The Kriptonomicon

My Swordhand is Singing

By Marcus Sedgwick
A YA medieval vampire thriller, set in Transyvannia itself! Well researched and enjoyably historical book.

Best of 208 - Books

Ok,so it has to be 'War and Peace', ,
but otherwise runners up would be;
The Yiddish Policemen's Union
The Graveyard Book
The Name of The Wind
Little Brother.

How about you?

Best of 2008 - Music

Normally I agonize over this, but this year its pretty easy;

Portico Quartet - "Knee Deep in the North Sea".
The album was launched at the beginning of the year, and they were nominated for a Mercury prize for it. Saw them twice, and looking forward to their new album in 2009!

Runners up, not limited to if they were actually produced this year, but more when I acquired them;
Marseille Figs - "The Dirty Cannon" - great dirty bluegrass album, very original stuff
Gun'n'Roses - "Chinese Democracy" - only listened to this once so far, but far more complex musically then their previous albums.
Note that I don't include classical music in this - thats a separate post!

Bluetooth on Fedora Core 10

f you're having trouble with Bluetooth support on FC10 - the gnome applet not listing the adaptor, not promping for a pairing PIN etc, then search fedoraforum.org for similar issues - I wasted about three hours trying to get my BB Bold to act as a 3G modem with a FC10 laptop (working fine under FC9), until I found a post stating that it was a buggy bluez package, and enabled the testing repository and pulled down the latest package - fixed all the issues.
On the bright side, FC10 fixes the problem with OpenVPN where it couldn't set a default route on ppp connections, which made 3G dongles and BB modems no use for remote use for work. Might be a Fedora only problem, though - didn't try on Ubuntu..

Territory

By Emma Bull
Oh, this was just wonderfull. Bull writes the book like a perfect novelisation of Deadlands, but with wit and characters beyond your average RPG.
I enjoyed this so much I ended up browsing wikipedia's articles on Tombstone and Wyatt Earp just to see how much was real and how much she'd made up!
I wasn't sure what to expect, and was wondering if I should have paid the hardback price, when I did a book run from The Book Depository last month, but like everything else I've read of hers, it takes a genre and twists it imaginatively, in a similar, but different, way to Gaiman. A pleasure to read, and I just wish she'd written more books. I'll have to hunt out her back catalog also, which appears to be criminalls hard to get hold of. Well, post Xmas, I know what books I'll be adding to my shopping cart!

Hammered

By Elizabeth Bear
I've started the process of reading the entire Bear back catalog, and Hammered was the first I could find. I didn' realise until later that its the first in a trilogy, and this only became apparent as the book went on, and there was too much plot left to resolve!
Its recognisably her style, and good cyberpunk, but lacks some of the subtelty and craft that marks her later works. Its still about redemption, though, a theme that runs through all of Bear's works I read.
I wouldn't have read more based on this book, but I will read the rest of the series and keep reading her back catalog, but I might interleave this with the later works she's releasing.

Amazon.co.uk mp3 store

So my first experience with this wasn't positive, as my card company decided that buying books from Amazon was OK, but MP3's was just madness, and therefore must be fraud, and locked my card. Bless them. Unfortunately, Amazon's systems took a dim view of this and cancelled the order, including the entire basket.. So I had to go through whole process again a day later, adding all the songs again. You'd have thought that in this circumstance they'd have moved the items to the 'saved for later' section of the basket - they have a section for this after all!
Anyway, downloaded using the 'Amazon MP3 Downloader', which made the process of downloading addding to iTunes pleasantly seamless, and I'm now listening to a KT Tunstall EP on my rather good entry level 'Ultimate Ears' iPhone headphones via the iBook. MP3's are 320Kbps with album art, all in all a well done implementation. The downloader creates its own folder in the ~/Music folder. I'd been looking at 7digital.co.uk but I suspect they have serious competition now. The only question will be catalog. I've already found some stuff on Amazon that isn't on iTunes (KT Tunstall EP's and a Sophie Solomon track I was unaware of previously). Being that the labels seriously want to move out of Mr Jobs influence, I expect this will increase..

Fedora Core 10

So, I run FC 9 on my HP 2510p at work, and a week after FC10 came out I thought I'd try upgrading. I used the preinstall method, and then the DVD install, but neither worked. The first method complained about a partiton (one it had created in memory!) being too small, and the latter about not being able to mount the /home partition. To be fair, I had encrypted the entire disk of the HP, to try out the functionality, and the interaction between the installer and that probably caused it.. The encryption worked well, BTW, from a protect all the laptop content angle, but as I was aiming at protecting the content should the US's DHS require me to turn it on, and copy it, this would have been of little use, since you have to input the password at boot. Anyway, I'm borrowing a Lenovo Thinkpad X200, and installing from scratch. So far, everything is detected out of the box, with the only exception, from the limited time I had to test, was the built in EVDO modem (but I might need to activate this on Vodafone via Windows, not looked into it as I don't intend to use it), and the webcam, which Cheese hung on trying to get the picture, although the light showing the camera was on did light up. I'll do a follow-up post with the packages I add after installation, for interest..

Portico Quartett, Redux

A and I went to see them live last weekend. Last time they had been part of another programme, but this time it was just them. In addition to some of the tracks from their current Album,'Knee Deep in the North Sea', they also played some new tracks. The great thing was,as this is jazz, even the tracks we knew were fresh, with different improvisations. They also revealed that they have a new album coming out around March (I think), so looking forward to that!

Acer Aspire One

I have a new toy. I've been lusting after one of the so called 'netbooks' for a while, but as I couldn't justify it, I've been holding off, knowing that the price will drop of the older models and drawing up a selection criteria.
When the supermarkets started stocking them I knew I'd be able to get a good deal, and this thursday, as we did our weekly shop at ASDA, they were selling the Acer Aspire One for £215. This was the one I had my eye on too, with a 120GB hard disk. The only thing it doesn't have is bluetooth, and I only use that for Blackberry connectivity these days, and have a usb adaptor or two hanging around. Plus there's this cute almost-flush usb adaptor doing the rounds for £15 or so, so why pay more for a Lenovo or Asus 'top of the line' netbook for just that?
I never thought I would, but I succumbed to walking around ASDA, shopping, with my iPhone checking out the excellent Ubuntu documentation (yes, I'm switching from Debian to Ubuntu. Don't hate me. I'll still run vanilla Deb on a server..) to make sure I could get it working, before purchasing it. At least it wasn't the Blackberry. Of course, a busy week at work means I didn't get to play with it properly until the weekend.
The Linux it comes with is OK, but I can see how people might be underwhelmed. Rather than learn another *nix variant, I used the USBstick method of live booting Ubuntu 8.10 to install it. A hint for those trying - the Ubuntu 8.10 program appears to be slightly b0rked - it created the image on the 4GB Kingston Data Traveller stick I had, but it wouldn't boot, with a 'invalid boot partition' image. This is apparently a reported bug on Launchpad, and the workaround is to use a different tool - the distro agnostic unetbootin. Interestingly, everyone reporting it had a Kingston 4GB stick..
Ubuntu then installed fine, no wireless. As the docs said, I did a full update and installed the backports Atheros driver. No joy. Much rebooting and checking of /var/log/messages and dmesg and swearing. Then I tried turning it on with the soft switch. Success! Ahem.. Rebooted after some other changes and... no wireless. More swearing, more pressing switches. Eventually discovered via Ubuntu forums that problems with the WPA authentication being fixed by shutting down and leaving it for a few mins prompted me to try that, and success! No idea what that's about, but so far (touch wood) its worked fine. Oh, and the 120GB hard disk? 160GB in mine. Splendid!
I'm documenting what I install for a followup 'what to add after installing Ubuntu' meme thats doing the rounds on the Ubuntu Planet blog aggregator.

I've used the word Ubuntu a lot, but this experience, and that of my MacBook has really shown me how far the distro is ahead of the others in terms of documentation and thinking about what people want to do with it. Very impressed so far.
Of course, Fedora Core 10 ('Cambridge' heh.) is out on Tuesday, so I'll be trialling that at work. It may win me over, you never now.

It looks like I'm not the only one buying one of these. And blogging about it..

Twittering.

People seem to, and I don't seem to get to my blog as much as I'd like (unlike this weekend, perhaps). Do you? Should I?

Survivors

on BBC tonight. Didn't suck. Colour me surprised!

Patterson Joseph for Doctor Who!

I thus declare my allegiance. He would be great, in my opinion. BBC news article, if you don't know what I'm talking about

Blackberry Bold

This was finally released by T-Mobile, so of course I got one to 'evaluate' for work. The first (working) 3G Blackberry from RIM definitely bears investigation..
Actually, I'm quite impressed. The 3G modem works easily under Linux using WVDial (you can figure it out, but a good set of instructions are here.
I'm also impressed how open it is - the internet memory and the microSD card show up as drives under Linux, and both Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora Core 9 appear to charge the device just fine from the USB port. With the latest (1.4) version of Banshee the drives show up as mass storage devices so you can copy music files to and fro (no support for Ogg that I'm aware). Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to support playlist sync, but I might look into syncropated to provide playlist sync. If it supported smart playlist sync and remembering the position of files so marked, I'd be able to switch away from my iPhone. Alas, it doesn't seem to, but I might look to see if there are music players for the BB that do..
Almost forgot - its apparently possible to set-up two way syncing using Multisync with Evolution, so I could sync diary and address book, if I wanted.
Battery life is pretty good. I use BlueProximity at work to lock and unlock my screen when I walk away and back to my laptop, and the downside is that I haven't hit the sweet spot between pinging the bluetooth often enough to be responsive and draining the battery, so its hard on the phone. My old BB Pearl lasted just over a day, but it looks like the Bold will last two easy.
The downsides? Well, the web browsing experience is pretty crummy still - I installed Opera but that didn't help much, its still nowhere as nice as the iPhone.
I guess my next best hope is the T-Mobile Android G1. I can't get it via work, as its not on the business tariff, and it has enough issues (3.5 headphone adaptor? Hello?) that I don't intend getting one for me just yet, but its very promising. Interestingly, the Banshee 1.4 release brings native G1 support - smart playlists, everything. It is very tempting.. Perhaps I'll wait for some other phones to come out with the Android OS on (or an iPhone port! :-).

Portico Quartet

Are coming back to the Junction on the 30th. We've booked tickets, anyone fancy joining us?

OMG WTF?

There's no pine or mutt in the Ubuntu repositories!!

The Graveyard Book

By Neil Gaiman
This being his latest young adult book, featuring Nobody 'Bod' Owens, and growing up in a graveyard, after his parents were murdered by a serial killer, this is in no way a morbid book!
Capsule Review: Wow.
Probably his best book to date - wonderfully written, incorporating all kinds of legends and fantasies and real world facts that combine beautifully. I bought it in hardback as part of a recent book splurge (I was getting low, OK?), and I'm very glad I did. Looking forward to rereading it!

Arabesk

By Jon Courtenay Grimwood
A three volume book made up of Pashazade, Effendi and Felaheen.
Madhatter loaned me this. Combining the three books into one makes for a joined up narrative, but I suspect I'd have enjoyed it more if I had read it as three separate books. Nothing to stop me doing that, but once I've started...
The books were very evocative of the Arab world I've holidayed in - Grimwood has done a good job of bringing the culture and experience to life, as far as I can tell, anyway. This would be a great series to read while in Tunisia, or Marrakech, or even one of the Gulf states. The story weaves near future sci-fi believably, with genetic technology being an underlying theme, as well, as the use and abuse of power and how people adapt to the future. The protagonist is a little *too* competent for me - genetically engineered or not, he was just a little too capable. Grimwood did a good job of making him believably, but there were still points in the book where the only reason he failed was to further the narrative. He did a good job of weaving most of the threads together, however.
I think I've figured out the ending, but I'm not sure!

Ubuntu on my Macbook

So a few weeks previous, running low on space on the 120GB drive I'd got with my core 2 duo black macbook, I bought a larger hard disk for it (first from Dabs, which was a mistake, because apparently there are two types of 2.5" disk, one larger than the other. and the Macbook takes the smaller, naturally. I then went to macupgrades.co.uk, and got a 320GB drive for not much more, which fitted perfectly. Restore was easy with Superduper!. A week or so later, I was reading about the Ubuntu 8.10 release, and came across the Ubuntu Community page for installing on Macbooks.
It showed that using BootCamp, I could partition my drive without losing data, and install Ubuntu. So I did. The page also covered the setup for the hardware, which, apart from the iSight, worked out of the box. I even got multi touch button clicking working, which is needed on the Macbooks, and damn cool!
I can't honestly say what I did to get the iSight working, but the instructions were most of it. I think the issue is that you need to power cycle, not just reboot, after copying over the firmware, otherwise it doesn't detect the camera properly. Took me til 2am sat night to discover that, though.. The things I'll do to get Cheese working..

I'm impressed with the hardware detection - the Ubuntu article is pretty comprehensive, but I could have used 90% of the kit out of the box.
I liked the fact that it mounted the HFS+ partition (albeit read-only) so I could copy files over.
In fact, with the aid of the iTunes and Rhythmbox Ratings script and site, I was able to import all the items in my iTunes library into RhythmBox, and then import all the ratings. As I've spent hours rating most of my library, and have playlists that select on ratings, last played etc, all of which I can replicate in RhythmBox, being able to import all of this was very helpful and rather cool. A tip for anyone else trying this, as mentioned in the comments on the site, you need to make sure that the songs have a rating first before running the script, or it can't adjust the ratings correctly. I simply marked all my songs as 1 star, then reran the script. Power saving works flawlessly, not something I've had good experiences with on Linux.

On the downside, I've noticed the laptop runs hotter, although I suspect I can adjust the fan speeds until I get the coolness I'm used to. Also, Network Manager, while being fine and all that, does still lose its mind from time to time and not connect the wireless networks I use.

I'm very tempted to move over. I've ported my RSS feeds from NetNewsWire to Google Reader, and bought an app for the iPhone that syncs with it. Google reader, using Gears, can be used offline, so I've not lost any functionality, and have found it faster than NNW, although not quite as much of a pleasure to use. The iPhone. Therein lies the sticking point. I can reformat my iPod to FAT32 and use it with RhythmBox - I can even install RocketBox and play Ogg files, but the iPhone itself I may not be abe to manage or sync. I've jailbroken it, and I know people have got it working, but its flaky.
Will I keep booting into MacosX to sync the iPhone, or will I change it to another device? I'm not sure. Podcast syncing and tethering are 'just around the corner' for the iPhone, which would greatly reduce the need to sync it, as that's what I listen to the most. Also, what alternatives are there? The N95/6 is a great phone, Symbian etc, but reportedly hard to get to work with Linux. I had high hopes for the Android phone, but I don't like the hardware - at least I can change the headphones on the iPhone!

The Doubtful Guest

I've a picture of the stage before they started (and before I saw the sign saying photography forbidden, oh well) up on flikr - check the sidebar.
A. saw this and bought tickets for us. Its an adaption of the Edward Gorey book of the same name. As surreal and weird as the original book, this was some of the best theatre I've seen, and pretty much defies description. I think the show has ended now, but if it hasn't, head along to the Cambridge Arts Theatre and see it. You may even get a Q&A with the cast, as we did.

Some nifty command line stuff

So after reading in the Halloween countdown pages at the Redecorating Middle-Earth in Early Lovecraft blog that Mary Shelley's book 'The Last Man' was available as a free audiobook, I thought I'd download it and listen to it as a series of podcasts (thanks to podcastamatic) but when I got to the page, the low quality mp3's were mixed in with the high quality ones. I've addressed the multiple mp3 download issue before, but this time I thought I could come up with something that got what I wanted. One last night command line sesson, and lo;

for i in `~/perl/mp3grep.pl thelastman.html | grep -v _64k` ; do filename=`echo $i | cut -d '/' -f 6 `;curl -C - -L -o $filename $i; done

A neat script that downloads the files, and renames them to something sensible. I'm sure you could replace the initial curl of the 'thelastman.html' file with another shell script to extract the info, but that I'll leave as an exercise.
The things you'll do when you realise MacOSX only has curl, not wget (indeed, I understand why now, curl being much more powerful), and you determine to proceed anyway..

Japanese Banking Crisis

We have learned from reliable sources that the Japanese banking crisis shows no signs of improvement. If anything, it is worsening.
Following last week's announcement that Origami Bank had folded, we have received more breaking news ... According to our sources, Sumo Bank has gone belly up and Bonsai Bank is preparing to cut back some of its branches.
Karaoke Bank is up for sale and is going for a song! Furthermore, shares in Kamikaze Bank have taken a nose-dive and 500 back-office staff at Karate Bank got the chop.
Analysts report there is something fishy going on at Sushi Bank and staff there fear they may be in for a raw deal.
Stay tuned ...

Sorry, sorry, email circular and I couldn't resist..

Chariots Of Fire 2008

I trained for months for this, up to three times a week, and managed in a very respectable 11:24. Similar to previous times, I found after I checked this blog, which was disappointing, but much better than the times I was getting running the test route near work (12:45 often). Our team came 87th, maintaining similar position we had last year - not bad considering over 450 teams! Of course, one of my (younger!) students ran it in 10:something..

As I ran with my new GPS, I have Tracklogs of
test run and the the race itself
or if you have google earth, you can use these for test run and race itself

Also, still taking sponsorship. I'm just saying...

Cambs County Council and the Geospatial web!

I'm looking for new halls for my Tai Chi (and hopefully Kickboxing!) classes, due to issues with my previous one, which is turning out to be fairly tricky to find. On a whim, I phoned the council, and asked the receptionist if they had a list of halls for hire, expecting to get passed onto another department. "Oh, yes" she said, "would you like me to email you the link?". Sure enough, a few mins later, I was looking at this. Browsing it, I realised what I wanted was it overlaid onto a map, so I could see where would be appropriate. Looking at the source, it was in nested HTML tables, and inconsistent formats, so I gave up the idea of writing a web scraper, and mailed the site admins on a handy link, asking if they had the info in a CSV that I could use in a google maps overlay.
A day later the reply came back; "Oh, we've done it! put "Halls for Hire" in the Search For box (including the double quote marks) and put the village/town you are thinking of moving to in the Location box leave the Show Results on a Map box ticked then click on the Search Cambs.net button.

Live Earth rather than Google maps, and in a tiny window, but otherwise superb - great job Cambridge County Council, and completely unexpectedly competent and on the button!

Just upgraded my Macbook's hard disk

Remarkably painless. The most difficult part was ordering the right hard drive (not all 2.5" drives are the same size, apparently. Yes, I know.). So poor marks to Dabs, which took a week to ship my order ("usually ships in 24 hours!"), and only decided to when I complained, and full marks to macupgrades.co.uk, which, for 30 more than I was going to pay at dabs for a smaller disk, sold me the right sized disk - and one thats 320GB!
You'll need a Phillips #0 Screwdriver and a Torx T8 Screwdriver - which was the hardest for me, I ended up using one at work, so must buy some v. small torx.
Using SuperDuper! I made a bootable clone of my current 120GB disk (which as its part of my normal backup routine, took 15 mins to update the image), swapped out the drive in its caddy, booted into disk utility from an OSX install CD, formatted the disk, and selected restore from the USB disk. Took about 3 hours, all told. Now I can start creating and using the assorted Virtual machines I need!

Now to buy a USB caddy for the old disk, and partition the huge USB dsk into Time Machine and 320GB clone for my new disk!

How To Make The Perfect Cup Of Coffee

I was pointed to this podcast by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing. Its very well presented, and very engaging - recommended for anyone who likes thier coffee. Maybe I'll get the expresso machine down from the loft, and buy that French Press after all! I already ground my own beans, but Dr Mark Miodownik's talk shows me how much more I could do to make the perfect cup of coffee.

Update Resonance FM have a hard to navigate site, but I did find this intro to the podcast;

What elements are involved in the making of a simple beverage. The Director of the Materials Library and Head of the Materials Research Group at King’s College London provides an audibly practical demonstration of the answer.
Visit http://www.materialslibrary.org.uk

The Kings Gold

By Arturo Perez-Reverte
The latest in the Captain Alatriste series. This one started slow, and I found my attention wandering. I persevered, and it really cranks up the pace in the last third. While I enjoyed it, I got the feeling he wasn't really making an effort. Inigo, on the other hand, continues to develop, while Alatriste become slight more cardboard, or a caricature of himself.
Talking to a spanish salesman at work, I was gratified to find that dropping the authors name got me some respect and a decent car conversation as I dropped him off at his hotel.
Books, what can't they do..

The Edge Of Reason

By Melinda Snodgrass
Bought in hardback, amoung much fanfare by the likes of Walter Jon Williams and Tor books, in time to go on holiday, I read this on the last day and on the plane back. Frankly, a bit nonplussed. Many people have said that this will poke the atheist and diest alike. Well, maybe, if they're easily offended and stupid. The plot is basic, and the characters only just two dimensional. The ideas floated in the book are simply nonsense, and wouldn't offend any person of faith with more than two brain cells, IMHO.
A moderm world with magic book, it has has the cental concept that Magic is the tool of the Old ones, and reason, the tool of those fighting them. All well and good so far, interesting start with the police officer and the sorceress, but fails to carry it off. Every time I read something like this, it reminds me how well Jim Butcher does the same genre.
Snodgrass (you'd change your name, surely? I mean..) is part of the same writing circle as Williams, which I fear, has something to explain moth books medoicre impact on me.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

By Michael Chabon
Now this is Literature, with a capital L! By far the best book I read on holiday, the use of language is just wonderful - up there with Tolstoy, Susanna Clarke and Gibson in the ranks of authors who use language so cleverly it delights, amazes and amuses. The book is in turns witty, poignant, insightful and suspenseful - I didn't see several of the plot twists coming.
Thw world that Chabon has created is believable and enthralling, as are his characters - not one rings anything but true, and one of them especially, Zimbalist, the boundary maven, is something that Gibson could have created - a character, and role, so believable and yet fantastic that it could only exist in fiction. As Gibson said, 'the street finds its own uses for things'. Although, I have a suspicion that the role may actually exist - I may have to ask my Jewish friends..
Simply fantastic. I'm looking forward to reading more of his work. If not for Tolstoy, by Book Of The Year so far.

Implied Spaces

By Walter Jon Williams
Billed by the author, as a follow on, in spirit to 'Voice Of The Whirlwind', I was hugely looking forward to this. It didn't live up to my expectations, but I think thats as much my expectations as the author's writing. I was expecting a martial arts book, and yes, it features one, but, in no way is this reflected in the plot or affects the actions of the protagonist.
Williams has loads of good ideas - wormhole worlds created as live action rpg's, as fuel sources, as places to put spare populations, massive benign AI's, one of which accompanies the protagonist in avatar form as a cat, a wormhole sword, biomimetic plagues, and so on, it all goes rather space opera towards the end, and blows what little suspension of belief I had..
The author is part of a writing circle, and while the work has no glaring complaints, its not standing out in anyway. Williams fails to being to life the main protagonist, who is damn near immortal, has some funky superpowers, and responsible in part, for the creation of the world as they know it. Frankly, Williams did elements of this better in his 'Aristoi', and Zelany did MUCH better in 'Lord Of Light'.

New Amsterdam

By Elizabeth Bear
The second of the lady's works I've read, not counting her short stories, and another worthy title. More polished than 'Dust', I was initiall distracted by the format, finding it a little disjointed, as its a series of stories. Its only when A read it and remarked how authentic it was to the style of the period - think the novellettes of Conan Doyle, that I realised how well it had been put together.
A lot more to be bought by Eizabeth Bear, I think.

Google Maps Hacks

By Rich Gibson & Schuyler Erle
I actually bought this by mistake, hurredly, before the start of our holiday, thinking it was 'Mapping Hacks', intending to get more to grips with the Garmin eTrex I'd been bought. It was an interesting set of read anyway, although my lack of knowledge of Javascript means I'll get less use our of it than I might otherwise.. I'll be revisiting bits, hopefully soon to integrate the photot's I took with the GPS track I was recording at the same time. You never know, I may have a location based travelogue up at some point!

The Last Days of Old Beijing

By Michael Meyer
I bought this because, for some reason, it came up n the new books list on the book depository, and I remembered his name from the TV tour of China that Paul Merton did..
The book is a documentation of the author's time spent living in the old neighborhoods of Beijing, before they were razed for the Olympics. Its part travel guide, part urban and rural planning, part cultural treatise, part history, part exposition on modern living.
Meyer definitely has an agenda, but you can't fault him - he's lived in the area for years, in the communities, speaking and living the culture. A very interesting read. I bought it as an 'intelligent' even worthy, book to read on holiday, but it never felt like I was slogging through, and it never seemed repetitive - there's always the danger that the description of the third hutong will be the same as the second, but Meyer does a good job avoiding this, and discussion how the communities provide social communities, and showing the benefits without shying away from the detractions. Thought provoking stuff.

The Blade Itself

By Joe Abercrombie
Another recommendation from Whatever's 'Big Idea', this is non-heroic fantasy, quite the antidote to the optimistic highjinks of 'The Name Of The Wind'. Its a nasty, cynical book full of anti-heroes. The main characters are a vain dandy, a psychopath and a torturer. Well written - its 515 pages, but cracks along. I found myself really getting under the skin of the protagonists, and just when you are getting used to how shallow, or amoral they are, the author develops them, and changes your view slightly.
Obviously part of a series, I'm looking forward to the sequels. Some great understated magic, and some potentially fine villains - a ruthless power mad norse style king, a mad wizard who is teaching his followers to eat human flesh to gain magical power, and others. Is the First Of The Magi as benevolent as he appears? Who is The Maker, and why did the Magi have to destroy him?
The second book, "Before They are Hanged : Book Two of the First Law" is already out in paperback, and the third is coming out soon. I'll have to interleave them with other books, because the cynicism and bloodshed can be a little wearing, but some good reading set for the future, I feel!

My Name Is Legend - the film

A and I saw this last night on DVD. Its a better retelling than 'The Omega Man', but hollywood couldn't leave it alone - semi happy ending, and what's with all this 'god told me' rubbish? Quite offensive to the spirit of the book, I felt, which was all rationalism. Some good acting by Will Smith, though. Some plot holes you could drive a bus through, but no more so than in the original novel.

The Winters Tale

Another live outdoor shakespeare performance. This time, it rather broke the mold as the weather was lovely. As it was in Kings, it was fairly well attended - perhaps 50 people all told? Still not a great audience for the price and experience but more respectable than others we've seen.
The performance was OK - nothing outstanding, but for me it had a lot of nostalgia value, as I studied 'The Winters Tale' at A Level, the closest I've come to proper lit. crit. analysis. There were a few masterfully understated moments, though - at the end, when the faithful widow who has kep the king on the straight and narrow until his wife can be returned to him, is rewarded by the hand in marriage of the faithful assistant, the played this as kind of 'er. great. Thanks, King. I think. Who are you again?' rather than the 'all's well that ends well, with all injuries redressed, as is normal in the comedies.

Richard III

The Yates, A and I went to see this in Downing College Gardens last week. I'll have photo's of the grounds to upload when I pay my Flikr subscription.. A superb performance as always, with the usually irremediably evil Richard played with sardonic humour and evil leers to the audience beautifully by (goodness, I don't remember his name, and none of the actors appear on the website - how odd!). Still irremediably evil, of course, but... Having seen this many, many years ago at the Arts Theatre, I was expecting a worthy play, not an enjoyable one but I was forgetting that;
A) Shakespeare's quite good actually..
B) The Shakespeare festival always manage to delight

So I really enjoyed it. Not sure I'd go and see it twice in one year, as we did (slightly by mistake) with Macbeth (the scottish play? ;-) last year..
oh, and for Madhatter and anyone else interested, I looked up the play when we got home, and the famous line (no, the other one, about the nail), is just a line, and the entire verse about the kingdom being lost wasn't in the play. Damned where I heard it though...
Anyway, if you haven't been to any, please go and support them. We're turning up without booking tickets these days, with no problem - this performance had more audience than actors, but not by even 100%, which given the performance standard, is a crying shame.

The Name of The Wind

by Patrick Rotherfus
Hmm. This is the third time I've tried to write this before the Mac has wiped it in creative ways - seems like it doesn't want this review written. Well, the truth must be told!
The Truth is that this is one of the best fantasy books I've read in a long while. Patrick has a plot, characters, and a believable world. The magic system is constructed along sympathetic magic and scientific lines, and the only niggle I'd have is that the hero, Kvothe, is just TOO damn good at everything, and that for a kid, he's pretty bloody precocious and worldly wise. The author works this into the plot, and does a good job, but it does stretch credibility at times. The way he most does this is by reminding the reader that he, Kvothe, knows nothing about women, but let me tell you, I was never that smooth at 15. Hormonal, yes, smooth, not so much.
Another slight niggle is that with the scientific understanding they seem to have, along with the interworking of magic, would imply to me that they'd have a greater technological basis than they do. There may be reasons for this revealed later, and its not enough of a niggle to interrupt the verisimilitude.
Patrick has some genuine laugh out loud conversations in the book, and generally writes dialogue well. Its a big book, and at times I felt it could have been trimmed, but never enough that I felt it suffered overmuch from it.
I'll definitely be buying the next volume when it comes out - had it been possible, I'd have bought it right now, but it looks like I have to wait a few months.
If memory serves, I found this in Waterstones, on one of those pleasurable browsing sessions that turn up a load of books you'd like to read - increasingly rare in the mainstream bookshops, I'm finding.

Digital Music from Play.com

I bought Bellowhead's first album from Play.com following the their toe tapping performance on the folk Proms last Sunday (I'm not jealous that several of them can play the Violin while jumping up and down in time, no not at all..), and it was a thoroughly pleasant experience. Cheaper than iTunes, and in 320kps mp3, my only complaint would be that album art wasn't included, not was a digital booklet of the album slip cover, and that the track number wasn't encoded into each file, so I had to add it manually. iTunes added the cover art fine, as will Banshee on my Linux box, I expect, so no worries there. I'll be using them more!

Ode To Joy

Ode Indeed...