBook format, and had been holding off on, since is Another Zombie Book, but two pages in and its already gripped me, which is a good sign..), which is two down, three to go. That means three in July. Tricky, but if they’re not all as long as ‘Dervish House’, I may manage it!

So, cards on the table. I’ve read McDonald’s work before, and its always been good, but this is something again. He’s definitely upped his game. An overworked phrase, perhaps, but he’s the new Gibson. His style is somewhere between the chaos of Gibson and artfulness of Banks – several times I just stopped and reread paragraphs for their descriptions alone. Good characters, gripping plot (also, I so want a BitBot, and I have a birthday coming up… , the other nominees are going to have to write some pretty good stuff if they compare with this. Go get a copy – unlike some of his other works, you don’t need to have read ‘River of Gods’; this is standalone (although prob in the same universe).

Which, of course, leaves me with something of a dilemma. McDonald has been writing for a while – I read his first, ‘Desolation Road’ back in the 90′s. Grant and Jemisin are new comers (Grant to scifi admittedly, as she’s written urban fantasy beforehand), so should weight my vote based on original ideas (Jemisin definably gets a play here), or just on best work, where an established author will have more advantage? I guess ‘Cryoburn’ by Bujold will settle that – she (he?) has been writing for a while now – long before McDonald.

Ah. Happy days, to have such a profusion of riches!

Bless Escape Pod and their Hugo nominee podcasting. Another novelette down, this time Amaryllis (link is to Escape Pod’s page).

Nothing outstanding in this – no real sci-fi, not a major plot, barely post apocaplyse, but it had a real emotional effect for me. Perhaps it was the early morning listening, or perhaps it was my increased awareness of fertility rights etc. Or it could have been a simple story well told!

I’d say that ‘For The Want of A Nail‘ is better science fiction, but this is better fiction. I can see its going to be an interesting lineup!

Escape Pod, bless them (I’m going to donate this year – promise!), are podcasting all the Hugo nominated short stories in time for the voting, so I can keep up with the Hugo nominees while commuting, and this is their first for this year.

This is an interesting take on the ‘what if we rely on something else to hold our memories for us’ idea that assorted Sci Fi authors have explored. I don;t think Kowal develops that theme enough, but its still an interesting premise, with lots of built and left out of sight – hard to do in a short story without feeling one dimensional.

So, for those keeping score at home, thats one Novel and one Novelette under my belt!

The first in the Hugo 2011 Nominees, in the Best Novel category.

While I liked this, it didn’t quite fulfil the hype that surrounded it from Escape Pod etc. Its a new way, to me, to do the ‘gods and humans’ thing, but I never really engaged with the character, or if I’m honest had any fear that they wouldn’t be triumphant in the end.
There was one scene, where a character is tortured, that I really found distasteful. Ian Banks has written torture scenes that are genuinely horrifying (the scene with the kettle, only alluded to, in Transmission, or several of the scenes in Complicity, for example), and furthered the plot, but this wasn’t horrifying, just unpleasant – perhaps because the background of the character? It also didn’t really further the plot, apart from showing how awful her adopted family were.

Josh Roseman from Escape Pod has a good review that I mostly agree with.

All in all, though, a promising start to the Hugo’s. Not sure that I’m going to get through even the novels in time to Vote by the end of July, though!

I spent an interesting half an hour writing this, including researching how to write a Munin plugin. Unfortunately, after doing so, I took a closer look at the Munin For Windows sample config file, and included details of how to query these values directlly, so it was all a bit moot. However, this might be usefull for someone as a template of how to do so…

TerminalServicesUsers_plugin.ps1

#import the parameters, if any
param($Argument1)

#otherwise, generate the output
Default{ Generate-MuninData }
}

It strikes me someone might also be interested in the Munin config I used to query this information directly;


[PerfCounterPlugin_TSTotalUsers]
DropTotal=1
Object=Terminal Services
Counter=Total Sessions
CounterFormat=double
CounterMultiply=1.000000
GraphTitle=Total TS Users
GraphCategory=system
GraphDraw=LINE

[PerfCounterPlugin_TSInactiveUsers]
DropTotal=1
Object=Terminal Services
Counter=Inactive Sessions
CounterFormat=double
CounterMultiply=1.000000
GraphTitle=Inactive TS Users
GraphCategory=system
GraphDraw=LINE


Add the above to your munin-node.conf on the server, and it will produce graphs like this in the system part of the machines report;

Link to the Rennovation Hugo Packet and a list of the works up for consideration and available in the download below (so I can remember this for when I finally work through them all – I think this will be the rest of the years reading, notwithstanding the new Butcher Dresden book);

Best Novel

Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra) - Blackout (Part 1)
Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen) - RTF/PDF/EPUB
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald (Gollancz; Pyr) - PDF/EPUB
Feed by Mira Grant (Orbit) - PDF/EPUB
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit) - PDF/EPUB

Best Novella

“The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window” by Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Magazine, Summer 2010)
The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
“The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” by Elizabeth Hand (Stories: All New Tales, William Morrow)
“The Sultan of the Clouds” by Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov’s, September 2010)
“Troika” by Alastair Reynolds (Godlike Machines, Science Fiction Book Club)

* RTF/PDF/EPUB/MOBI formats

Best Novelette

“Eight Miles” by Sean McMullen (Analog, September 2010)
“The Emperor of Mars” by Allen M. Steele (Asimov’s, June 2010)
“The Jaguar House, in Shadow” by Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s, July 2010)
“Plus or Minus” by James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s, December 2010)
“That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” by Eric James Stone (Analog, September 2010)

* RTF/PDF/EPUB/MOBI formats

Best Short Story

“Amaryllis” by Carrie Vaughn (Lightspeed, June 2010)
“For Want of a Nail” by Mary Robinette Kowal (Asimov’s, September 2010)
“Ponies” by Kij Johnson (Tor.com, November 17, 2010)
“The Things” by Peter Watts (Clarkesworld, January 2010)

Note: category has 4 nominees due to a 5% requirement under 3.8.5 of the WSFS constitution.

* RTF/PDF/EPUB/MOBI formats

Best Related Work

Bearings: Reviews 1997-2001, by Gary K. Wolfe (Beccon) - PDF Excerpt
The Business of Science Fiction: Two Insiders Discuss Writing and Publishing, by Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg (McFarland) - DOC
Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It, edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Tara O’Shea (Mad Norwegian) - PDF
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 1: (1907–1948): Learning Curve, by William H. Patterson, Jr. (Tor) - RTF/PDF Excerpt
Writing Excuses, Season 4, by Brandon Sanderson, Jordan Sanderson, Howard Tayler, Dan Wells - MP3

Best Graphic Story

Fables: Witches, written by Bill Willingham; illustrated by Mark Buckingham (Vertigo)
Girl Genius, Volume 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse, written by Phil and Kaja Foglio; art by Phil Foglio; colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
Grandville Mon Amour, by Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse)
Schlock Mercenary: Massively Parallel, written and illustrated by Howard Tayler; colors by Howard Tayler and Travis Walton (Hypernode)
The Unwritten, Volume 2: Inside Man, written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross (Vertigo)

* PDF format

Best Editor, Short Form

John Joseph Adams
Stanley Schmidt
Jonathan Strahan
Gordon Van Gelder
Sheila Williams

* Anthologies and Magazines in RTF/PDF/EPUB/MOBI formats

Best Editor, Long Form

Lou Anders
Ginjer Buchanan
Moshe Feder
Liz Gorinsky
Nick Mamatas
Beth Meacham
Juliet Ulman

* List of works

Best Professional Artist

Daniel Dos Santos
Bob Eggleton
Stephan Martiniere
John Picacio
Shaun Tan

* JPG format

Best Semiprozine

Clarkesworld, edited by Neil Clarke, Cheryl Morgan, Sean Wallace; podcast directed by Kate Baker
Interzone, edited by Andy Cox
Lightspeed, edited by John Joseph Adams
Locus, edited by Liza Groen Trombi and Kirsten Gong-Wong
Weird Tales, edited by Ann VanderMeer and Stephen H. Segal

* PDF format

Best Fanzine

Banana Wings, edited by Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer - PDF
Challenger, edited by Guy H. Lillian III - PDF
The Drink Tank, edited by Christopher J Garcia and James Bacon - PDF
File 770, edited by Mike Glyer - PDF
StarShipSofa, edited by Tony C. Smith - MP3

Best Fan Writer

James Bacon
Claire Brialey
Christopher J Garcia
James Nicoll
Steven H Silver

* RTF/PDF format

Best Fan Artist

Brad W. Foster
Randall Munroe
Maurine Starkey
Steve Stiles
Taral Wayne

* JPG format

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

Award for the best new professional science fiction or fantasy writer of 2009 or 2010, sponsored by Dell Magazines (not a Hugo Award).

Saladin Ahmed
Lauren Beukes
Larry Correia
Lev Grossman
Dan Wells

Note: All Campbell finalists are in their 2nd year of eligibility.

* RTF/PDF/EPUB/MOBI formats

Bought for £1 in a Kindle sale.  I’d had it on my wishlist for ages, but never got round to buying it, and when it came up for pre-order on kindle at a pound, I thought why not?  So it was delivered on kindle app shortly after I’d finished the previous book, and as I *still* don’t fancy either Feed or The Windup Girl, (my backlist at that point) I started on this.

I’ve read two other works by Powers – Declare and The Drawing Of The Dark, both of which were OK, but I wouldn’t have gone for save for recomendations.  The news that this book was used for the next ‘Pirates Of The Caribbean’ movie was NOT a motivator for my picking this up!

Powers has done a really good job on this one – believable characters & magic, good plot.  having read Michael Scott Rohan’s Chase The Morning, I did wonder how much inspiration Rohan had taken from Powers – the feel was very similar. Just checked and Rohan’s novel was 5 years later.  This seems to be a theme for Powers – he wrote another book similar to Stross’s ‘Laundry Files’ series well before Stross got there.  These days I can hardly say he’s lesser known though, having the screen play used!

Its certainly made me more interested in checking out his work in the future, although I’ll give it a bit – it can be quite bleak in places!

Oh, and it turns out that the KindleDRM hack no longer works on Kindle App for Mac.  Next attempt is using the kindle app on iPad and getting the s/n from the USB, and transferring the book via iTunes.. Simpler to just buy a kindle, as the hardware keep still works, AFAIK.  Might even do that soon..

I read this via work’s Safari subscription, almost entirely on the new ‘Safari To Go’ App just released for the iPad, which allows one book to be held offline (or in a ‘bookbag’ in their parlance) for reading when you don’t have an internet connection.  I’m going to have to stump up for an personal Safari sub myself when I leave – I was spending $10/week on their eBooks ‘Deal Of The Day’ beforehand, and not reading them all even then.

I was reading it because I was getting good results from using the SIP client on Android (sipdroid, but now the built in client on the Nexus S), and was looking into what else I could do.  We use a TruCall at home, which IIRC is an embedded Asterix box, and works very very well to block nuisance callers.  I also have an ongoing conversation with a work colleague who has the most fantastic home network/automation/soft PBX, which is inspiring me to try more complex stuff.

While its a good overview, it never gives you enough knowledge to ‘roll your own’, but perhaps that’s the problem with a ‘FAQ’ styled book.  It did give me enough information to start my own researches, and a good all round overview, though, and I suspect that’s the point, and worth it, if nothing else.

A wonderful pastiche of Fritz Leiber’s ‘Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser’, Howard’s Conan and similar.  I bought this via Fictionwise (referral link) years back and came across it while browsing by eBook collection for something to read (real bookshelves are better for this!).  It was shorter than I expected (not surprising in hindsight – fictionwise made their name getting rights to republish short works from authors before they started to get full book deals and you could buy lots of rare and out of print bits and bobs for a dollar or so), but eminently satisfying.

I’ve got alerts set-up to notify me when my favourite authors make more work available on the site, which haven’t fired for years, so I suspect that they are something of a spent force (or all the short works are published now!), or all the works are going to the Amazon ‘shorts’ via the Kindle Store, which, given my experience, I can;t blame them, despite the fact that the Stanza and eReader apps for the iPad make it just as good a reading/purchasing experience as Kindle. I’ll just have to work my way through the back catalog of the couple hundred or so short stories etc I bought – about fifty or so remain unread.

On that note, better get started..

I bought this via Kindle on the iPad, when I was stuck for something to read and just didn’t fancy anything I did have, even in the motley collection of works I bought from fictionwise back when I was reading eBooks on my Handspring.  I can see why Amazon are doing so well with this, its really seamless.

I always said I’d borrow this series from the Library, as his fantasy writing doesnt grip me as much as his Dresden files, but it was cheaper than a paperback and immediately available that evening..

I always seen to start off with Butcher’s fantasy style grating a little, but it became quite the page turner after a bit, and I had to restrain myself from purchasing the next instalment immediately (another reason the Kindle/App is so dangerous!).  The Alera series has now finished and is only a half dozen books, so finishing them off is attractive, especially given the potential for the Dresden files (as mentioned by Butcher) may go to 25 books (next one due in July, dammit).

Another Kindle eBook. I really must investigate the DRM plugins.. This worked nicely though when I was sitting in the car, waiting for 2.0 to wake from his nap, and wishing I’d brought the iPad, and remembered that Amazon do a Kindle App for Android, so within 5 mins was reading from where I left off.  Loving the future.

Bought after a Big Idea article prompted me to add it to my Amazon wishlist, and bought a week ago when I didn’t fancy any of the other books I had around.

I’d say my capsule review of this would be ‘Dresden Files as seen by an ex-con.  And someone who liked tattoos.  and punk. and was quite angry’.

He’s got another one out that I’ll probably buy as an eBook also, when I need my next Urban Fantasy fix (come ON, Butcher, release ‘Ghost Story’ already and stop teasing us about it on Twitter! Yes yes, I know, ‘George R.R. Martin is not your bitch’, thank you Gaiman, but..we wants it, my precious..)

After the digital retune in the UK, I found our MythTV box wasn’t recording or playing BBC channels any more (not all, fortunately, CBeebies was still being recorded so 2.0 could get his fix of Wibbly Pig and Timmy Time (best thing on TV..)).

Much swapping of cables and checking signals ensued (thank goodness for MythTV showing the signal % on the live TV display when you switch channels), along with retuning the Hauppauge USB receiver via the mythtv-setup interface, but to no avail.  I also upgraded MythBuntu to 10.10 (just in time for 11.04, I guess!) – flawlessly, thanks Ubuntu people!

Dimly remembering some similar debugging in the past (and hence the reason I’m blogging this, so I can find it next time), I removed the failing channels via the mythweb interface (the mythsetup interface I found tricky to delete in) and reran the channel rescan, adding channels as prompted and mythfill.  It took a long time to run, but success!

So I could video Dr Who.  Hurrah!

Anyway, comments and trackpacks and pings still disabled.

New artwork, copyright yours truly. Violin is a Frederic Paesold, 2009, if you care.

So this is role playing game fiction, and at least twenty years old at that, re-released into a digital only format by the current publisher of the Shadowrun line. Catalyst Game studios ran into some problems last year, and needed to raise some cash fast, and I suspect they had this lying around, and could release it easily for some quick cash.  To be fair, they also released a newly commissioned anthology, ‘Spells and Chrome’, in ebook format only, which I also bought (but won’t review because it was fairly unremarkable (although, to be fair, it did take up the 9 hour flight back to the UK) and doesn’t have some of the other factors that made this worthy of a review).

I bought this while sitting in a hotel room in Mumbai last year, and immediately uploaded it to my old Elonex ebook reader (I still can’t believe I read the entirety of ‘System Administration with Perl’ on that thing – iPad has made eBook reading so much easier), marvelling at being able to do so  – this as before the launch of the Kindle in the UK and the iPad.  While I then went on to read the other ebook anthology I bought from Catalyst immediately, Findley’s omnibus languished unread until a few months back, when I was between books, and waiting for a new delivery to arrive.

I started it with the idea it would be a quick distraction, as game fiction doesn’t have the best reputation as high quality work at the best of times, and I hadn’t read any of his work in the Shadowrun line (although his Earthdawn fiction had been quite good, hence the impulse purchase).

I quickly became glued to the book – all 1000 pages of it, and had to force myself to pick up other books in-between the four books that made up the anthology. This is now the second eBook I’ve read cover to cover on the iPad (via eBooks this time, as the Goodreader App was able to load it into that, following the latest IOS update), and it was certainly a pleasant experience. I expect more of my fiction reading to be done this way (my technical how now almost entirely shifted now that I have access to Safari online library – just waiting for the iPad App to come out and allow off-line reading and I’m set).

Findley was a good author, and made the world come to life, with decent plots, even with the handicap of the game jargon and faux swear words.  I was also amused at the obsolescence – the first book was written in 1991, and the game world is 2020 – yet no mobiles or even Internet (poor research by the game authors perhaps, as I was on the Internet myself at that time?).  In many ways, the books with the character of the private eye translate very well into this genre with no mobiles.  Still, march of technology and time and all that.

So now I have a problem.  I’d like to lend at least one of these books to someone, but its digital only.  Kudos to Catalyst, though, no DRM, but ePub only.  With no library loan possible, how do I share this?  An intriguing problem for the eBook age..

Most impressed with the trains from Peterborough to Leeds – clean, on time and with free Wifi (for 15 mins, then chargeable), and power sockets at every seat.  Makes me wonder what the hell the cambridge operators are doing when the Leeds line can obviously muster this..  Also most impressed with Google maps/Navigation on my HTC Wildfire.  It directed me walking from the train station to event, and hotel, flawlessly.  Pity the battery didn’t hold out all day, though.  I really should be able to listen to a couple of hours of music, walk for 30 mins with the GPS on and make a couple of phone calls without using up all the juice.

Conference was good and increasingly attracting the DevOps crowd, which is a very good thing – preventing the conference from fading into obscurity and obsolescence.  Inspiring talks from Matthew Macdonald-Wallace and Adrian Kennard in particular, although I enjoyed the talks on Ceph, Git and DNSSEC also, and have some new projects to investigate as a result.

Thanks to Google for the excellent stationary swag, and for paying for dinner at the excellent Leeds Armoury.

Good fun, interesting talks and people and not too much intrusion into work for those attending via that.  Bloody good value.

Eagerly anticipated (but I still managed to forget I’d pre-ordered it from The Book Depository, before I’d realised that they never responded to queries), sequel to his excellent ‘Name of The Wind’.  I was a bit daunted on receiving it, as its about half again the size of the previous book, and that was what Elizabeth Bear coined FFWM (Fat Fantasy With Maps) to begin with!

I actually got through it fairly quickly, even with pauses – I found it a bit much in one go, so would catch up with RSS feeds then dive back in.  I’m looking forward to rereading it with the others once the last one has come out, as I got the feeling that I was losing some of the detail in places, but like Neal Stephen’s Anathem, while I look forward to rereading it, it wont be for a while yet!

Rothfuss manages to tone down the ‘brilliant at everything’ side of Kvothe a little, and some troubles caused by his attitude come back to haunt him, and he finanly, finaly, gets laid – something which, as a teenager in the previous book, almost broke my suspension of disbelief when he was not pursuing the offers available in the earlier story!  May be done for dramatic effect, but even less likely that him being a polymath..

If for nothing else, I have a warm feeling for the book in the way its reignited my love of martial arts.  Rothfuss has evidently based the martial society in his book on Tai Chi Chuan, or some form of Kung Fu, and done enough research, or training to make a decent analogue.  I’ve started paractising again, albeit somewhat intermittently, so we’ll see where that goes.

I have no problem with how long it took him to write the second part (if you do, google ‘Neil Gaiman and George R R Martin is not your bitch’ ), and based on this am pretty certain the third will get published, but I do worry that the J.K. Rowling effect is taking over, and with each highly anticipated sequel, the page count gets bigger..

I bought this after reading Scalzi’s Big Idea post on his latest book, a follow up to ‘This is Not A Game’.  I also bought it on Kindle, within 5 mins of finishing that blog article, via the iPad’s app.  I’m somewhat conflicted about this, but since there are tools to strip the DRM via Calibre, I need to investigate this. It was a very pleasant purchasing experience, however, and knowing that I have an out (unlike Apple’s iBooks, at least that I’m aware of), makes it more likely I’ll buy stuff this way.  Once I’ve tested the tools, of course..

The book doesn’t quite match up to the previous one for me – that had more realism for me, part of its appeal.  I kept not quite believing that people would actually try and use ARG’s to destabalise a country, even acknowledging Williams comments in the above piece that social media tools were heavily used in the Egyptian uprising.

The oddest thing about the book was the style kept feeling like a mashup of Doctorow and Stross – hardly fair to Williams since he’s been established a lot longer, but its seems a different style for him.  Then again, before TINAG, I’d not read his recent work in a while, so perhaps its evolved.  There were a few moment of very Williams-ian style however – the post traumatic stress disorder was definitely his, as were the shootouts – I almost flashbacked to his much earlier works reading them.

Definately worth checking out if you liked ‘This Is Not A Game’, or any of Doctorow or Stross’s works.

The penultimate of my xmas books (seem to be getting through them quick this time), this is the fourth installment in the Inspector Chen novels.  While I enjoyed it, I found it a little disjointed for about the first third, and I probably wouldn’t have come back to the series if this had been my first introduction.  The extraordinary is rapidly becoming ordinary – something the characters make often reference to, and hence losing its uniqueness – a problem urban fantasy appears to suffer a lot from, from the reviews I’ve read.  All you can do is up the power level of the protagonists, which gets increasingly strained.

That being said, I did enjoy it, and as always I ended up with the feeling that there were cultural references I was missing, both in Chinese and Indian Hells and Heaven, and, as always, I find myself craving more green and white tea as I read it and after!

There is the next one out in the series, which I might pick up next time I’m stuck for something to read, as the world is so unusual, but with the profusion of interesting speculative fiction coming out, I tend to give my focus to those and the established authors I’m waiting on the releases of (still haven’t got to Gibson’s Zero History, so that may have to be a Kindle purchase via the iPad app, since that seems oddly appropriate!).

Ah, another Culture novel.  When Banks gives himself permission to do space opera, he really goes to town.

Its Banks characteristic sharp characters, descriptions and plot turns, with some wickedly funny conversations, the AI’s, as usual, getting all the good lines.

This books is very post 9-11 for Banks, and its his attempt, in my opinion, to discuss (and in one case, have the conversation about the use of torture he would have loved to have had with Blair) the whole recent Iraq/Afganistan foreign policy of the Labour goverment, in the light of how a cultured civilisation would go about punishment.

That being said, its not as heavy as ‘Matter’, and is far more in the light of ‘Excession’ or ‘Consider Phlebas’, and I kept reading it on and off until it all kicks off about two thirds in and I couldn’t put it down.

Post the ending there are a number of afterwards, which feels slightly un-Banks to me – I’m ore used to him wrapping everything up, but perhaps I’m misremembering.

1000 pages, 6 months to read,  (paper and Safari eBook edition, about 800 and 200 pages, respectively).  I even got a Safari edition (you may have seen my justification post) primarily to read this (unfortunately, their iPad app got yanked just before I got the subscription through, so it was through the iPad web browser, which was surprisingly usable), and be able to download it as an eBook.

The book is divided into chapters covering all the different areas a sysadmin is likely to encounter, covering the basics and ‘the icing’.  I think if you could sum up one overriding principle of the book, its automate everything, with the additional push to make Systems Administration more a profession and less of a collection fo organically derived at best practices you may or may not have encountered.  It would be a fantastic start to a sysadmins career, although I suspect few companies would live up to all the aims in the book.  I bought, via work, a copy for everyone in my team, and we’ve had regular discussions about relevant chapters.  The only complaints I’ve heard levelled at it from my colleagues, or that I would make, is that its not quite as platform agnostic as it claims – most of the examples coming from the Unix world.  The other would be that it favours large IT departments/organisations.  I’m not sure how true this is, given Limoncelli for certain worked as a one man SA  for a number of years, but it seems hard to implement most of the ideas and suggestions if you’re just one person.

Its no exaggeration to say this book changed by working life.  The seeds had been started with ‘System Administration with Perl’, but it really illustrated, for me, how you could remain technical and in management, in addition to all the best practice stuff the book covers.

Talking of which, its pretty comprehensive, as you might expect from a thousand pages.  The only area I felt it didn’t cover well was in justifying IT as a business driver rather than a expense.  Limoncelli says that he prefers working for CTO’s or COO’s as they tend to see IT improvements as part of the overall business efficiency, whereas CFO’s tend to see it as a cost to be reduced.  I’ve only worked for CFO’s, but that seems broadly true in my experience.  Unfortunately, while the authors make a lot out of saying to need to justify IT to get the resources, there was little in the book to say how.  As this was one of the things I was interested in, especially as the book progressed, and the number of ideas I’d like to implement from the book grew, and hence would need resource for, it was a bit frustrating.  Plus I get the feeling from Limoncelli’s blog posts and this book, that its something he feels we as a profession should do better.  Cant disagree there!

Useful links;

Everything Sysadmin - the blog of the book, mostly updated by Limoncelli (@yesthattom on twitter)

Tomontime.com – Tom Limoncelli recorded talking about his other book ‘Time Management for System Administrators’ (and another book I’d highly recommend reading).

Sysadvent – the sysadmins advent calender, running for the past two years now.  Has some good introductory articles on the kind of automation technology the book advocates and on DevOps, a ‘new’ sysadmin movement about combining SA’s with development, and bringing the practices of one into the other.

First of the Xmas books.  I actually paused reading ‘Surface Detail’ by Iain Banks because I’d been looking forward to this so much.

Its an alternate history second world war, with almost Cthlulu like magic and Nietzsche supermen, written very believably in a UK style – it was only when I read the author’s blurb I found out he was American, so either he’s done a ton of research, or spent some time in the UK, as it has a very authentic feel.  It starts as if it as imagined by Charlie Stross and then gets a lot darker.  Actually, I misrepresent – it starts dark and gets more so.

My only complaint is that it finishes rather abruptly – I had the feeling it ended in the middle of the story, rather than the end.  This could be a feature, there could be a sequel, but it felt… rushed, like the editor had collected the work from the author befor he had finished.

I’ll certainly be buying some more works by Tregellis, but I’ll be reading something lighter in between!

I actually finished this a couple of weeks ago, but no time to blog about it.  Now the xmas shopping season is over, and I’m starting another book, its time do this;

So, this is a collection of Butcher’s ‘Dresden Files’ short stories, from assorted websites, magazines and anthologies, some of which I had, some I didn’t, particularly the last story, which was written especially for the anthology, and set after the killer cliffhanger in ‘Changes’.  It doesn’t resolve anything from that, in case you were wondering.

Its interesting to see Butcher’s style mature as the stories go out – and to see the gaps in between writing them when he had other writing projects.  Only worth buying if you’re a reader of the series, but compulsive if you are.  I had to order this from the US as for some reason the UK publication isn’t until April, which is when the next Dresden Novel ‘Ghost Stories’ is also out.  Odd.

I bought this with the last of the money from a gift voucher, to tide me over until xmas or the iPad, whichever came first!  I’d not been mad keen on reading this, as the premise didn’t appeal, but they didn;t have much else in Waterstones I fancied, and I like lots of his other stuff, so, I gave it a go.

Wasn’t bowled over, I have to say.  I’d read somewhere else that he wrote it in a knowing pastiche of another luminary of SF who wrote a lot of rather dodgy stuff while under the influence of a brain tumour, which once removed, he went back to writing in his previous style, which is an odd kind of thing to pastiche if you ask me.

Anyway, its a different take on post singularity transhumanity, written with Charlies normal attention to detail – some interestingly realistic seeming space travel, with the less said about the sex the better.  Not that it was bad, just, not needed.

1. Consultants.  At Ł1000 per day three days of consulting will more than justify the expense.

2. Down time. We have had recent outages that could have been prevented by better system design, or reduced by access to the right manual.  One network outage of one hour costs 360 man hours at assorted rates of all the onshore and offshore staff.  

3. Cross training* - getting team members knowledgeable about other team members expertise, without sending on training courses for everything.

4. Instant library access - access to research and documentation on huge amount of subjects and softeware - we can't be an expert on everything - and we can't buy books on everything.

5. Lifelong learning - if a member of staff wants to learn about a topic, he can research this in his spare time - and has the books to hand to do so.

6. Staff motivation - with a high workload, access to resources to help do your job better may be seen to be worth Ł38/month/person

7. Reduced cost.  The average IT book is Ł20 from Amazon, and once you've bought it you can't swap it out for another one once you've read it - you can with safari.

8. Efficiency.  You can copy and past code examples, configs etc from the books in the digital library which you can't do with online versions

9. Portability - access to the library in India as easily as in UK, or at desk as easily as in machine room.

*To define "cross training". A department with many sub-specialities wants everyone to be able to handle tasks from the other sub-teams. For example, you have an IT department with three sub-teams: a Linux sub-team, a Networking sub-team, and a Window sub-team. In an ideal world, the Storage sub-team members should be able to handle 80% of the requests of the Linux sub-team, and vice versa. Being able to handle 80% of the Storage-related requests probably means knowing about 20% of what someone on the Storage sub-team knows. That's ok. 80% of the requests are probably things like add/delete/change requests (add a new virtual partition, increase the size of an existing one, etc.), and common problems (what to do with a NFS stale file handle, etc.). If everyone in the department could handle those tasks, the individual teams could focus on higher-order issues like scaling, monitoring, and optimization.

What would you have written?

I think that, again, I came to this via Scalzi’s Big Idea, and was given it form my birthday – it being the last of my birthday book haul. I left it to last because I kept looking at the blurb and not quite fancying it.

When I did pick it up, though, I couldn’t put it down! I can’t remember if I read the author saying he wanted to do a Firefly tribute but if that’s not what it is… Basically if you think a steampunk Firefly with a slightly more roguish captain, you have the basic theme.  It cracks along with a number of fun ideas, and some genuine tragic moments.

I’ll most likely buy the next one when its out in paperback – there are enough loose ends to make it intriguing.

I can’t remember how I came to this book; it must have been an Amazon recommendation, although I usually ignore those.  I thought it had been via Doctorow or ‘The Big Idea’, but I can’t find any reference since, so obviously not.

This is YA (again – seems to be a trend in my reading recently, but its the last in my upcoming pile), but more A than Y, unlike the previous book.  The plot is simple; its post apocalyptic post-war with Faerie that ended years ago, but the magical fallout is still ongoing.  Any more than that will threaten to spoil things, but it reminded me a lot of ‘Forest of Hands and Teeth’ and ‘Ariel’.  It also strongly reminded me of the ‘Hell on Earth’ roleplaying game from Pinnacle – some good nostalgia there!

Very good – if she ever writes for adults it will be splendid.

I bought this after being directed to his site from the Podcastle Story ‘The Osteomancer’s son’, which was wonderfully dark and creepy.

This is a YA book (more Y and A, I think – like the 1st Harry Potter), about a boy who stays with his uncle during the summer and finds that the local carnies are in fact a witch cursed people nicknamed flotsam, and he ends up fighting assorted sea creatures under the witches control, aided by a princess of flotsam, and a girl out of ‘Harriet the spy’ (in a good way).

Its a quick easy read, and very enjoyable – I’ll look for more of his work when he brings his Osteomancer series out.

I bought this after reading about Kamkwamba’s acheievment, although I can’t recall quite where – one of the tech blogs.

I was expecting it to be a light feel good read about engineering and persistence overcoming adversity, but it was a lot more than that; through the story of how he tought himself enough engineering to build a wind turbine, he reveals the adversity facing much of Africa, and how little it would take per person to make a huge difference.  Jeffrey Sacks has written and spoken about how contraception and mosquito nets would allow many disadvantaged areas to ‘bootstrap themselves (my paraphrasing), and get out of the poverty trap.  Kamkwamba brings that to life here (distressingly so in places, talking about the famine), but also shows how much that a basic electrical supply from renewable energy would allow them to stay up at night, pump water, charge mobiles etc.  If you think that last example was fatuous, read up on some of the work going on in Africa to use the widely available basic 2g mobile to provide everything from election overwatch to buying and selling crops. Its been well covered on the BBC programme/podcast Digital Planet.

Over all, humbling stuff.  Makes me think of what I took to be the unofficial slogan of last year’s Open Tech; “Get exited and make things”!

A collection of short stories I got for my birthday.  I’d not realised it, but the anthology had been put together on the premise of “…and then what?”, which is a lovely way to theme a collection.  Some succeded more than others, and some contained more fantastical elements than others (I’m still not sure why the Moorcock story was included, for any reason other than the fame of the name).  What I found the most interesting was the stories from authors I thought I knew I didn’t like – Roddy Doyle for example.

A smorgasbord of stories and concepts, and one I will come back to when considering new books/authors to buy..

Answering this question for a friend on Twitter, I thought I’d posted my links here, but evidently not, so;

Technical

OReilly (specifically their ‘deal of the day‘)

Safari (also OReilly, but subscription with ‘tokens’ for chapter downloads – not signed up for this yet, but really should based on how much I’ve spent on their ‘deal of the day’)

Safari (via the Cambridge Library, if you have a library card)

Fiction

Fictionwise – the first people to do commercial DRM free eBooks of living authors, from way back when.  Most new content contains DRM these days, but they have a lot of out-of-print and short story stuff at reasonable prices – I’m still reading my way through the stuff I bought there..

Webscription – a number of publishers use this as their portal, and it seems to do most formats (crucially, epub, mobi and PDF)

Some others that might be of use, but I’ve not used, and you can’t get the latest ‘blockbuster’ from..

Feedbooks; not read anything from them, but linked via Aldiko.

Genre Specific – go by recommendation only; drivethrurpg.com RPG related works inc fiction (checkout Eclipse Phase and Shadowrun for examples)

Mixed – both Fiction & Reference

Archive.org/openlibrary.org (the latter has some interesting proposals for DRM-aided lending eBooks that I haven’t fully explored yet  -and may not as its Win/Mac only due to the dreadful Adobe Digital Editions)

Project Gutenberg – the original eBook project digitising out of print texts.  I recently bittorrentted (as they encourage, and I left the torrent open for a couple of weeks to give something back) the DVD they make available of all their books – 7.8GB of text!

eBook friendly publishers

Tor – they often do free downloads of authors works inc commissioning short stories (and when launched gave away loads of eBooks); worth keeping an eye on.

Night Shade Books (via webscription, above)

eBook friendly Authors

Cory Doctorow – one of the first; you can often find eBook apps like Stanza and Alkido with sections to download his works, as they;re all Creative Commons licensed. He also writes some though provoking commentary on the eBook market, including some columns in Publishers weekly that are worth seeking out (but also see below)

Charles Stross – well worth reading his blog for his thoughts on the industry and technology.

John Scalzi

Robin Sloan – I particularly recommend downloading his ‘Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-​​Four-​​Hour Book Store’

eBook podcasts

The Dragon Page – Cover to cover; slightly cheesy but usually has interesting information each week, and at least one of the hosts makes money from fiction eBooks.

eBook software

Calibre – eBook management; works on all three OS’s, handles all file formats

Aldiko – Android eBook reader with built in download sites & options fro free/creative commons books

Stanza – iPhone (Ios I suppose I should say) client similar to the above; now ceased development because (IIRC) they were bought by Amazon and it became the Kindle App.

Almost everywhere I went in Pune & Mumbai had plug sockets that took Indian and UK plugs, which was nice.

This Wiki has an excellent guide to buying PAYG sims with Data, although I didn’t take advantage of it in the end.  Its odd how much you get used to having pervasive, all you can eat data (India not having ubiquitous 3G coverage, yet).  It will be interesting to see how the UK market changes as all the operators go for restrictive caps and per-use charging (I thought they’d learned; the smartphones only took off when people weren’t terrified at the prices being charged per MB).

Having a real GPS makes a difference; I took my Garmin eTrex this time and it did a much better job fixing onto satellites on the Pune – Mumbai road.  Also the USB chargeable batteries I picked up in Morrisons for £10 lasted the entire 4 hour drive (but not the return trip – about 5 hours in total!)

I’ve proved that my Acer Aspire One with extended battery works very well as a movie viewer on airplanes – big enough to view, small enough not to get in the way even with a meal on the tray (yes, even in economy).  A combination of DVD ripping and MythBox means plenty of viewing.

I’ve never regretted the purchase of the noise cancelling headphones, although I think they make better in-ear ones these days..

Most hotels Internet connections appear to be wise to the ‘bring a wireless router and connect it up to the connection and put all your pc’s and smartphones behind that’ approach.  The wiser ones just provide it free, to as many devices as you have, of course.

When this was  recommended by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing, kept popping up in my Amazon ‘people also bought’ and had an intriguing ‘Big Idea’ post on Scalzi’s ‘Whatever’ site, I bowed to the inevitable and put it on my wish list, where I was kindly bought it for my Birthday.

I loved a lot of the concepts of it; steampunk, zombies, mad inventors, dirigibles, but I found it a little hard going in places, with the character, particularly the kid Zeke hard to get into.  It warmed up towards the end, but the twist I thought I’d imagined turned out completely differently, which is fine (but mine would have been cooler and more dramatic .  There was a lot of dislike for the characters father, with little exposition as to why, same with the husband, which I found a little frustrating; I understand she didn’t like them; but why? Some is explained, but not enough for my taste (Of course, I may have missed it).

The book also failed to address my general issue with Zombie books, and it was acute for me in this one; all the zombies are penned up in old seattle.  Why don’t they float a few airships over the top and pick them all off with rifles?  Figures of 5k zombies are mentioned; a lot certianly, but a few bombs and a regular patrol that shoots all they can see would put paid to that – after all; its obvious they can’t get out.  Like shooting fish in a barrel, as the saying goes.  Granted, I suspect it wouldn’t be that easy, but it would bring the population down to tens that could be cleared by military with room to room searches, even with the Blight.

Regarding that, I did like this concept – it added a whole other atmosphere (literally), and layer of tension.  I was a bit disappointed that it wasn’t explained more, but I guess there’s room for a sequel.  Not sure I’d go out of my way to read it, but glad I read some non-Doctorow steampunk, although there seems to be some more on my up-coming reads shelf.

Capsule review; Eagerly awaited and doesn’t disappoint.

Slightly longer review; the third outing of his Laundry series, this examines the origins of the Laundry, and the metaphysical concerns of the participants who know that the End Of The World really is nigh, and how they deal with it.  It has demons, mathematics, other dimensions, middle management (good and bad), lethal violins and iPhones (‘its at least a class three glamour!’).  Thoroughly enjoyed it, looking forward to going back, rereading it and the previous two and picking up some of the references again.

I was between (paper) books, and wanted something light and fluffy to read before what I hoped would be my haul of books for my birthday came in, and was browsing Amazon, and came accros this.  Described as a mix between the ‘X files’ and ’24′, and with an intro line like “When you have to kill the same terrorist in a week, there’s either something wrong with your skills, or something wrong with the world.  And there’s nothing wrong with my skills”, how could I resist?

More 24 than X files, and more military macho wish fulfilment than needed, the book is enough if a read that I kept through all the way to the end, but not tightly plotted enough that you were ever in doubt of the outcome.  Some good points (I’d love to know the authors martial arts background), but it breaks the rule of good storytelling in that it tells you how great the characters are instead of demonstrating it.  I know that’s a hard trick to pull off, and if done well you don’t even notice, but there weer some passages near the start of the book that gushed about the hero so blatantly that it rather broke my suspension of disbelief, which I never fully regained..

Fun read, but I doubt I’ll be buying more of his books.

I was thoroughly looking forward to this, and indeed, chunked my way through it at a fair old pace.  The media makes a lot out of Salander being the heroine of the book, and while she is, Blomkvist is the real here – a wish fulfilment version of the author, I suspect.  I like the style, being journalistic and just enough aware of itself to be able to twist that at times.  I did feel that this book, while it wrapped everything up with some neat twists (Salander’s father; didn’t see THAT coming), was oddly unsatisfying.

I suspect that Walter John Williams summed it up best, and if you like the stories you should also check out the NYT Parody..

The film is an adaptation of the book, I understand. It was the last in a number of Horror books I seem to have picked up, and took me a while to get round to – never quite in the mood.

Once I did, it was certainly a page turner, though – I could hardly put it down.  My word does it emote alienation, however – you end up not knowing whether to root for the hero and antihero, but can’t bring yourself to adopt any of the others either.  I’m not sure that any of the adults had a single positive role model in any of them.

A short volume of short stories set in the same world as his epic ‘River of Gods’, the stories cover life in near future (and increasingly transhuman and singularity) India.  I read this cover to cover on the flight out to Mumbai a few weeks ago (yes, its taken me this long to get round to catching up with my reviews, and yes, it was a long flight!), and I like to think it helped me with the cultural adjustment.  of course, as from what I read McDonald hasn’t ever been to India, that statement is somewhat in question!

As with ‘River Of Gods’ its a wonderful tapestry to tell the stories – very different to the usual backdrop.  He’s written Brasyl also – a novel set in future Brasil (funnily enough), which I’ll definitely have to pickup now.

I’ve been on a bit of a Bear bender recently (ahem), and this was the latest in the run.  It was a limited edition from Subterranean Press, in the (I suspect) increasingly likely model of getting readers to pay up front to cover the production costs, and print when done.  Its not what they claim to do, but given the delay in between the pre-order and the delivery its what I suspect.

Anyway, the book is a slimmer volume than I expected – a novella really.  It bears all of her style (sorry), in that it combines (I think) post apocalyptic fiction with magic, steampunk and Arabic culture, and does so so seamlessly.  As always, I could spend a lot more time in each of the worlds she creates, and wished she’d written more in this universe.

I am beginning to worry that she’s working so hard that she is burning herself out however – this is the second or third of her books and short stories I’ve read about a protaganist that’s at the end of her life, world weary, with one last effort before her.

A. got this and recommended I read it, and as I was coming to the end of my stock of books, I thought I’d give it a go.  From the blurb I expected it to be a satire on government incompetence, and while it is, thats like saying ‘Yes Minister’ is a how to guide for the Civil Service..

Very witty and well written, the tale of the fisheries scientist drawn into the scheme of the title is both very well observed and very touching – an excellent comment on our times and the previous government.  I do wonder what Mr Torday did that gave him such an insight into the government.

I put this on an amazon preorder for the paperback about a year ago, after reading her Big Idea interview.  It turned up about a month ago, and I just got round to reading it.

In short, the book is about the descendants of people who survived the Zombie Apocalypse.  Think M Night Shalayman’s ‘The Village’, but with zombies.  Its a YA book, which means some topics are skirted, but it brings home the unremitting horror of a world where the undead pace ceaselessly outside your fence.  It was an unremitting page turner – I think I read it in two days flat.

Some of the practicalities started to nag at me after a while though – how would the community produce axes etc; there was no mine in the forest, and re-used metal would only go so far.  I also wondered about the gene pool being diminished, but I think she addressed that in a way.  Frustratingly, there was no detail on who built the fences and paths, and how they managed to do this with the undead roaming around, no backstory.  I know that this was part of the book; that the village had forgotten so much, but it still left me wanting to know more.

Ultimately, the depressing angle for me was the lack of hope; in such an environment you would be running down stores, never able to manufacture anything, so the world would slowly revert to barbarism.  After all, if our society couldn’t stop it would the science and the weapons, a fast-reducing to feudal society with projectile weapons certianly wouldn’t be able to.

Make you think.  Could YOU survive a zombie apocalypse?  And would you want to?

A collection of the author’s short stories (Missing Tideline, unfortunately – perhaps that was written after this collection was published), with some works I’d read and some I hadn’t.  I did get to re-read the work that introduced me to her writing via Escape Pod (or Starship sofa, can’t remember which, may have been the latter); ‘And the deep blue sea’; still excellent.  ‘Seven Dragon Mountain’ was a gem as well – I’d love to see a Judge Dee mystery done by her!

Got this for Xmas.  A collection of authors some of which I’d heard of, some not.  Apart from the usual superstars, Gibson, Doctorow, Bear, Sterling, there were a few others I’d either not come across or only recently that I’ll look into more work by; Paulo Bacigalupi (did the excellent ‘Pump 9′ that was on StarShip Sofa recently), Mary Rosenblaum & Christopher Rowe.

I bought this about the same time as we set-up a Nagios & Munin system (and by we I mean Gatekeeper), but didn’t get round to reading it until just recently.  As I kinda suspected, it mainly emphasises getting good information and knowing what you want the system to do, but explained very clearly and logically.  There was also some good information on automated build systems, something I’m looking into recently.

I was looking for more information on the kind of statistics maths you need, but apart from some frustrating hints about using excel and linear regression (unusually with no links to find out more info), it wasn’t expanded on.

Ultimately, well written, a good introduction but I’d have liked more hard info on calculating metrics, which is ultimately what I bought it for..

Well.  The title doesn’t lie.  This makes about as many changes to the Dresden Files universe as its possible to do and still remain the same series.  It had me on the edge of my seat at times, with some scenes I really reacted emotionally to.  Looks like Butcher has upped his game again, and it was pretty good before hand, in a subtle way.

I can’t write too much about this without giving too many plot points away, but suffice to say that I’m looking forward to re-reading it in a less gulping it down style, and cant believe I have to wait a YEAR for the next one!

This is probably the best system administration book I’ve read, and certainly the best, most quintessentially ‘OReilly’ book, in a long long while.  Its safe to say it restarted my love of both perl and system administration.  Not bad for a purely technical book.

Blank-Edelman takes the OReilly approach of assuming you’re intelligent and just don’t know the subject matter.  In this book, he includes appendices such as ‘the 5 min RCS guide’ or ‘the 20 min XML tutorial’ to supplement the chapters that deal with sysadmin topics that use those areas.  In all of the chapters he gives not only the subject matter, but where you can find out more, and crucially, enough understanding that you can troubleshoot the problem yourself, knowing where to start.  This is an invaluable technique, and very hard to get right.  If he uses advanced Perl techniques or modules, he clearly documents what and why.

Along with Tim Limoncelli, and Jesse Vincent he’s one of my new Tech heroes.

I started reading this just before Fred was born, so at over 700 pages it took some time to get through, but it was interesting and entertaining, even reading this on a black and white screen of my eBook reader!  Thanks goodness I bought it in eBook format too – its possible to read with a baby in one arm, but not a 700 page technical tome – unless its an eBook..

I look forward to the day when Bear’s genius is fully recognised and she is held up in the same lights as Gibson, Banks and Stephenson.  I don’t know anyone who could meld Norse myth, apocalypses, post-human, H.G. Wells, far future, science fiction and magic in the way she has here and make it seem not only reasonable but seamless.

My only criticism of this book was the ending felt wrong – I can’t put my finger on it, but while it was an excellent ending in that it wrapped everything up and concluded the book perfectly satisfactorily, the actual mechanic seemed at odds.  Ok, another moan would be more detail of the end fight – but purely because a Violin was involved and I’ve not read enough magic/music fantasy (‘Name Of The Wind’ is the best so far).

I bought this more out of loyalty (Williams was one of my first favourite authors and is having something of a renaissance it seems), and because the plot seemed cool in a Stross/Doctorow kind of way – different than his previous works I’d read.  The book is more Doctorow like in its challening of current trends in AR games, but unlike Doctorow’s work, ends satisfactorily.

Indeed, I felt very much as if this was Williams channelling Stross – especially the first part of the book.  Its a different style  for him (or perhaps I’m not as perceptive a fan as I thought!), and he made it work rather well.  I enjoyed the style and the plot – the first part of the book more than the last, and rather hopes he writes more in this vein.

I bought this as part of my audio book experiment, this time on MP3 CD, to see if that was a better format than buying on CD and ripping myself.  Long story short, not really, unless I’d have set-up a podcastamatic podcast feed from my own server of the mp3′s, neither my iPod nor my Android phone would save the bookmark in the file, so I had to remember where I was in each file, which, at semi-random lengths, wasn’t ideal.  Given I’ve already ripped the Bill Bryson book I bought of 6 CD’s, I’ll have to break down and setup the podcast feed, along with perhaps combining all the mp3′s for that (around 50!) into one large one, so I don’t have to remember to download the next ‘episode’ before I go somewhere..

Anyway, this was a professional audio book reading, compared to the ‘amateur’ readings from the likes of Escape Pod, Starship Sofa, etc, so I was expecting good quality.  It turns out it was OK, but it only had one ‘actor’, and at times he slipped out of character, making it hard to determine which person was talking.  I guess the above podcasts have set the bar pretty high.  Must go and make a donation..

I heard of this from Cory Doctorow, who reviewed it on BoingBoing – it was on his recommended fiction books of the year list, or recommended christmas list of something.

The premise is fairly cool – a magician claws his way out of hell fifteen years after being banished there by the magic circle he belonged to.  He comes back with a working knowledge of ‘Hellion’ magic, a fortune telling coin, a knife that opens anything, and a key that allows him to travel through shadows and worlds – how he manged to escape Hell.  Most of which he got by acting as assasin for one of the top devils in Hell.  Which position he got by surviving years pit-fighting in the arena.

As you may be able to tell from the above description, it gets pretty high powered, with subtlety not high on the list of priorities.  I thought that a lot of the elements f the book could have been improved by a more subtle touch, actually.  It was fun and snarky, but it lacked the deft touch with characterisation or even motivations that Jim Butcher can bring, for example.  I’m not sure I;d read any more in the series, but I suspect a lower powered book dealing with  lessor powered magicians would be interesting.  Something I found frustrating was the lack of magic the character performed, despite him supposedly being a powerful magician.  I suppose that the author could have been making the point subtly about the amount of trauma the protagonist had been through left him not only unable to sustain positive relationships, but also to contemplate non destructive magic, but I’m not sure that’s the case.

I got the impression the author had done a lot of research, but more in the sense that Magick was his hobby rather than the aim of verisimilitude, but I could be wrong.

He has written other books, including one that sounds like it was set in the same universe.  Another review of one of his books caught my eye with what i think could also be the capsule review of this book;

“Pick this up and expect to want to finish it – with relish – and then forget it instantly.”

I came to this via a short story of Sloan’s ‘Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-​​Four-​​Hour Book Store‘ on EscapePod.  I enjoyed the story, (especially the phrase, ‘if all of this seems amazing to you, you’re probably over 30′ in relation to some fancy technical stuff -not so far from home as we shall see – Mr Sloan is more than competent at a number of ‘new media’ technologies.), and I think the podcast mentioned his site, so I checked that out, which in turn mentioned that he was in the process of writing a story via Kickstarter (don’t follow that link just yet).

Kickstarter is apparently a way to micro-finance projects via pledges, tied into the your amazon account – you pledge one of the predetermined amounts, and when the project owner receives the amount of pledges equal to the threshold set, he produces the work, and everyone who pledged gets the result, according to the amount they pledged (so $2 might get you the PDF, $11 a softback, and $50 three special edition signed copies, for example), and their amazon account is deducted the said amount.  Kind of escrow for projects, and moving back to art via Patronage rather than contract with a publisher, you might say.

I was intrigued enough by both Sloan’s writing, his description and the whole concept to sign up (or so I thought) for the softback copy.  This gave me access to the kickstarter blog he was writing with updates to the production process, everything from sourcing the paper for the special editions, to writing the code that generated the artwork.  All very interesting stuff, especially for the whole self publishing thing, what with Cory Doctorow’s recent experiment ‘With a Little Help’, especially given the fact that Sloan was not an established writer.

The podcast exposure and word of mouth must have been good though – he set the target at $3000, and ended up with nearer $14000!  Unfortunately, Kickstarter glitched my subscription, and despite saying I had signed up to his project, it didn’t list it in my ‘subscriptions’ on the site, and wouldn’t let me subscribe again (I already had, you see, except..), so I missed the launch.  I mailed the author anyway a couple of weeks later, and agreed to paypal him my $11, and a couple of weeks later the copy showed up.

So the book itself!  Quality is OK, similar to the on-demand printing from Lulu. Its a short volume, but self contained – I didn’t feel the story should have been longer (not that I’d have complained!), and I didn’t feel cheated on the price – self publishing is always going to be more expensive than mass market paperbacks, and given the shipping from the US was thrown in free, I can hardly complain.

His style reminds me of a mix of Gibson and Stephenson  It has elements of Gibson’s imagery, and definitely elements of Stephenson’s early work’s throwing out sparks of ideas.  High praise, I know, but it has potential.

Not much I can talk about the plot without giving away something of the story – it really is pretty self contained, other than it incorporates Occult, Artificial Intelligences, Private Investigators and a company that most certainly is not Google (goodness, no).. You can watch Sloan’s promo video, if you didn’t already, on the Kickstarter site.

He’s got another couple of short stories up on his site as well, and blogs at a collaborate site called ‘Snarkmarket‘, which has had some interesting thoughts recently on the future of book publishing.

I read this serialised (with each serial announced on Twitter, so often from my mobile) on tor.com, but you can also download it from his site in a variety of formats (as well as, you know, buy a copy).

I’m not sure if this was as a result of the fragmented nature of the format (or the sleep deprived state I often read it in!), but I had trouble liking this book.  Doctorow has spoken and written about how it started life as ‘themepunks’, serialised on Salon.com, and then he stalled and ended up rewriting it.  Don’t know if thats what I’m picking up on, or not, but the plots and characters never really engaged me.  Doctorow did a good job making you warm to Sammy, the disney exec at points, as well as showing things from a lawyers angle, but there were huge areas I wish he’d explored more – the curve of the ‘new work’ rise and fall would have been a worthwhile novelette in itself, for example.  He didn’t dig into the ramifications of what happened to the protagonists often – perhaps this was a literary device meant to show their focus and singleminded-ness, but I felt it came across more that this wasn’t something Doctorow was interested in exploring.

Valid enough choices, but after Little Brother and  ‘After The Siege’, I know he can do excellent work when inspired.  I think that this was actually written before both of those, which may explain something.  I’m hoping that in writing ‘Little Brother’, he’s got a different take and stance on writing, especially with being able to dedicate himself to it full time.  Thinking about that, Little Brother was the first book he wrote when able to do that, if I’m recollecting and piercing together the chronology correctly, which may bode well for future output.

On the subject of Doctorow’s work, I wish he’d publish more about the ongoing progress of ‘with a little help’ – I’m fascinated with the minutiae and ‘new media’ angle of him doing this himself.