Category: Personal

Set centuries after the events of his amazing novel Accelerando, Charlie Stross’s Glasshouse is an attempt to deal with the issues of identity and self when technology has divorced the essence of individuality from any specific physical form. The Singularity of that story is so far in the past that individuals who remain recognizably human have chosen to forgo the option of ascending to that higher plane of existence, for the most part, and thus remain emotionally understandable to us.

Stross is, for my money, one of the stronger writers assessing the impact of technological trends, as illustrated by a recent talk he gave to a corporate audience. In this novel he posits that one’s mentality (for lack of a better, non-spiritual term) can move between nearly any imaginable type of body or other processor-capable object (humanish or not, of either gender or none at all), be copied and simultaneously occupy many different objects and then re-merge those instances back into one or be scanned and instantaneously shipped to a distant star system through a wormhole and re-instantiated in physical form; further, sophisticated surgeon-confessors are able to deftly excise specific memories. In such a context, how does one answer the question “Who are you?”

Robin/Reeve, our protagonist, has done a lot of living in the more than 200 years (or seven or eight gigasecs, since this star-spanning culture measures time in large groups of seconds rather than days, months or years) since being born. Most recently he was a soldier for an army battling an unknown but omnipresent enemy that used a computer worm called Curious Yellow to corrupt the network of gates that underlie the galactic polity and destroy the single, uber-Libertarian minimalist government that organized human space. For most of his enlistment Robin was a battalion of tanks (see the previous paragraph) but reverted to orthohuman form (what you and I think of as normal) and joined the intelligence group just before his side won.

What did winning mean, though? The perpetrators of the worm were unknown and remained so to a large degree even after defeat. The Linebarger Cats, Robin’s army, won by capturing or destroying a significant majority of the infected gates, replacing them and shipping every human through the clean ones. But the worm was, as you’d expect, quite capable of forcing the infected people to fight on its behalf so the war was extremely bloody and traumatic. Robin, even after memory surgery to remove the worst of it, is still in need of therapy to recover and signs up to participate in an experimental polity that offers hope of just that.

He wakes up ‘inside’ as Reeve, a petite female, having undergone further surgery that deleted his memory of choosing to switch genders and deciding to go in to a Truman-show like recreation of the late 20th Century. And she is not very happy, especially when her cohort of ten new citizens are told to divide up–immediately–into male/female pairs. Leaving things until a bit late, her choice of mates is reduced to a quiet man called Sam.

You see, the years from 1950 through 2040 are (at the time of Glasshouse) considered a dark age, dark in the sense that very little knowledge remains of the period when humanity went from the steam engine to the Singlarity. Records were lost due to inefficient, incompatible storage mechanisms and so society’s understanding of its formation has vanished. Three scholars, Doctors Yourdon, Fiore and Hanta, have proposed this experiment as an attempt to recreate the lost knowledge.

If it were that simple, the novel would more than likely have been trivial and unworthy of Stross’ talent, so of course that’s not it at all. Robin’s military past is very much a part of why he volunteered, as is Curious Yellow. And Charlie, despite dropping dazzling sci-fi tech left and right (lesser authors would have milked this for a bloated trilogy), focuses on the emotional battle of Reeve, Sam and a few others against the three experimentalists.

definitely recommended

TS1 and I flew out for a long weekend to visit my parents, and my sister and brother-in-law brought my now two year old nephew Jake from their Long Island manse. Very enjoyable time, not long enough of course, and the boy is something else. So blond, friendly and nearly unlimited energy; fortunately, unlike last year’s visit neither he nor my mom were sick. I should have a photo or two soon, once my sister sends them along.

Jake is old enough now to have a small, barely understandable vocabulary but he quickly picked up on calling us Uncle Bill and Aunt Viv. Hearing that was a real rush! Trying to keep up with him as he ran around the house backyard, ha!, that was another story. You’d think going to the gym and such would have made it less taxing; big props to my sister and Larry for doing it every day.

While there I expanded my use of MooTools by updating my gallery page class (click any on the list page to see) to use Sam Birch’s Lightbox for managing the image display and some code from MooTools Gallery to generate thumbnails as needed. Because of my less than stellar graphics skills, the gallery thumbnails may look squished but I’m working on it.

The trip home was not one of the best, though. When we got through security and checked the departures board, though, our flight had been delayed an hour; let’s just say Newark/Liberty International Airport is not my idea of a place to sit and wait, especially since they don’t provide free WiFi. We got jammed in the takeoff queue thanks to the change and lost another half hour waiting for our turn at the runway. The flight itself was a bit on the rough side but something I ate earlier in the day must have really disagreed with me as my stomach felt like an angry goblin was inside, poking me with its claws; I am not good with pain.

We walked halfway around SFO after claiming our bag looking for the SuperShuttle pickup point courtesy of crap signage, only to find that the company decided to jam eight people into one van. Not super-thin people either, and when I complained to the driver he laughed–not mailiciously, I’m sure, more from a combination of nerves and inability to do anything about it. Of course the driver is a (recent?) immigrant from eastern Asia with poor English speaking and comprehension skills and driving ability to match. TS1 and I agreed that on future trips of five days or less we are driving ourselves and using the longterm parking.

Midnight California time we finally got in the door here and got a brief second wind to handle a bit of necessary immediate unpacking before extremely welcome collapse in our own bed. I love seeing my family, not being able to do so more often is the one bad thing about living on the other side of the country from them, but sleeping in your own bed is, as the commercials say, priceless.

There’s a web designer tradition, or vogue, that one should freshen up one’s website each May Day and though I’m neither a web designer nor a follower of fashion I do enjoy using this site as a learning environment. So if you’re reading this post from the RSS feed or on some other aggregator/content stealing site please click through to see what I’m writing about here.

There are three changes in the new design:

1. The main navigation element has been pulled out of the right side column into a top of the page horizontal menu.
2. The right side column has been significantly simplified. In fact, if it wasn’t for the $100 check from Google every six months or so I’d probably remove the column completely and go with a one column layout.
3. Clicking the top menu link next to Movies labeled Latest slides open a list of the five most recent entries in my movie blog.

This last item was inspired by a similar, albeit more substantial content-filled, implementation at Lather Rinse Repeat (click the image that says Click Me at the top of the page), which came to my attention via the redoubtable web celeb mathowie.

Previously I used the Yahoo User Interface Library to deliver the last 5 block, using its very nice Panel widget and Event utility but some months ago I started having problems with retrieving and processing the movie blog RSS feed. After experimenting with many different open source RSS libraries in both PHP and JavaScript and several different JavaScript user interface libraries, the solution was the very new Google FeedControl and the MooTools JavaScript library.

Since I am more of an enlightened amateur than a professional programmer these days most of the difficulty was surely due to my skill level rather than any shortcomings in the various libraries I was unable to make work for this small implementation. Even now I don’t really think the code does precisely what I’d like, mostly due to the FeedControl delivering each RSS item as a separate and complex set of divs, but it does appear to work on OS X and Windows, and on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.

If you see any problems or nits I should fix, drop me a line. Or just to give me your two cents on the new layout, I always enjoy hearing from people who read this site.

This is another of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins mystery novels, set in early 1964 just three months after A Little Yellow Dog. Mouse is presumed deceased but still on Easy’s mind as there was no funeral nor even a definitively dead body, Bonnie has moved in with him, Jesus and Feather and, sure enough, the cops and white folks in general have him under pressure.

In Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Rawlins’ long time friend John the bartender and John’s new wife Ava ask him to find Ava’s son Brawly Brown. The boy’s had a difficult 23 years, further handicapped by an inability to control his temper and a body built to deal out hurt, and seems to have fallen in with a very bad crowd. Sure enough we learn right away that Brawly’s a member of the First Men, a group of black radicals that appear to be a precursor to the Black Panther Party.

No sooner does Easy see the boy walk in to a (regular, weeknight) public meeting at the First Men’s storefront headquarters when an LAPD flying squad crash in, leading with their nightsticks. Easy helps Brown’s girlfriend escape and they jump into a car with Brown and another radical.

Meanwhile, there’s trouble at home too. Mainly adjustment pains to living with a woman who truly loves him but his teenage son is having problems at school that need attention and a creative solution.

Mosley shows how the environment is changing, or at least starting to change. The First Men are group that couldn’t have existed 10 years before and while Rawlins has no choice but to deal with the LAPD, he’s able to create some maneuvering space to protect his own community a bit. Not as much as he’d like but more than the cops expected.

recommended

PS: Try saying the title five times fast!

While I might not have made mention of crossing the 46 line last week, this is a milestone that needs bragging on. Four years ago tonight Vivian made me happier than I could expect by marrying me in front of our family and close friends. Life outside our home has had its ups and down but never intruded into our relationship, only strengthening our bond and commitment.

Thanks Sweetie, and here’s to 40 400 more years of love!

Every few months the semi-farcical email calling for a one day boycott of buying gasoline gets sent around again. You know, the one which says if only all American Internet users, all “73,000,00+” of them, don’t buy gas that one day then the gas companies will lose about $3 billion in revenue and surely get the message that we’re fed up with high prices.

This is so wrong on so many levels but let’s just hit a few highlights:

• Gas is not, generally speaking, a luxury item like dinner out or a team jersey; people only buy as much as they need and use. So not buying on one particular day only means filling up early or later and thus the net revenue is the same for the gas companies.
• Since people working at gas companies are among the 73M American Internet users and therefore as likely as anyone else to get this email they might use the information to raise pump prices a day or two before, drop them on the day of the protest and raise them again the day after. Just to show consumers who really has the hammer.
• By the law of large numbers, not everyone would need to fill up on any given day and so only about 1/7th of cars would be filled up on the boycott day in any case, say 10.5 million. Further reducing the numbers, by an admittedly much smaller amount, is that not all Internet users own cars; I would argue that the proportion is smaller for this group than the general population since more Internet users live in cities or are still in school. Let’s say 10%, getting us down to about 9.5 million and the hypothetical revenue loss to $300 million even though, as previously mentioned, this is only an illusionary loss and a drop in the bucket compared to total annual revenues (which were, in 2001, just for US gas stations, $158 billion).

So what can we, as fed-up consumers, do that will have actual, meaningful effect?

1. For starters, use less gas. Seriously! Most people think cars need to be warmed up for a few minutes before driving but that hasn’t been true for many years thanks to better engine technology, so here’s one easy way to save a gallon or so every month or two. When you stop at a major traffic light, one where you’re likely to be waiting over 60 seconds for a green, shift into neutral. Plan your regular shopping to minimize the route–and take your own bags for bringing home the groceries, since petroleum is a key ingredient in plastic and transporting them to stores uses gas too. Realize that every second less you have a car engine running is one second more we have left for later.
2. Buy a hybrid next time you get a new car and support groups like CalCars that are trying to work around the major automakers.
3. Make your opinion heard. Call or fax your congressperson and senators (don’t email, apparently those are mostly ignored). Call or write the CEO’s office at the major gas companies and tell them what you think. Call or write the CEO’s office at the major automakers and tell them what you think. Try and be polite, I suppose. Maybe get several friends and family members to sign your letters. Send a copy to your local newspaper or the consumer reporter at your local TV station’s news team.
4. Buy and use fewer things. I know, this is a terrible suggestion in our capitalist, materialist society but every good bought uses some amount of resources to manufacture and transport. Reuse where possible, use energy consuming goods less where possible–turn off lights and TVs today so you can see and watch tomorrow.

I’m sure you can add to this list. Feel free to send me your ideas or post them on your own blog, and to pass this list around too.

In the last week I’ve come across two people I used to be very close with but haven’t seen or spoken with in over a decade. Both instances were strange, one breathtakingly so.

About this time last week I googled some names in this category, people with whom I’ve had no contact in quite some time. One, who was my best friend from high school until my relocation to the Bay Area, was mentioned in a news article for doing something very distasteful; no need to go into details but adding to the strangeness was that another acquaintance (albeit someone I was never particularly friendly with) was leading the effort that swept my former pal up.

If you think I’m being purposely obtuse you’re spot on. The activity involved blew my mind; this is someone I spent time with in person or on the phone nearly every day for the 17 years of our friendship and even now thinking back on those days not one instance comes to mind that could be construed as a hint or clue. Nothing even remotely close.

The other incident was much less dark. After getting lost, something that happens to me constantly in Cupertino for some reason, I was late for a doctor’s appointment and had to kill two hours waiting for an open slot. Think about how many times you’ve sat waiting for a doctor running late and you’ll understand I was a bit peeved since there was at least 10 minutes until the next appointment.

Anyway, I went around the corner to kill the time at a Starbucks. Reading Iain M. Banks’ short story collection The State of the Art was enjoyable but I’m an inveterate people watcher and popped my head up each time the door opened. After more than an hour even Banks had a tough time keeping my attention and then a woman came in the door that had me looking not twice but three times.

While there are plenty of very attractive women in the area and not a few at this coffee shop but I kept my head up until this one came into view again not because she was particularly attractive (not that she isn’t, but it isn’t relevant here) but because she’s my ex-wife. Who I’ve not seen since early 1997 despite our working in the same industry and living in the same general area. Heck, she worked at Sun before me and our tenures overlapped a couple of months but we never were in so much as the same meeting.

I’m not 100% sure about either incident but if a money bet was involved I’d wager both were who they appeared to be to me.

AC Milan were comprehensive tonight in defeating Manchester United 3-0 to set up a rerun of the 2005 Champions League final against my beloved Liverpool. The Rossoneri were never really threatened and Dida was in his form of old the few times his goal was threatened, with the peerless Kaka leading an attack the injury-depleted Red Devil back line couldn’t contain.

Kaka, a resurgent Clarence Seedorf and late substitute Alberto Gilardino had the goals. Seedorf and Gennaro Gattuso had control of the midfield and neither Michael Carrick nor Darren Fletcher were able to start any offense for the visitors, who had to start three second choice defenders while the lone regular starter, Nemanja Vidic, was not really recovered from a broken collarbone. Sir Alex Ferguson’s eight year cycle of European glory came to an end (Cup Winners Cups in 1983 and 1991 and 1999’s Champions League portion of that year’s historic treble).

Milan have six European crowns to Liverpool’s five and will surely be looking to remove the stink of their collapse two years ago, giving up a 3-0 half time lead in the first 15 minutes of the second half and then losing on penalty kicks; their coach Carlo Ancelloti will try once again to become the first man to win European titles with four different teams. And in an odd bit of geographic rivalry, this year’s title will be decided in Athens.

Go Reds!

Returns, not reruns, of series I’m interested in (for a more complete list check in regularly at the futon critic):

• Rescue Me: June 12
• The 4400: June 17
• Burn Notice: June 28 (USA, lead character is a forcibly retired CIA agent)
• Dr. Who: July 6
• Eureka: July 10
• Monk: July 13
• Flash Gordon: Aug. 10 (Sci-Fi Channel)
• The Wire: September (my estimate)
• Dexter: Sep. 30
• South Park: Oct. 3

Sometime this summer on BBC America:

• Life on Mars
• Wire in the Blood
• MI-5 (Moving over from A&E)
• Torchwood (Dr. Who spinoff)

The stories so far are mainly about the disruption to Bay Area traffic and whether repairs will take weeks or months but I wonder if repairing the 80/580 interchange is the right thing to do. Regional public transportation agencies are making travel tomorrow free and significantly increasing capacity to accommodate people leaving their cars home for the day.

Gov. Schwarzenegger is in the area tonight, announcing he’s declared a disaster so that emergency funds will be available and normal contracting rules suspended to speed repairs. He’ll even ask the Bushinator to add federal emergency status and money.

But wouldn’t the better answer be to clean up the mess but leave the roads unrepaired? Let’s use this as a means to get hundreds or thousands of cars carrying only a single person back and forth off the road five days a week and increase the very low public transit ridership numbers. Heck, maybe the incident can be leveraged to get commuters in other parts of the Bay Area not directly affected onto trains and buses too.

I know, I know, I’m dreaming. Would be nice though, especially in this allegedly eco-aware region.

A co-worker got a new laptop, a generic Asian brand, which came with Windows Vista pre-installed. Inside he found a photocopied sheet that says:

“ATTENTION, During the first boot of Windows Vista please allow for 15 to 30 minutes for the booting procedure to finish. You MUST NOT shutdown the system by force in any one of the following stages (screenshots), otherwise it may result in irrecoverable errors.”

Have I mentioned lately how happy I am to not be running Windows? I actually had to install VMWare Fusion last week and WinXP on top of it, something that has not given me any real joy but necessary to test web pages on IE6.

Another excellent Easy Rawlins novel from Walter Mosley, first published in 1996, A Little Yellow Dog is set in November 1963 when Easy is two years into his job as maintenance supervisor at Sojourner Truth Junior High School in Los Angeles. Trouble, as always, has no problem finding our man and coming in at all angles.

recommended

I know, this book has been out for so long, how did I not already read it? Oops. Still, I will say that JK Rowling has improved her writing considerably from the very first book and seems to have gotten past the “too good for even the slightest of editing” egotism that bloated several of the middle volumes. Even though this one runs to just under 700 pages, far fewer of them are wasted and there’s very little thrown in magic that shows her cool imagination without advancing plot.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is the next to last book in the series and the war with Voldemort is out in the open. After what happened in Order of the Phoenix (I read this but for some reason didn’t write it up) no one in the Wizarding community doubts He Who Must Not Be Named is back and aiming to complete the takeover Baby Potter blocked him from finishing 15 years before.

This is the first of a two parter, I think, which is fine. Rowling has set up many threads and a great deal of depth; she hasn’t forgotten the little touches that are so popular with readers either, like Quidditch—Harry is captain of the Gryffindor team, a responsibility of which he’s proud and happy to take at first but weighs him down as other events require his attention—and various magic class lessons.

In fact the latter is the source of the book’s title. Not expecting to take Potions this term Harry and Ron didn’t buy the textbook and new Potions professor Slughorn lends them copies from the classroom until their’s arrive (Snapes has finally gotten his desire to teach Defense Against Darks Arts). Harry’s borrowed copy is filled with notes from a previous owner, the self-styled Half Blood Prince, which he uses despite Hermione’s frequent protests. The identity of the student, be warned, is not revealed until very late, something which TS1 seemed unhappy about when she read HBP but I thought was a good effect.

Harry has little choice at this stage except to throw off what little remains of his childhood. Rowling gives us a bit of a model for him in Fred and George Weasley; the brothers have left Hogswart a year early and parlayed their love of joke magic into a thriving Diagon Alley shop. Potter is also forced to deal on an adult level with Professor Slughorn and Dumbledore, and his conflict with Malfoy simmers in the background. We also get a peek at Voldemort’s biography and understand why he became so evil—to some degree, Tom Riddle becomes much more human and sympathetic though there’s no question he must be defeated.

If you thought I’d say anything more about the story, sorry, but I hate giving spoilers no matter how long a book or movie has been out. We are definitely looking forward to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in a few months and will certainly get to it very soon after publication to avoid seeing the inevitable spoilers others are no so considerate about posting.

recommended

PSV must have decided before the opening whistle blew that they were never going to climb last week’s three goal hill visiting Anfield, or at least that’s the way they played. The Reds weren’t a whole lot more enthusiastic, with Craig Bellamy going off early with minor knee trouble lowering the motivation on the home side, but Peter Crouch was determined to keep his goal streak going and did.

Liverpool legend Robbie Fowler came on for Bellamy in the 17th minute and Fowler made the goal by getting the rebound off Crouch’s first shot and passing it back to the beanpole. The 68th minute goal was about the only serious attempt by either side. Rafa Benitez, looking at an overloaded schedule over the next month, rested Stephen Gerrard, Jamie Carragher, Dirk Kuyt, Steve Finnan and Javer Mascherano and PSV boss Ronald Koemann had his own injury woes limiting his choices.

Chelsea scored an injury time winner last night to beat Valencia 1-2, coming back from an early 1-0 deficit, and so for the third straight season Liverpool will meet Roman Abramovich’s team in a cup quarterfinal. We’ve won the last two and I would be thrilled to see the boys make it three, though with Michael Essien and Joe Cole coming back from injury and Andre Schevchenko and Shaun Wright-Phillips getting in good form this is no easy task.

No matter. The Reds’ comebacks against Milan in the 2005 Champions League final and West Ham in last season’s FA Cup final show they’re a team that wants to win every time out.

What a great lunchtime treat today from Rafa, the two Stevies and ESPN2. The game started in slow motion and when I checked the game clock after about 11 minutes I thought I was trapped in some alternate universe where seconds are 2.23 times as long as our normal ones.

But no, it was just PSV Eindhoven coach Ronald Koeman having his side work for a nil-nil result. Jefferson Farfan as the lone man in the offensive end with everyone else packed in to stuff the Liverpool attack. The Reds responded in kind for the first 20 minutes or so, before deciding that their hot form warranted an aggressive strategy.

Steven Gerrard made it pay off with a smashing header off a Steve Finnan cross, jumping over a bent-over Dirk Kuyt. Liverpool kept up a bit of pressure but there were no more results in the half, with Peter Crouch having a tough time getting shots. As Tommy Smith pointed out, my boys are second only to Milan in number of shots in the Champions League, which you wouldn’t know from the first half. PSV, their hopes of 0-0 vanished, didn’t seem to have a plan B.

The second half was a different story and John Arne Riise got the second goal on a trademark left footed blast four minutes in. Tick tock, boys. Even Crouch got on the scoring sheet with a sweet header in the 63rd and though they had a few more chances, that was all there was. Fabio Aurelio was stretchered off after pulling up despite no one else being near him, with what appeared to be ruptured Achilles.

“We have no chance now,” PSV coach Ronald Koeman said. “If I can make my players believe we can still go through I don’t belong on this planet.” ROFL, eh? This is the coach who had been building a reputation as an England-killer after Benfica, where he coached last season, knocked out Manchester United and then Liverpool and dumping Arsenal in the round before this.

A couple of Liverpool Champions League club marks were set today: 3-0 was the biggest margin of victory in an away match, and Gerrard’s goal was his 15th, passing Ian Rush.

Return match is next Wednesday at Anfield but with three away goals and the quality of PSV play its hard to imagine that we won’t go through. Next round is against the winner of Chelsea-Valencia (a good Spanish team, which just happens to be the club previously managed by Liverpool’s current manager). Odds are still long but I can’t help wondering if the Reds will be raising the trophy in Athens in May!

This 2002 debut novel from Richard K. Morgan is a blast, combining Dashiel Hammet (down to its primary setting of San Francisco) and Bruce Sterling/William Gibson into a highly readable medium future melange highly reminiscent of Phillip K. Dick (whose fiction was the basis for movies like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and the upcoming Nicholas Cage-starrer Next). In fact, it won the 2003 Phillip K. Dick Award for best science fiction novel originally published in the US as a paperback. Morgan is yet another topnotch British author.

Altered Carbon is the first part of a trilogy (fortunately the others are already out and in paperback) about Takeshi Kovacs set about 500 years from now. Key science fiction elements:

• Altered carbon, devised perhaps three centuries before this story opens and which Morgan does not explain at all, allows for cloning/quick growth of new bodies, though it remains expensive and so not generally available. Similarly sophisticated chemical engineering is also practiced.
• Cortical stacks, implanted at the base of the brain, store the essence of one’s self so one can be transferred to another body–either an altered carbon-based clone or the body of a person currently ‘in storage’ for being convicted of a crime, popularly referred to as sleeves. The stacks allow the criminal’s essence to be stored on computer disk for the term of the sentence with no guarantee of the original body’s availability afterwards since sentences can run more than a hundred years.
• AIs, intelligent computers, exist but in limited numbers and tightly controlled circumstances. Kovacs stays in The Hendrix, a hotel controlled (inhabited?) by one.
• Humans have settled several worlds beyond Earth through slower than light travel, Takeshi having been born on Harlan’s World, but instantaneous communication permits a single, United Nations-derived government as well as the transmission of stored essences for download into a local sleeve.

Indeed, a needlecast is what brings Kovacs to Earth. Our man is an extremely tough guy over a hundred years old (though he’s only experienced about 40, the rest having past in storage), born into a ghetto gang and escaping into the UN military where he’s eventually drafted into the Envoy Corps, an elite force combining diplomatic psychology, chemically-enhanced body control and special forces training. Envoy work is soul-destroying and since most jobs are out of bounds because of the perceived advantages the enhancements give, many turn to crime after leaving the service.

A wealthy methuselah, a person named Laurens Bancroft who’s lived 350 years continuously through a series of altered carbon clones, pays for Kovacs to be transmitted and resleeved in order to investigate why Bancroft seemingly killed himself just before. Having multiple clones and automatic stack backups the body death only cost him two days of memories but he can’t accept the explanation that he did it to himself, the ‘meth’ unable to conceive of any logical explanation.

Kovacs being who he is and Bancroft having resleeved him in the body of a corrupt police detective called Ryker, the path from arrival to uncovering the truth and the actions taken in reponse is engagingly tangled. We travel from the ultra-privileged through police working in an ultimately corrupt democratic regime down through the least privileged strata and back up to the level of global politics, our protagonist moving ruthlessly to earn his promised payment while trying to help the downtrodden he encounters and hurt their abusers.

Morgan has done well in embedding the hardboiled noir detective work, giving us multiple beautiful (and intelligent) women, dangerous red herrings, antagonists from both Kovacs’ and Ryker’s pasts and an answer to the why that makes sense but was unpredictable. The writing is colorful, the plot swirling excellently tighter and tighter and the characters compelling making it difficult for me to put Altered Carbon down.

definitely recommended

Koders.com is a new source code search engine. I’ve seen a number of favorable blogosphere writeups, which makes me wonder why their PR contact, Scott Howard at Milani Marketing, is spamming me about it through my contact form. Howard’s bio claims 12 years experience working for companies from startup through global delivery so one could expect a bit more cluefullness.

No doubt I’m a good target for what I presume is their blog marketing campaign, but when the message sent is completely generic and doesn’t get any personalization, not even a simple Dear Bill at the top, then in my book that’s unwanted spam.

Too bad.

Update: I received two email apologies from Howard and a manager at Koders. I still don’t care for the approach but at least they owned up to the mistake.

I was supposed to go to Startup School today over at Stanford but, with apologies to Paul Graham and crew and despite the outstanding speaker lineup, after the past week I just didn’t feel like sitting in a huge auditorium with five hundred or so not so close friends.

So TS1 and I took off late morning to drive to Half Moon Bay. I love driving on 280, it’s always wide open and the scenery is just beautiful. Green hills, towering trees, low-hanging clouds riding atop the mountain ridge like frosting on a cake. Amazingly, my sweetie’s never really been there despite living in SF or MtnVw her entire life. I lived a few miles north, in El Granada, just after moving out here but haven’t been back much since.

We had a pretty nice lunch at Pasta Moon to celebrate my recent hiring and some good news of her own at work. One word of advice: the guy at the next table ordered the lasagna and it was fraking huge! Think of the huge piles of meat sandwiches served at, say, Carnegie Deli and translate that to lasagna. Seriously, the thing must have been six inches high or more. So if you want to have it, pay the $2 sharing charge and go halves.

Afterwards we walked up and down Main St., window shopping or browsing. There are few nice stores there, one in particular tempted us with fine wood offerings but our credit card stayed in the wallet. The downside to HMB is that, while it was a beautiful sunny day here the clouds were closing in there and since I’m still recovering from the strep we only walked for about an hour.

What a nice break, away from computers, work and TVs with my sweetie!