Category: Personal

In the future Humanity has spread among the stars but as a significantly junior partner to the mysterious,uncommunicative and far more advanced races which make up the League of Peoples. Meanwhile the main human government, covering many worlds, has created a branch of the military service called the Explorers filled with general purpose problemsolvers. Foremost among them is Festina Ramos, featured in several of James Alan Gardner’s previous novels (I read and enjoyed Expendable and Vigilant, the first two of the six novels in this sequence, before starting this blog), the youngest Admiral in the Technocracy because of her uncanny ability to be in the right place and solve the most difficult problems.

Explorers are chosen because in an age of near universal physical perfection each somehow has a significant–and visible–imperfection even though genetic tampering is theoretically illegal. Youn Su’s mother is so obsessed with the Bamarian (Burman) culture’s ideal of beauty that while Youn Su is in her womb she pays a back alley geneticist to alter her daughter’s DNA but such hubris cannot possibly succeed.

As Radiant (2004) opens, 19 year old Youn has graduated from Explorer Academy and been assigned for a couple of uneventful to a spaceship along with a normal navy complement and the slightly older, undeniably insane explorer Tut. They’re sent down to a city which has been infested with red spores, elements of one of an advanced race called the Balrog.

Gardner doesn’t explain why the city has been invaded but in the course of resolving the issue–again we’re not told how or why–Youn Su ‘agrees’ to host a small number of the telepthically-connected spores and Admiral Ramos turns out to have already been elsewhere on the planet. Another crisis sends the three Explorers to see if they can rescue a group of scientists studying a possible colony world, one which was mysteriously abandoned 6500 years ago by aliens which shortly thereafter transcended and became one of the advanced races.

Youn Su, a Buddhist, gradually agrees to greater assistance/body infestation by the Balrog, each time taking a step towards enlightenment. Though the scientists are gone, they aren’t dead, not quite nor are the previous inhabitants. We learn too that the Explorer Corps are not simply outcasts, that Gardner intends this book to tranform the series from an interesting future history to something more. I do look forward to where he goes next.

recommended

I’m still watching as much of the World Cup as possible, of course, and been fortunate to avoid learning the score of lunchtime games all week so I could enjoy them after work. I really do appreciate that ABC has spent the money and resources to bring every single game to me live.

Really though, do the announcers have to mention the US team within every five minute block? If I hear one more time that USA need to beat Ghana to move on–which happened while typing the first part of this sentence–I might have hit the mute button.

That has to be my number one complaint, more generally that the announcers and color men are incredibly repetitive. Even the many people unfamiliar with the sport watching these American broadcasts cannot possibly enjoy being told the same facts over and over through every single game.

Guys, football is a game of finesse and power but your announcing style is all power. Feel free to leave some sonic spaces now and then.

While I generally don’t bother with these things, Dan’s answers to the traditional Inside the Actors Studio Questionnaire inspired me to add my own:

What turns you on?
Clarity

What turns you off?
Thoughtlessness

What’s your favorite curse word?
Pardon the language but: pile of steaming moron shit.

What sound or noise do you love?
Twin melodic distorted guitar playing, such as Dickie Betts and Duane Allman on the early Allman Brothers records (especially “Whipping Post” from At Fillmore East) or Thin Lizzy’s Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham exemplified by “The Cowboy Song” from their 1978 Live and Dangerous double album

What sound or noise do you hate?
Muffled bass and drums from car stereos turned up so loud they make my car vibrate at a stop light.

What is your favorite word?
Yes

What is your least favorite word?
Because

What profession other than your own would you like to try?
Movie Producer

What profession would you not want to try?
Dan’s answer, Medicine, is one I agree with but my answer has to be truck driver. I’m not Zen enough to stand the monotonous boredom.

If there’s a heaven, what would you like God to say when you get there?
Existence: why is it so confusing?

What are your answers?

That’s my judgment on the job Jorge Lariondo, the Uruguayan who wore the referee’s shirt in today’s USA-Italy match. Respected footballers like Franz Beckenbauer had already called out the officials for going in their pockets far too frequently in the World Cup and this guy must have thought, hey, screw them I’ll give as many cards as I like.

The result? USA had two men sent off when they clearly had not earned it, especially Pablo Mastrentonio, and Italy lost a midfielder first. Daniele De Rossi, though, got tossed justifiably for a flagrant foul that drew blood from Brian McBride’s forehead.

Lariondo was suspended in 2002 for “irregularities” and wasn’t eligible to work the 2002 Cup finals. How bad was his performance today? At the 49th minute he’d called 20 fouls on the Americans and only seven on Italy, including all three reds. Every one of the TV people said he wouldn’t be working any more matches in the tournament and I surely hope that’s true.

We almost had a second goal, in the 65th minute, which could have been a winner. It seemed like one more bad call from the ref but replays showed that for once he got it right with McBride interfering on Buffon from an offside position.

Neither team helped itself with poor shooting throughout when chances came. Keller made a few terrific saves towards the end but otherwise neither keeper was called to do much.

At the 84th minute, I was confused on why Arena was holding onto our third sub. He absolutely should have brought on Eddie Johnson, Josh Wolff or Brian Ching!!! McBride was a warrior but like most of the starters on both sides was out of gas. Marcelo Lippi had used all three of his options and couldn’t have matched our pair of fresh legs. Damarcus Beasley had come on, it was his shot that was almost our second score, but even he seemed caught up in the slogging of the last ten minutes.

The game ended 1-1, we’re still alive to advance with a win over Ghana and a Czech win over Italy, and our players did indeed learn from Monday’s debacle. Despite how negatively Lariondo affected the result I can’t help wondering if there was a second goal available if Bruce Arena swapped in a new forward.

The title of the San Jose Mercury News review of Harlan Coben’s latest mystery novel says “Promise Me worthy of bestseller list spot.” I can’t argue with that, and Harlan is surely happy–the book did in fact make the NY Times list for a few weeks, as did the new paperback of last year’s The Innocent.

The big news in Promise Me is the return of Coben’s alter ego Myron Bolitar, psychotic best friend Windsor Locke Hart and partner with street smarts Esperanza. The basketball star turned lawyer/sports agent was the hero of the author’s first seven novels and many fans, including me, were wondering if he’d ever feature after Coben’s last five novels turned away from the light comic style of the Bolitar books, all of them serious thrillers with protagonists trapped in holes dug by others.

So Myron is back but Coben is still working out the negative emotions from 9/11 and this story is not even slightly comic; in fact he brings in three key characters from those other novels, DA investigator Loren Muse, Livingston PD detective Lance Banner and lawyer Hester Crimstein.

Promise Me is an integration of these two streams. Some fans may be a bit disappointed but not to me, I think Harlan has written a powerhouse which should elevate him to the top ranks of American suspense. Myron quickly becomes the prime suspect for Muse and Banner but while he knows someone else is responsible, he cannot escape the realization that his best intentions often lead to disaster for the people in his life.

Frankly I couldn’t put the book down, especially for the last hundred pages.

definitely recommended

This morning Garret linked to articles about idle theory and the purpose-driven life but in the day’s early game in Germany, there was no doubt that Argentina is a believer in the latter as they won 6-0, destroying over Serbia and Montenegro in the next to last game that will be played under that name (voters in Montenegro approved plans a couple of weeks ago to become their own nation).

The South Americans got on the board first on a threading pass in the box from Javier Saviola to Maxie Rodriguez, second from a beautiful backheel by Hernan Crespo to Esteban Cambiasso and closed the first half with Rodriguez getting a second off a Saviola rebound. The former Yugoslav side came out looking a bit more determined in the opening minutes of the second half but that energy quickly dissipated when they were unable to make any offensive headway and completely fell apart after former Chelsea striker Mateja Kezman was sent off on a straight red for putting both feet up into defender Mascherano.

Jose Peckerman brought on strikers Carlos Tevez and Lionel Messi, who made or scored the last three goals. Can you imagine a team so deep that the third and fourth strikers are a three time South American player of the year and an 18 year old pushing his way into the starting XI of European club champions Barcelona? Netherlands kick off a must win match with Cote D’Ivoire in 15 minutes, and if they do win will need to beat Argentina in what will be an awesome last group round match because somehow I doubt a draw will get them first place–Argentina’s goal differential is seven and no way will the Dutch be plus six against a strong African side.

What an awesome display of power and fluidity! The losers might as well have not come back out from the locker room at halftime. And I can only hope that Landon Donovan and Bruce Arena were watching closely and taking inspiration for tomorrow.

I slept at the doctor’s office last night. No, TS1 didn’t give me the boot or anything like that! I’ve been tired in ways that simply can’t be chalked up to not getting enough sleep, eating right or exercising, and it’s been happening for a long time.

I first went to see the neurologist nearly two years ago. A technician gave me the equipment, and instructions, to do an at home diagnostic test and then a week with a CPAP machine but it didn’t work for me, even at the end of the trial I couldn’t sleep more than a couple of hours wearing the equipment. I started on a treatment for a different issue–which masked the sleep apnea–and put the idea aside.

But your body rarely lies and in time the issue came back so after some urging from my primary physician I went back. This time I insisted on meeting with the neurologist, not just a technician, and if nothing else she made more more comfortable and confident in the possibility CPAP could help. Plus the next alternative is nasty surgery to reduce the size of your tongue.

So last night I went to the clinic to try a new machine; this one uses distilled water to make the air easier on the intake and has a smaller, less intrusive mask about the size of a roll of quarters with two openings that fit over nostrils. What I didn’t expect was to be wired up with 21 sensors but with the help of a couple of Ambien tablets went pretty much right to sleep.

The technician woke me up around 5:45. You can imagine my impatience as she slowly, carefully removed all the sensors. Most guys my age have a little something to do right after waking up, if you get my drift. The Ambien has a serious after kick, turns out, so it was a good thing that I was working at home today because right after lunch I fell asleep for most of the afternoon.

I don’t get the results for four weeks. Keep our fingers crossed, okay?

I’ve watched eight of the first 11 matches from Germany–you’re surprised I missed three, right?–and 11 hours later I’m still mystified by the play of our team today. They lost 3-0 to the Czech Republic. The Czechs are ranked number two by FIFA and the US five so even if you give credence to those numbers a loss isn’t that surprising.

The loss, then, isn’t mystifying. They brought some real bruisers and a few world class players like Pavel Nedved, Tomas Roszicky and Jan Koller. Peter Cech in goal is usually mentioned in the world’s best goalies list (as is our own Kasey Keller) but my assessment is still open since the defense in front of him at Chelsea FC is so amazing he faces far fewer difficult shots than pretty much any other major club keeper; this tournament is Cech’s chance to show he deserves the accolades. Ranked second or not, I think the only satisfying end to this month for the Czechs is to life the trophy or else barely lose to Brazil.

Back to the US Men. The first problem was they all played like a dozen polka bands were playing overlapping amplified sets outside the team hotel all night. Bruce Arena put Damarcus Beasley on the right wing and I can’t remember the last time he played on that side, certainly he didn’t in any of the qualifying games. Bobby Convey, Eddie Lewis and Claudio Reyna were never able to provide supply into Brian McBride, Eddie Johnson or Landon Donovan.

The heart of the offense, the real engine, for the last five years has been Donovan, who was just somewhere else the whole game. Maybe it was his disastrous ten weeks with German club Bayern Leverkusen 18 months ago but since then he hasn’t seemed like the same player who took the Earthquakes to the 2003 MLS trophy. For a player who used to score nearly every time out, he’s gone 16 matches now without a goal.

If we’re to have any chance of getting out of the group round Donovan needs to find the old magic. Beasley needs to be back on the left, racing up to get the ball deep into the offensive third and putting it into Landon, McBride or Johnson. Oguchi Onyewu needs to shake off the Koller goal and early yellow card. Eddie Johnson (or can I hope Brian Ching) needs to be in the starting lineup, with Pablo Mastroeni left on the bench. Maybe Clint Dempsey on the right instead of Convey.

Most of all, Bruce Arena needs to get the guys a good night’s sleep.

Last night was the first Silicon Valley Ruby on Rails meetup and I can tell you it was an impressive first meeting. Turnout was 50+ people (okay, 50 guys and two or three women), we had good presentations from

• Hasan Diwan discussing his Quicken-ish replacement Finance on Rails and also mentioned some plugins he found really useful such as undo_helper, validates_date_time, Cartographer and continuous_builder.
• Bill Katz explained his Authorization Plugin
• Seth Banks wowed the crowd with his Substruct open source e-commerce/content management engine

Much thanks to Zachary Taylor and Mark Smallcombe of InsiderPages.com for organizing and hosting the meetup, and for the delicious pizza.

Someone posted this question to the Blogger user mailing list recently and here’s my response:

Tag clouds are a collection of tags and the idea is that instead of having categories, especially a short simple list of categories with perhaps only one assigned to each post, you can assign any number of tags to each post and give readers easier access to your archives. Tags are keywords and might otherwise be considered reasonably equivalent to categories.

Since Blogger does not support either it’s possible to put tags directly in the post body or else to manually tag each post to a service like delicious or RawSugar.

Personally I think clouds are a poor interface when the tagged content has more than a fairly small number of posts. A couple of good examples of fairly useless tag clouds are:

• DailyKos (compare it to this sample we worked up using RawSugar)
• WordPress.com (this is an aggregation of all the tags used by all the blogs on this hosted WordPress service, which is comparable to Blog*Spot)

Complicity (1993) is one of Iain Bank’s non-science fiction novels though still set in his beloved Scotland. Cameron Colley is a veteran journalist working for one of Edinburg’s big dailies, addicted to cigarettes, booze and speed, unhappily having an affair with a beautiful married woman. Interspersed with Colley’s chapters, written in the first person, are scenes presented in the second person of brutal justice being meted out by an anonymous vigilante (the book opens with “You hear the car after an hour and a half. During that time you’ve been here in the bedroom, istting on the small telephone seat near the front door. waiting.”).

The dead all seem to be getting punishments fit to their alleged crime. They also are all men mentioned in a vitriokic column Colley wrote a few months beforehand and at times when he can’t account for his whereabouts because he’s being fed clues to what might be a separate series of deaths of men linked to Britain’s nuclear program and a shady arms merchant. Colley picked a bad time to try and quit his abusing addictions, a really bad time.

Banks writes so well that I even enjoyed his regular bits of advertisement for Scottish tourism. By the last third of the book I really had a hard time putting it down.

recommended

John Scalzi got lots of positive attention and award nominations so I grabbed Old Man’s War from the library. Enjoyable enough read and an interesting conceit but I wouldn’t have rated it quite so highly; the ideas Scalzi brings to the table are much better than his execution.

Basics: Over a hundred years before the opening some humans got loose in the galaxy and found the place is pretty crowded, with neighbors who for the most part shoot (so to speak) first and last. Still, we were able to get a foothold and colonize a few dozen worlds yoked together in the Colonial Union. The fighting is done by the Colonial Defense Forces–enlisting is the only way Americans and citizens of other wealthy nations can get off Earth but the CDF won’t take you before your 75th birthday. John Perry, his wife dead several years, is happy enough to go.

Your ticket is one way and no information and almost no technology gets to Earth either, which leads to one of my major complaints, in addition to the lackadaisical pace: Scalzi never once explains or justifies why the colonies have developed some amazing technology and knowledge about the universe but refuse to share it with the gang at home.

Secondary, he more or less waives his hand at the ‘how this all got started’ piece. Since Old Man’s War is the first book in what turns out to be a series–Ghost Brigades follows up with a story focusing on the CDF special forces we meet in here–I think this could have easily fit in. By the time I was halfway through this was really irritating me.

Jewish High Tech Community – July 11 Meeting

Eric Benhamou, Chairman and CEO of Benhamou Global Ventures, LLC will be speaking on Venture Philosophy.

Benhamou Global Ventures, started in 2003, invests and plays an active role in innovative high tech firms throughout the world. Mr. Benhamou is also the chairman of the board of directors of 3Com Corporation and Palm, Inc, and served as CEO of 3Com from 1990-2000. He is an adjunct professor of Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise at INSEAD and chairman of the Israel Venture Network, a venture philanthropy organization for a stronger Israeli society.

See you there!

I made this with Sala’s neat tool:

I’m taking longer than hoped to clean up and post the photos from the recent Jersey visit but here’s a Coming Attraction shot, a nice one of Vivian and Joanne playing on the floor with birthday boy Jakey.

Later: Here you go, a couple of dozen photos many featuring the budding superstar.

Towel Day :: A tribute to Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

A great, funny writer gone before his time.

I’m having a little problem with the tendon in my right pinkie so the doctor advised to cut down on typing, meaning even less posting here. Boohoo. But I did want to mention the latest small technical addition I made to the site. Yahoo! has releaed a nice open source JavaScript UI Library and I used the Panel widget to rewrite the way the “Last 5” entries from my politics and movie review blogs are displayed. Just click the link to see it in action.

I’ve also implemented the new blog integration code from RawSugar on this blog and the movie reviews. This version is even slicker, with complete control of how the embedded tag box appears and–this is the new part–how the search results show up too. You can really make it all look like your own site, have the results appear in the same page as the tag box or on a dedicated page. Subsequent tag clicks, refining a search, refresh in place (that is, an Ajaxy no page reload) and when a user clicks the X close button, the same URL where the search started is redisplayed. Very nice work, and you can use it for your blog too, no charge.

Tony Hillerman has been writing mysteries featuring Navajo policemen Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn for more than 35 years so it’s not surprising that 2003’s Sinister Pig works like a quart of the higest quality motor oil. Quickly set up a mystery death for the cops, though we get told first just what’s up, and then tie it in with an odd stop made by the woman Chee has trouble admitting to himself he loves. Bring in a corporate tycoon–remember this was written as the Tyco, Worldcom and Enron scandals were breaking–either sociopathic or believing the slightest inconvenience justifies any action he makes. Slick, smooth, smart. Highly readable.

recommended

So now I’ve read the first, second and fourth novels in Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution series. Series is a good name for the books given how loosely connected the stories are, though they do share thematic explorations of post-socialist polities.

The Stone Canal focuses on David Reid and Jonathon Wilde, from Wilde’s perspective, paralleling joint experiences on Earth pre-Singularity and a world named New Mars afterwards. The two meet at Glasgow University in 1975, the first scene set in a bar with politics the topic of discussion. Many of the scenes which have them physically together involve bars or at least alcohol. The Earth-based story skips across the decades, technology developing to lengthen lifespans far beyond what we have today, but the other half is just a few days in Ship City, the only habitation on New Mars. The only inhabitants are humans and human-gestated intelligent machines, some of whom occupy human clone bodies.

Negatives: Macleod poses Wilde as somewhat less discerning than you’d expect a person of his education experience to be and, in a second surprising mistake, clearly overestimates the impact of the revelation of a connection between two of the female supporting characters. I’d also prefer he left out the constant mention of cigarette smoking despite the handwaving cancer immunity.

The book is wildly creative and engaging though, as is the case with many second novels, works too hard to top the screaming success of the first. I can’t imagine not reading Stone Canal, though.

recommended