The Parasite

I just finished The Parasite by Neal Asher.
This was quite meaty for a novella and I really enjoyed it. It is one of Asher's earlier works, and lacks a little bit in the editing compared with the Pan/Tor novels, but that's OK because if it wasn't self re-published on Amazon it wouldn't be available at all.
In particular it was a treat to read about some early Polity tech ideas before the Polity books were written, for example, chainglass, golems, and an obsession with nano tendrils taking over a human body.
There was plenty of Asher style gore, and a high body count, much enjoyed, good fun.

Golf

I played nine holes of golf with a bunch of mates today. Damn, shame I was just topping most of my shots. Ah, well. Still, really pleasant getting out in the sun with a great bunch of guys, followed by beers. Thanks to Rob, Dave, Olaf and Paul :_)

Surface Detail

Just finished reading Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks.
I love Banks' Culture novels, they're always a lot of fun to read and I wasn't disappointed this time. This one revolves around the existence of virtual afterlives of various species throughout the galaxy. Many intelligent species host massive simulations where individuals can be uploaded to, where they can live forever in an environment of their choosing, or until they get bored with it all and want to terminate, or be frozen for a period of time and so on. The novel focuses on the virtual hells though, rather than the wonderful but boring virtual heavens.
The descriptions of the environment and the events of the main virtual hell made me physically wince, and stop reading on several occasions. Wow. That's some nasty shit right there.
The story revolves around a battle between groups of species that are for and against the existence of virtual hells, of course with the Culture being against, but not getting directly involved for political reasons. As always, the Culture AIs are hilarious in their dealings with their people, and other species, but in particular, I loved the SC ship called "Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints". I was laughing out loud on the bus, its avatar was awesome. Another ship with an excellent name was the "Me, I'm Counting". Brilliant.
An excellent, well written and fast paced book.

Sony Media Player

My MediaGate media player just died, the video out started to play up, so I tossed it out, and bought a WD TV Live. However, that didn't seem to be capable of putting out video on component out to my Sony SD CRT telly. No idea why, and after a couple of support calls to verify I hadn't done anything stupid, I sent it back. Shame. It seemed like a decent unit at a good price.
So I went and bought a Sony SMPN100. Cost a bit more, but not that much, and it plugged straight in and worked straight away. Sony talks to Sony.
And it is friggin awesome. It plays all the media types I have shared from my Windows 7 PC, and streams direct from ABC iView, YouTube, and a bunch of other stuff.
Sweet.

[update 2 July 2012]
Except the damn thing only plays HD from a USB stick. Useless. Now that I've upgraded all my systems to HD, this has to go. I'm currently using an old Patriot Box Office.