Snow in the Desert

I just finished reading Snow in the Desert by Neal Asher.
This is a Short Read (novelette) set in the Polity universe from Asher's Cormac novels.
You have sex, violence and plenty of action packed into this punchy little short story. It adds a new bio/tech anomoly to the Polity setting which was interesting, and ties in various aspects from the Polity that we already know and love.
Good stuff.


[updated for typos]

Pink Noise: A Posthuman Tale

Just finished reading this.

It was shorter than I had feared halfway through.

Neuromancer

I just finished reading Neuromancer by William Gibson.
I hadn't read this for years and yes, it's still awesome. It's hard to believe it was written in 1984. The descriptions of the Matrix, the shared virtual space, with the bright lights of the mega corporations and AIs with their defensive firewalls and ice still feel futuristic and possible. There's a whole range of really cool tech on display, like nerve splicing, physical appearance and performance upgrades, derm patches for drug delivery, obviously the Matrix and AI, an uploaded mind, a rotating space habitat and being able to ride on the back of anothers sensory input via the Matrix.
It's not just all the really cool tech either, the language used is mind blowing in many parts. I love the descriptions of the recreational drugs kicking in for the protagonist, Case, and also the virtual runs against the defensive ice of an AI, where his mouth was "filled with an aching taste of blue" for example.
You really should read this if you haven't already.

Immortality

I just finished reading Immortality.
I really enjoyed this, particularly the concept, which I thought was brilliant. Seemingly randomly, hundreds of people in a single location all within a tight radius just die within a minute or so. It starts happening again and again, in larger and larger scale, and there is a race to discover just what is causing it and how to fix it. There is clearly a bacterium involved, but it just doesn't make sense.
The pacing is quite good given the novel is around 500 pages and the information about what is really happening is fed constantly so there are few boring patches. I liked the way a chapter would be devoted showing the lives of some characters only to have them die in a kill zone shortly afterwards. It was a little USA focused but hey, you get that.
Excellent.
99c.

Why is Optus so Awful?

Why is Optus so awful. I'm probably unfairly picking out Optus in this rant, when it really applies to all telecommunication providers generally. They are all horrible.
In particular, here are the things I have found horrible about Optus as a mobile comms provider:

• The coverage and availability of 3G data is pretty horrible. This might be slightly better with Telstra. Yes, I'm aware it is a difficult problem to solve and needs to be balanced with having 3G towers everywhere, but I never realised the situation was this bad.
• Pricing. Seriously? They charge at least ten times more than is reasonable for calls and data, and then give you ten times as much credit for any given plan. Really? Obviously this is so they can charge massive amounts when you go over your quota. It's just ridiculous.
• Website. The Website is horrible. To check your current mobile usage is slow, convoluted, and when you get there plain confusing and inadequate. See previous point about making vast amounts of money off people blowing their limit.
• I had bad experience actually getting a phone in the local Optus store. The expected guilt trip over not buying insurance was amusing. The selling of phone covers boring. The pushing of premium SMS and voice mail etc tedious. And after saying 'no' to everything, I was still charged for some premium SMS thing on my first bill. Oh, and then it took them three days to get my number switched from my old phone when it was supposed to take a maximum of four hours. FFS people.

You may be inclined to feel a little sorry for them though. They are pushing a seriously aging business model against the flow of technology. It won't be long before all we need from these people is a pure data connection, and the phone and software does the rest. Already we see Apple killing SMS with iMessage, and obviously there are a bunch of VOIP providers. All we need now is for them to fix mobile data access on their networks so all these things work all the time. Maybe that is why they aren't overly concerned about 3G not working half the time. It keeps them in the business of selling telephone calls and SMS. They've already lost the fixed line home phone business.

iPhone 4S

I finally gave up my aging Nokia E61i and got myself an Apple iPhone 4S.
Loving it. Siri is fun, but not awesome, although I have used it a couple of times to send a text (or iMessage) while walking, which is really useful.
The benefits of a 4S are all well known so I don't need to go into much detail, suffice to say that as my first phone device to do 3G data properly without worrying about cost too much, it's awesome. I never really used the Nokia 3G data as the cost didn't justify the value, but with the iPhone, it certainly does now.

Out of the Black

I recently read Out of the Black.
I haven't posted for a while, but I thought this was worth noting as I really enjoyed it. It was a little bit different, mixing in demon magic, zombie hords, mysticism, ninja pirates and nanotech. Good pacing, great concepts, lots of fun.

Firefox pausing, freezing

I've been annoyed for a while now about Firefox constantly freezing up for a couple of seconds at a time. And today I've fixed it. To do the same, go into the options, and find the Plugins section, and disable Shockwave Flash. In fact, disable any Adobe product.
Flash is evil and should be banned.

Earth Trojan Asteroid

This Earth trojan asteroid has been recently discovered. Trojan objects typically orbit one of the stable Lagrange points, L4 and L5, and to a lesser degree L1, L2, L3. I posted a cool animation showing this for Jupiter previously. What's interesting about this find is that it seems this asteroid is in a weird oscillating orbit moving between L3 and L4. I've never heard of anything doing that before, but orbital mechanics gets very chaotic in actual space with lots of other planets and the moon around. The simple theory of the Lagrange points is all well and good, but this looks just weird.

The Jennifer Morgue

I just finished reading The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross.
This might not be Science Fiction, but it is firmly in the fantasy/horror/tech/comedy genre and what's not to love about that? This book is a lot of fun to read. I particularly enjoyed the main character's hacking attempts using his occult apps on his Palm Treo. The spyware eyeliner was pretty cool too.

Swarm

I just finished reading Swarm by B. V. Larson.

I recently read Larson's Mech, and was expecting a similar ride. Happily, I had exactly that. This is another well paced easy read with a lot of action and large scale destruction. I kept thinking how similar it felt to War of the Worlds in the early parts, as alien ships arrive and start plucking people out of their houses. It quickly turns out they are testing them and trying to get the best possible commanders as possible. For what though, I won't spoil here.
I like where this series is headed. Swarm finishes with a minor win for the protagonist, but the larger picture is quite a bit more than knee deep in shit for humanity.
Excellent.

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.