Fictitious

In the spirit of vulnerable, transparent blogging, I thought I would share with you my current reading habits. I've noticed that I only read fiction books when I go on vacation. I think that the reason why this is the case is that I want to have a book that just passes the time easily while I'm trying to fit a six-three frame into a hobbit-sized airplane seat for a couple of hours.

And I've noticed that the longer the vacation, the longer the book. For my 3 week trip to Brazil I read this:



For my 3 day trip to Mexico I read this:



But during the short periods of non-vacation, I seem to only read non-fiction books. There are two reasons why this is the case. I enjoy learning new things. And I feel I should at least attempt to do something productive or redeeming with my reading time. Key word here, attempt:



And no, I don't consider McLaren fiction.

But now, for next week's Seattle vacation, I have returned to my geek roots to pick of the 700 page fantasy classic:



To be honest, most people see fantasy novels as not much better than the average cheap romantic novel. But if millions of adults are reading cute children's fantasy novels about a bunch of persnickety school kids with magic sticks then I shouldn't be embarrassed about reading this.

So far its pretty good, as the reviews said, the characters are more raw, and colored with shades of grey instead of black and white. People die, bad things happen to good people, the seedy underbelly of humanity is exposed. I'm sure some good stuff will happen in it too, but in most fantasy novels such as potter books, you know that the unwitting, misunderstood, underdog hero will ultimately triumph over his clearly evil foes. (which is why people read them, nothing wrong with that)

Back in college, I really enjoyed Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series:



The characters (even the many female ones) were entirely believable and full of depth even while in a fantastical setting. But I really got pissed off and felt abused when after around book 8 in the series, the plot slowed to a spine-numbing crawl. Book 11 is out now, and they say that things have started picking up again for the final book 13, but I don't think that I can ever go back.

There's a lot of crap in Fantasy and SciFi, but these writing genres also allow a good writer a huge array of freedom to talk about the human condition in accurate, but refreshingly entertaining ways:



I guess why I also enjoyed several of Percy's novels (while not exactly scifi/fant) is that I can identify with the characters because they are human (in every sense of the word, and not just human in the sense of ethical or unethical actions).

But anyway, with this new series, I at least know what I'm getting into up front --- a total of 6 books with a very probable chance that all will be published before the author dies... and maybe the start of a lot more fiction between vacations.

Breakfeast

Have you seen that new Sonic comercial? I must say that I really have hated those two guys in the car and have vowed to never go to sonic.

But the new one? GENIUS!! "it's a break-feast!"

and I've seriously considered going to sonic now just because of that pun.

so funny!!!

Dumpster Diving

Roommate R really cracks me up sometimes. A few days ago, R took out the trash to find a computer sitting beside the dumpster at our apartment complex.

R has an affinity for dumpster diving. Apparently he learned it from his father and, later in life during college, he would perfect this skill by pulling out many chunked valuables from dumpsters at the end of the school year. A few months ago, he pulled out a Webber charcoal grill and two bags of charcoal. He has since grilled many a steak on that little webber.

I also have to say that R was currently using a decade-old hunk of a doorstop to write his doctoral dissertation. It's painful for me to watch --- I couldn't imagine how painful the thing must be to use. Oh yeah, and he's poor and too cheap to buy a new computer.

But he wasn't getting his hopes up too much with this dumpster computer. He pulled it out and asked me if I could salvage it for any good parts. So we took off the case and plugged it in to see if it would power up. Which it did, but it let out beeps of agony when we hit the switch. So we turned it off.

All of the components were there except for the RAM, which I found one DIMM stuck to the bottom of the case and another RAM DIMM that must have fell out of it because it was on the floor. I inserted the RAM DIMMs and turned it on. The computer hummed happily without a chirp.

So I said, "hey, this thing might actually work". So I plugged up a monitor and keyboard/mouse and it booted up. I found that the previous owner seemed to know a bit about computers and (s)he deleted all of the files, but left windows and some other programs. And with a minor jumper setting change, we used the DVD/CD drive (yes, a DVD drive) to load the 5$ office 2000 disk that R got through PISD.

And voila! It turns out to have a P-II 400Mhz, 128MB RAM, ~20gig HD, CD/DVD ROM, with sound, modem, NIC, and video cards. Someone must have thrown it out when they bought a newer computer. Roommate R now has a ~5 year old computer instead of a ~10+ year old computer to finish composing his doctoral thesis. All free and courtesy of our very own apartment dumpster.