Misc. Life and Books
Today was a long day. It is review time at work. I and my peers spent eight hours in a room with our test manager (our immediate boss) doing calibration of data for the team for the period of the last year. We’re doing another six hours tomorrow. Woot!
Needless to say, one walks out of these meetings a bit fried. I came home to R and we went out to Greek food. We finished things off by watching the final DVD of the second season of Millennium. That’s finally done.
I finished Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town last night (available for free here). I haven’t decided what to make of it yet. It is some kind of fantastic realism piece (if that’s the term). His previous novels have been slashdot-esque Science Fiction. This is slashdot-esque surreal, modern fantasy. After all, the main character’s father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine… There is the obligatory tech as well: building a mesh wifi network in Toronto.
I think I’m going to sit down and finish the Rifters trilogy by Peter Watts now (insert Millennium joke here). I read Starfish when it first came out. I started Maelstrom but didn’t get into it so I put it aside. Now that the whole thing is out (even though the bastards at Tor Books split the third book into two books against the author’s will), I figure that I should read it. Reading Watts’ pseudo-blog, it is apparant that he is a kindred soul in some basic function of his outlook on the world. I like him.
Someone made a little fan graphic for the Rifter protagonists of his books, who are shit on by the world in more ways than they know:
They get their revenge in the end, right or wrong, better or worse.
Watts writes with an anger of the injustice of the world that reminds me of Jon Courtnay Grimwood’s work. People with power paying lip service to the greater good while raping the world (sometimes literally).
On a completely different note, you can download over an hour of Hunter S. Thompson from 1977 here.
Here are the download links to the individual files:
01 Intro, American Dream, Tex Coalson (06:56 – 6.3mb) 02 Nixon and Football, Vietnam Books (04:33 – 4.2mb) 03 Tom Wolfe (03:19 – 3.0mb) 04 Trudeau, Running For Office (05:48 – 5.3mb) 05 Rockafellar, Tri-Lateral Comm. (05:58 – 5.5mb) 06 Rush, Eldridge Cleever (04:21 – 4.0mb) 07 VD, Disco & Rolling Stone (05:50 – 5.3mb) 08 World Series, MK – Ultra (03:57 – 3.6mb) 09 Kesey, Canada (04:10 – 3.8mb) 10 Evil As Nixon?, Uganda, Degeneracy (05:32 – 5.1mb) 11 Steadman, Gonzo (04:20 – 4.0mb) 12 More Kesey, Avoiding Jail (02:36 – 2.4mb) 13 Silver Platter, The Slide (03:55 – 3.6mb) 14 Carter Argument (02:34 – 2.3mb) 15 Drug Question, Drunk And Loud (04:42 – 4.3mb) 16 Three Wishes, Fascist (05:21 – 4.9mb) 17 Grateful Dead (00:42 – 665k)
