Evergence 3: A Dark Imbalance

I just finished reading this.
This is an excellent read. Each book in this series improved markedly on the last, and the first wasn't a bad book at all. Great action, great technology, hidden agendas revealed, galactic scale secrets and events uncovered. I particularly enjoyed the coverage of the different levels of intelligence around. Starting from the lower castes (sub-human intelligences) to mundane castes (including pristine and exotic evolutions of humanity), then covering strong AI and of course the transcended "high humans" - super intelligences resulting from many minds uploading to some new substrate.
Very cool, and worth the read through the whole series.

New Fish

Just bought some new fish, bright orange Comets. I've also filled out the back of the tank with some new plants as things were low after the algae attack earlier in the year. Here's a current pic:

Very soothing :_)

Aging hardware

No, not me, my PC.
I've just realised that my current PC has 5 years on it. That's ridiculous. I just had to purchase a $20 network card that has a hope of being identified by Windows 7. My current card is identified by Vista, but I can understand if Windows 7 couldn't be bothered since it's on-board a 5 year old motherboard. I intend to do a major upgrade as soon as I have signed with an employer for this year, and the current employer's redundancy can pay for it. That should get the cost past my personal CFO.

Fighting the undead demons

Awesome. Rich finished off his planescape D&D campaign with a cracker on Wednesday night. The party had to travel to the astral plane to take on the clerical ogre minion of a dead god trying to resurrect his awfulness. He had stolen the wand of Orcus (said god) and was using it to achieve his aims on the astral plane.
We arrived in short order, and Moag (the now Centaur) went charging straight up to this maniac (who's the maniac?) with a +4 longsword of Sundering, only to be Dismissed back to his native plane. Ah. The rest of the party struggled on against this foe, and two more, which turned out to be super powerful undead demons that our cleric couldn't touch for Turning. Meanwhile Moag was bribing, cajoling and calling favours to get himself back to the astral plane pronto to get back into the action. He even managed to get back for the endgame.
The endgame wasn't pretty. We took down the ogre boss OK, since we hit him hard with every Flamestrike we had, but left ourselves short on the ultra powerful undead creatures. Bad. Then as we thought we were getting the upper hand, they hit us with some ultra powerful spell effect which caused all but one of us to be Dazed, Weakened and Paralyzed. We were so screwed, unless the freely moving character, Sebastian's, could Dispel the spell effect. Because of the level mismatch between casters, he needed to roll a 20 on a D20. Oooh. "We are so screwed.".
It was one of those moments. He rolled a 20. Just awesome. Then it was cleanup time as they had used their major power, and we had plenty left.
Top stuff.
Thanks Rich for a great campaign!

Dark Space

Just finished this.
Honestly, I found this one quite annoying by the end. I was willing to plow through the large number of undefined terms in the first half, hoping to have most of it fleshed out along hte way. Hell, some most excellent SF novels have used this technique, none other than Neuromancer high among them. However, most other novels get in and flesh out new technology ideas because they are cool, or the author thinks they are, even if the terms are used colloquially for a few chapters up front. Not this one. At the end of the novel I'm still wondering what the hell the skin suit looked like, how it worked etc.
And then there was the overuse of Italian throughout the novel. Like THAT's a language that will survive the next million years. Shyah. Anyway, I don't know a lot of italian, and many terms I had to work out from context, which was bloody annoying, only understanding some things toward the end.
And if the main character was going to feel sick in the stomach for whatever reason one more friggin time, I was going to choke and throw the whole unit across the bus.
One of the characters was really cool, one was overly flawed, and one was overly Good. In D&D the Good character was Lawful-Stupid. That's annoying.
And yet I will read the conclusion. Have to really, since it's only really half a book in terms of plot. Also annoying. I won't be buying it though.

The Machinist

Dark and moody, this film has you guessing for the duration. "What the hell is wrong with THIS guy!". It's really cool. There are several innocuous images/scenes during the film that are repeated over and over, and isn't until the end that it makes sense. So unlike Sinead, stick with the film until it is finished. I won't ruin it for you. The sticky notes are brilliant though.

Installing Windows 7 Beta. Nightmare

I decided to install Windows 7 Beta that was recently released to the world. I'm seriously getting the shits with the speed of Vista in terms of UI click through speed. Its so friggin annoying. Rather than jumping in and upgrading Vista though, I sensibly decided to blow away an old XP partition I was no longer using. Thank Fuck.
The install went fine, and it even all came up, and damn, Windows 7 is as fast as Windows XP for UI click through speed. It feels great. One problem though, it didn't detect my network card, and subsequent hours of throwing drivers at it only succeeded in screwing up the video driver as well. Stupid thing. Hella annoying.
I'm starting again now. This time I'll take a System Restore after install so I can get out of those problems more quickly.
It's really annoying when you can't access the internet to fix the internet. *sigh* Switch back to Vista, dealing with annoying startup speed and browser load. Research, download driver attempt, reboot to Win 7, install, fail, rinse, repeat. Arrrgh.
[Update 15/1/2009]
I decided to blow away the whole install, format the disk and try again. This took ages just to set up as I had to back up files from the target drive into my already stretched disk space. Now, every time I try the installation, it fails with "corrupt of missing files, error 0x80070570". And the MD5 hash on the install ISO is perfect. I've even tried installing from an unzip of the ISO as well as a virtual drive of it. Fuck Nose.

Don't Mess with the Zohan

OK, I normally don't like films with Adam Sandler, or his acting. But this is actually quite funny, and he doesn't play his usual character. Its funny, watch it.
Oh, I was drinking whiskey again. But is still funny, is good!

Finished Faery Tale

Woot! Finished Faery Tale on my emulated Amiga 500. Just in time before I go back to work tomorrow.
You have to collect 5 gold idols through the game, but I found I was missing one towards the end and was pretty sure I had been everywhere. But no. Whilst I had been through Hemsath's Tomb, featuring the longest corridor in computer game history (at the time, and probably still close at 5 minutes realtime), I hadn't searched all the maze thinking I'd already extracted the bones of the Lich King (or whatever I was there for) and had missed the damn idol. It took me forever to realise this, and then to go back and find it. I eventually made it to the astral plane, and the freaky section where you walk backwards, defeated the baddy with magic wand, and won. Yay!

Par for the Course

What the hell is it with the saying "par for the course"? Its starting to annoy me. Especially, actually, only, since I've started playing golf, this is starting to annoy me. As you know, it is used to mean, "that's entirely normal". But par on a golf course is NOT entirely normal. In fact its damn fricken difficult. I would have to quit work for a year and probably a lot more to focus on playing this stupidly frustrating game every day, honing what very little ability I have, practising until my brain exploded with the sheer folly of the task to even approach something that was considered "par for the course". And even then it would have to be an easy course.
Don't use this phrase. It's stupid.
A better phrase for "that's entirely normal" might be "that's a redundancy in the software industry". Sure, it doesn't quite roll off the tongue, but at least it's true. And appropriate. Again.

The Dying Light

Just finished reading The Dying Light, part 2 of the Evergence Trilogy. This was a much better book than part 1. More space action, more hidden agendas and politics, more new tech, more details on alien cultures and developed the Evergence main themes and plot very nicely. The last third had me turning the pages and ignoring the wailing of the kids and the lure of the swimming pool on this hot new years day. Good stuff.