Dominion

This is an excellent card game. I've been playing this a little the last few weeks with the D&D guys as absences have prevented us from actually playing D&D. Andrew introduced us to it and a bunch of other recent games, as he is want to do. Very cool.

Orbiting Carbon Observatory Launch Failure

Bugger. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory failed to pop out of the rocket nosecone.

Gradisil

I have given up reading this.
I'm afraid I don't have much good to say about this book. It seems to me highly experimental, and failed whatever experiments the author thought to run.
a) It is written as a series of first person memoirs, and because there is no one leading character throughout the novel, rather a series of characters over several generations of a family, provides a choppy, discontinuous experience. The first person, letter-writing style also serves to make things incredibly boring by recounting lots of character minutiae, which OK when building a central character in a novel, is just a waste of space when the novel carries over multiple generations.
b) The author decided to try a literature special effect of changing the way words are spelt more and more as the novel progresses, presumably to add some sort of future times feel. It was just annoying. crack -> crak; towing -> towin; (the final n replaced by a weird backward, almost n) are some examples. Distracting and pointless.

The novel is based around a technology which, to me, is clearly absurd. It postulates winged planes flying into space because they leverage a magnetohydrodynamic technology. This technology has a strong magnetic field across an electrically conducting fluid causing a force on that fluid. This is the technology the silent sub in The Hunt for Red October used, where the conducting fluid is seawater. This was at least feasible, some company at least making this sort-of work in the real world to achieve 15km/h. This novel pretends that a plane could leverage this effect using the Earth's weak magnetic field and "[electric] pulses of lightning strike intensity through the wings." Shyeah, right! Even if you allow a novel one preposterous technology to base a story on, this is ridiculous.

Overall, the page to page text was just plain boring, and I found myself speed reading, then skimming, then straight out skipping wads of pages.
Awful.

Asteroids, dust in Earth's orbit.

Interesting articles here and here about the possibility of large asteroids sitting at the Earth-Sun Lagrange points, L4, L5. We would probably have worked this out by now only it's difficult to see these places from Earth because of the constant angle with the Sun. The STEREO probes are going in for a look. Also interesting is the suggestion that the object that collided with the Earth to produce the Moon could have sat in one of these points, so it's worth knowing about their contents.

Prador Moon

Just finished reading this.
Short. Punchy. Multiple eviscerations. Neal Asher is known for his violent action scenes, but he takes gory and disturbing writing to a new level in this novel. This has at least as many entrail-littered pages as The Skinner. Tops.
Prador Moon covers first contact and some of the ensuing war with the Prador, a very nasty alien race of giant crustaceans. Fantastic! The Prador feature in several other of his novels, but this really fleshes out their culture and attitudes. (fleshes. out. yes!)
I was also very appreciative of reading more detail of the ubiquitous aug, the brain augmentation technology in use in the Polity. This novel lies a little in the past relative to most of the other Polity novels, so the augs were mostly a little less advanced than in other novels, but the description of their use in Prador Moon is brilliant and left me wanting one. More than usual.
Prador Moon covers one story from the beginning of the Prador war, and I would have liked a longer book with more coverage of the war, especially the mass thralling of humans hinted at in The Skinner. Perhaps this will come in a later novel?

Also, I've just found Neal Asher's blog here and am now a rabid Follower. Mr Asher, if you ever find yourself reading this, thank you for your novels, you are an SF God.

Dollhouse S1 E1

I've been waiting for this.
The first episode is out, and its really good. A bit sexy, a bit of action, a bit of violence, a bit of tech, a bit of conflict. You gotta look for the angle in each episode I guess, given the "Everything is not as it seems" theme. The ending was a little predictable after the twist was established. But that's ok.

fixing the toilet

The laundry toilet was leaking again. How annoying. At least I was able to fix it, and while wearing Ug Boots. Cool! Turned out a plug in the bottom of the cistern on one side had a badly deteriorated seal, but after taking it out and rubbing all the flaking bits off and screwing it back on, it seems ok. For now.
Now I have to go empty the pool of all the extra rain water so the skimmer box works. *sigh*

[update]
Damn. That didn't work. It's still leaking. Now I have to go to the plumbing supplies shop. How tedious. *more sigh*

[update 21/2]
The plumbing supplies shop couldn't provide a replacement o-ring, but suggested I whack silicone all round it and try again. Done that. Waiting for it to dry...

[update 24/2]
Shit. That didn't work either. Maybe if I just plug the whole overflow pipe....

[update 28/2]
*sigh* Turns out the water is actually flowing down the overflow pipe, because the filling system isn't switching off entirely. Now I'll have to replace it. How I didn't notice that in the first place, I don't know.

Implied Spaces

Just finished reading this.
Excellent read, really good stuff. The main character is this Zen-like wormhole-wielding, sword-bearing, 1000 year old, fully backed up ex programmer with an AI avatar in a black cat companion who travels the created pocket universes studying the implied spaces within them for fun.
If that doesn't draw you to the book, read a real review. Then you would miss out on massive rail guns, antimatter sprays, zombie plagues, battles, death, resurrection, and AI shenanigans.
The book is very readable, well written and fast paced. I'll be reading more of Walter Jon Williams work for sure.

Dickhead

A Prize Dickhead.
This guy (whose name I shall not utter as he probably googles himself) today released a statement to say he received "a flash from the Spirit of God: that His conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb"
i.e. "God told me in a dream last week that he doesn't love Victoria anymore because of the state's stance on abortion. The bushfires are the obvious result of that."

Dickhead. Dickhead for the following reasons (oh, where to start?):

• God's love is unconditional (random page proving my point).
• God most probably does not exist.
• Dreams are just you talking to yourself.
• Telling people who have lost loved ones that it's because God is punishing them really doesn't help.
• Telling people what you think they need to hear isn't necessarily what they actually need to hear.
• Using a national disaster to push you own politics is disgusting, immoral and bordering on evil.
• Using religious righteousness as the excuse for the above is worse.
  

Superhard Ionic Boron

This is very cool chemistry.
Boron is the only element for which the ground state is not experimentally known, all well known examples of Boron are compounds. These guys synthesized a new form of boron at high temperatures and pressures and had to use an evolutionary style computer program to determine its form. Its a wild crystalline ionic structure that is almost as hard as diamond. It's crazy - check it out.

Chaos Space

I've been reading this crap.
What's worse, it's now clear that this is not a two part novel, but part of an ongoing interminable never ending series of crap.
I was amused at some level that the main character, who had endless references made to her icky stomach, had in this novel little or no references to being sick or queasy, even though she was pregnant!
There were many metaphors and similies used which were ridiculous and just made me want to throw the book across the bus at a stranger and suggest they read it instead.
I feel the style of writing generally would be better suited to poor fantasy rather than annoying science fiction. Its just a whimsical drama in a space setting. Yawn. There are all these goodies in the background, but they are barely hinted at.
This book takes the main characters nowhere. And no one does anything of interest.
I am NOT reading any more of this series.

LHC: more electrical faults have been discovered

Repairs still on target, but they're picking up some more faults.
Looks like we're waiting until at least October 2009.
Hurry UP!

OptusGadget

I love the OptusGadget.
Its a Vista desktop gadget that tells you how much of your monthly bandwidth usage you have left. If you're with Optusnet. In Australia. Obviously.
Get it here.

Autocorrect in Thunderbird

This is something that has annoyed me in Thunderbird for a long time. There's no autocorrect when you are typing mail. Outlook has had this for years, and it's something that you come to rely on when banging out email.
Well, I finally put my googling brain to the task and came up trumps. A Thunderbird extension.
You can find it here.

Now if only blogspot would implement it here.

[Update 24/2/10] - note the extension in the link above does not work in Thunderbird 3.x, only 2.x

[Update 11/3/10] - I've downloaded Phrase Express. That works, and works for all applications as a keyboard hook! Great stuff.

[Update 5/1/13] - Why are you still using a mail client at all? Its all in the cloud!