books, luck, reviews

Luck Prevails

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Do you ever feel like you are just too lucky at times?

I follow a couple of sci-fi and fantasy publishing house blogs. From that simple act  follows the corollary that there are book giveaways from time to time. I would normally assume that the chances were slim-to-none of me winning any given contest. But … in the last several months I have been fortunate enough to win Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb (In hard copy along with a really cute pocket dragon broach that I gave to L.), Royal Exile and Tyrant’s Blood by Fiona McIntosh, and Wilderness by Dennis Danvers.

Then this morning I saw a chance to get a galley copy to review of BRAINS by Robin Becker. So I fired off an email and by this evening found out that the galley copy will be here soon. It feels a bit like a visit to Disneyland when you are a kid – all your wishes coming true. This is especially a living dream for a Science Fiction and Fantasy aficionado like me. Given that I already have a library of hundreds of volumes of the genre, there is nothing better than getting new books from authors old and new to read. I keep waiting for someone to come along and pinch me so I wake up.

Now if only I could find a few detective fiction publishing house blogs to follow and have similar luck with them. My reading worries would be over!

computers, humane society, netbooks

Five for Friday

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I thought about doing a Friday High Five post, but since I’m not sure Angela is back often enough to host, I decided to let it slide for this week. Instead I’ll ask the rhetorical question – Do you think there are enough computers on my desk?

Oops, sorry – I forgot that you don’t have telescopic x-ray vision. Here is what my desk looks like tonight:

It looks a bit like the computers are mating and multiplying. The two little netbooks on the left are in the process of being prepped and loaded for use by the animal officers in the humane society. (I’m not only the executive director, but also the IT guru of the humane society.) Couple them with some antennas and mounts and misc. electronics added to the vehicles and we will shortly have brought the process into at least the 20th century and maybe even the 21st.

One neat capability will be almost instant load from the cameras to the netbooks to the back-end database and then to the web site so that found and captured animals can be spotted almost immediately by their owners simply by visiting the web site. Likewise, when animals are cleared for adoption, they are then visible on the site as well, hopefully decreasing the time to adoption.

The animal officers are in seventh heaven over the idea of the netbooks and computerized vehicles. We’ll have to see how they feel in a few months when they have had time to hit the real warts.

Time to load some more software.

(Did you spot where the five in the title came from? Five monitors on the desk: 2 on netbooks, one on laptop, and two on the desk side server. )

better off gone, mama kat, writer's challenge

I’m Better Off Without It

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Time once more for the wonders of Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge. This week I take on the topic of:

1.) 10 Reasons why you’re better off without him….or her….or it.

My reasons why I am better off without it:

  • It is slow.
  • It is old.
  • It generates enough heat in operation to warm the whole house.
  • It generates more noise than a jet idling by your ear.
  • It uses proprietary accessories.
  • It is “No longer supported” hardware.
  • It is “No longer supported” software.
  • The optical drive is broken.
  • The built in Ethernet is broken.
  • It burns more electricity per year than the cost of a modern replacement.
  • It weighs more than 150 lbs.

Have you figured out what it is? It is my old domain backup system manufactured by the no longer extant Sun Microsystems. It was top of the line back in the late 90’s when I acquired it, but today its job can be done faster by a cheap Intel box. The only bad thing is that the beast has been reliable as heck. For the last 11 years it has had less than 10 minutes of unplanned downtime. Its replacement box averages that much downtime per month.

So long old friend.

angela, friday high five

The Case of the Disappearing Blogger

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Do you ever wonder what happens to people you meet via the blogosphere when they disappear? Sometimes they seem to disappear from the face of the earth with no explanation or hint of impending disappearance.

I don’t know about you, but I always start off for the first several weeks assuming that something in real life must have come up and then they will return.  But as the missing time extends to a month, I tend to actually visit the website {*gasp*} to make sure it is not a changed or missing RSS feed. And when it doesn’t turn out to be that, I start to assume that for whatever reason they have decided to stop blogging. In the back of my mind I hope that they have not suffered illness or accident or other misfortune. By the second month, I have usually come to acceptance that I will never know what happened to cause their disappearance, and, in many cases, it is not long thereafter that their web design graphics hosting fades and the site becomes nothing more than ugly placeholders. Rarely is there a return from the prolonged heat death of the site.

But there are exceptions. One recent returnee after undergoing blogging heat death is Angela of Angel Eyes Adventures, the hostess of Friday High Five. It will be interesting to hear (or not) the tale behind her sudden disappearance from the web early last November. In any case,

Welcome Back Angela!
mankind, quotes
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Today my mind was wondering and came to rest on quotes relating to mankind (or womankind or homo sapiens if you prefer). I thought of several quotes that seemed apropos, so here are a few remembered quotes on the topic:

  1. Man: A creature made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.
  2. The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.
  3. Is man one of God’s blunders or is God one of man’s?
  4. I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.
  5. I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.
  6. I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.

And here is a list of the authors:

  1. Friedrich W. Nietzsche
  2. Oscar Wilde
  3. Charles Schultz
  4. Fyodor Dostoevsky
  5. Friedrich Nietzsche
  6. Mark Twain

Your challenge is to correctly associate the author with the quote without using Google or other search engine.

While you cogitate and work on the problem, I’ll show you a picture of the icecles that have formed on the eaves from the freeze thaw cycle of the snow:

Cogitated long enough? Got your answers in hand?

Well, while we wait, let me ask another question: which of the quotes most resonates with you view of the world?

The correct associations between quotes and authors are given in the first comment. No peaking!

Oh, my world view resonates with either of

Man: A creature made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.

 -or-

I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.

Things Done Right