Author: andy

Iron Woman

Congratulations to my sister Helen, who completed her first Iron Man yesterday at Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. She swam 3.8 km, cycled 180 km, and then ran a marathon (42.2 km) back to back. An awesome achievement – well done Helen!

Three books

Three books. One great, one okayish, and one unfinishable.

I have finally finished Matter, the latest work from Iain M Banks. This is his first science fiction work in about three years. This is not a great book, but it is okay.

Banks (with and without the M) is one of my all-time favourite authors. I picked-up a copy of State of the Art back in the early nineties and was hooked. I have since read every book he has written. Many reviewers seem to be labelling Matter as a “return to form”, but compared to his earlier works (say, The Player of Games, or Excession) I found it bloated, slow, and unbalanced. At least a quarter (maybe a third) of the book – Ferbin’s jorney around the eighth and up to the surface – is superfluous. The book warms up when he meets his sister, and ends very quickly with very compressed (if well written) combat sequence. It read like Banks, having written so much, just wanted to be finished with it. I kind of did too.

That said, it did flesh-out the culture universe a bit – introducing various other ‘involved’ civilisations and establishing some scale. The shellworld concept was cool too.

Half way through Matter I did something I rarely do; put the book to one side and started another with the intention of returning to it later. The book was How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, and it was wonderful. If I could I’d have read it in one sitting. Originally written for the “young adult” (i.e. teen) market, it seems to have crossed-over into the adult market. The book is about the experiences of a young American girl, Daisy, in near-future Britain during a war and subsequent invasion. Its written entirely in the first person and Daisy’s character just made the book. Definitely recommended!

The unfinishable book was, unfortunately, God is Not Great by Peter Hitchens. I’d been looking forward to this, and bought the hardcover. Although I strongly agree with Hitchen’s thesis (er… that god is not great) this book just read like a rant. He makes points without citing sources (there some end-notes but they are brief) and overall the book comes-across as indulgent and smug. So for now its in the unfinished pile, and I’d recommend The God Delusion instead.

I have just started Richard Carrier’s Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism. So far its excellent and I’d highly recommend it.

Live from the Antarctic

I’ve spent most of the day coding and listening to a very cool live audio feed from below the Antarctic Ekström ice shelf. Its very ambient and spacey, and has really helped keep me in the zone today – just as well as I have a major release due to be pushed to our servers overnight tonight.

Nothing much happens: just hissing, bubbly, swishy water noises with the occasional groan and crash as chunks of ice calve away. Very relaxing and, for me at least, focusing.

And the Antarctic just got a bit less remote. Its a long way away, incredibly inhospitable, and very few people have been there – but I can sit here in my office writing code and listening to the sounds of one of the most remote places on earth.

I suspect that in a few years time my children will find something like this entirely unextraordinary…

(Via Wired, via BldgBlog)

Journey

Well, its been a while…

By way of breaking cover, and via dave Faber’s IP list, here is something rather wonderful. Its a very smart flash animation showing 150,000 years of human migration across the planet – from our origins in East-central Africa to the ‘present’ of the last few thousand years.

Although I am familiar with the route these people (we!) took from books like Guns, Germs, and Steel, the animation really makes it clear. I learned a lot from this. Definitely worth a look!

Best Usenet Sig

I don’t know how I can across it (probably following a link from uk.rec.walking) but this guy has has a really great usenet signature:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Barbeques on fire by the chalets past the castle headland
I watched the gift shops glitter in the darkness off the Newborough gate
All these moments will be lost in time,  like icecream on the beach
Time for tea.

If that doesn’t mean anything to you then you should probably check-out this clip. Better still, watch the whole film.

Blog.Reset()

Well, this post has been a long time coming. Back in November ’05 I really didn’t know whether I wanted to bother with this blog. A young family and work commitments meant that I had very little time to write the kind of longer posts that I tried after previous hiatus. Really, I found myself with little to say. So I posted a rather melancholic post entitled ‘Loser‘ and left the thing to go to seed.

One problem with this is that I kind of blocks your options for resuming posting – and the longer you leave it the harder it gets. Hence the year of silence.

Over Christmas I moved the content from Community Server to the suddenly fashionable WordPress. Writing the code to link the two systems Metaweblog API endpoints together was an interesting exercise, and I also got a passing familiarity with MySQL. It didn’t actually produce any posts, though.

Well, last week my partner, Debra, gave birth to our second child, Ben. I’ve been on paternity leave and we’ve been re-aquainting ourselves with deep fatigue and sleep deprivation. A wonderful time, though, and an opportunity to get some perspective on life. Since I return to work tomorrow (albeit telecommuting from home for most of the rest of the week), I thought that I might not get another chance to post here. So I have.

Maybe this will break the block I’d put on myself.

Mother and baby are doing well, btw. He has grey eyes, and we’re wating to see which colour they finally become.

Some other things I’ve done since the ‘Loser‘ post:

  • Spent a wonderful week with my family camping in a tipi in Cornwall.
  • At work, amongst other things, I transitioned our main smart client from a J2SE-based applet to a .NET 2.0 click-once application. This was a lot of fun, and I learned a few things about .NET that I didn’t know. Maybe a future post about this.
  • I read some awesome non-fiction books: Worldchanging, Hostile Habitats, the Pickaxe book, and a lot more that I can’t remember.
  • I read some good fiction books with disappointing endings: Quantico, The Execution Channel, Air (which just went on for too damn long), The Steep Approach to Garbadale and quite a few more. I don’t know why, but almost every fiction book I read seems to run out of steam just before the end. Maybe I’m reading the wrong authors.

I really can’t say how often this blog will be updated. I don’t feel much drive to do it, but I feel that for the writing practice alone its worth persevering with. We’ll see.