Yup. One year ago I signed the papers, forked over the cash, and added several keys to my ring.
My only opinion on the subject at the moment?
“Maybe I should vacuum something.”
The Latest News in Books
Things have been pretty busy the past month or so, but I have managed to find time to crack open a couple of new books.
The first one was The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. This is not the first alternate history book I have read, so it felt just a little cliche. Then I remembered that this was one of the first of that sub-genre, and in that context is was BRILLIANT! Basically, America lost WWII and was divvied up between the Germans (east of the Mississippi) and the Japanese (west of the Rocky Mountains), with a no-man;s-land in between. The stories are told from the point of view of several characters, Japanese, German, and American.
Next — and one I am still working on — is the ecological thriller The Swarm by Frank Schatzing. The overall plot is nothing new — the abused Earth begins fighting back against her tormentors — but the specifics of the story are fresh and engaging, and the characters are sympathetic without being preachy.
Finally, the one I just finished, and one which caught me by surprise: The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Normally I am aware of when interesting books are published, but I didn’t hear about this one until after the fact. McCarthy has (finally) published a post-apocalyptic novel. He has written several apocalyptic novels — Blood Meridian being the most obvious — and now he has written the book he was meant to write. The entire novel follows an un-named father and son as they travel west from the mountains to the coast of southern California in an America gone to nuclear winter where nothing is left alive but human beings. Gangs of cannibals roam the remains of the world and a can of peaches is the most magnificent meal to be hoped for.
There is nothing dignified or romantic about the end of the world here — everything is ash and rain and snow, and a simple thing like a shopping cart losing its wheel can be a life-or-death experience.
I read The Road too quickly the first time — punctuated by moments of having to put it down and let my emotions settle — and I will probably pick it up again around the holidays.
Thomas Harris has a new book coming out in three weeks: Hannibal Rising, the story of how Hannibal Lecter became one of the greatest literary monsters of the twentieth century. Saying I am looking forward to this one is an understatement.
That’s all for now. I want to get in a solid hour of reading before I go to bed. I suggest you do the same.
Back Again
Chaos, contrary to what you might think, is easily predictable. If many different areas of my life have a tendency towards instability, they will all become complicated at once.
Take my computer. The old one died a month ago. This is the first thing I am doing on my new machine. The build process went something like this:
-buy computer parts
-build computer
-install Windows XP, 64-bit edition
-install wrong drivers
-format hard drive
-install Windows XP, 64-bit edition
-install is corrupt
-format hard drive
-install Windows XP, 64-bit edition
-find 64-bit drivers
-discover that USB wireless adapter has no 64-bit drivers
-discover that antivirus and personal firewall software for 64-bit machine are rare and expensive
-format hard drive
-install Windows XP, 32-bit edition
-stare in confusion at notice that windows can’t find CD drive in the middle of Windows installing from CD drive
-format hard drive
-install Windows XP, 32-bit edition
-stare in confusion at notice that windows can’t find CD drive in the middle of Windows installing from CD drive
-copy files form CD to USB Flash drive, which now somehow is the D: drive
-stare in confusion at notice that windows can’t find USB drive that is says is now my D: drive
-format hard drive
-copy Windows install CD to new 4-gig USB Flash drive
-change boot order to USB FIRST
-install windows XP, 32-bit edition from USB drive
-stare in confusion at notice that Windows can’t find USB drive etc. etc.
-cross fingers and hit Enter
-stare in confusion as Windows finishes installing
-install drivers
-install Oblivion
-bask in the awesomeness that is Oblivion on a 64-bit, dual-core, 2GHz Athlon running 2Gb of RAM and a 512Mb NVidia video card
whew
Also, I started a new job at the beginning of the month. After a year and a half away, I am back at BBK Studio in its new, more developer-friendly iteration.
Funny old world, innit?
Crash
Find a light switch in your house. A good stiff one, which is just a little hard to move. Now click it about twice a second for several seconds.
That is the sound which came out of my hard drive last night.
Yup. My 5-year-old personal computer is dead. It’s bleedin’ deceased. It’s shuffled off this mortal coil. Etcetera.
Fortunately I backed up everything a couple of weeks ago, just after a virus scare. So all I lost was a few photos and my email archives. Nothing earth-shaking.
I have already, with the help of co-worker Jeremy, put together a shopping cart over at New Egg which I will soon submit, and then, for the first time in about eight years, build my own computer.
But this weekend I will enjoy 48 hours without a computer. Maybe I will read a book, or something.
O God It Burns, part II
This is the most recent harvest from my pepper plants. 29 cayennes, 6 jalapeños and 8 habaneros. The cayenne and jalapeño plants are done, and there are maybe 40 more habaneros still turning orange, awaiting harvesting.
This will bring the total for the whole season to, I think, nearly 100 peppers from three plants. I am already planning a pepper garden for next year; at least a dozen plants and maybe half a dozen different kinds of peppers.
Point of interest: If you need to harvest peppers before they turn red, put them in a paper bag with a tomato. For some reason this will cause the peppers to change color.
Trees!
Consider the above photo.
The blue house on the left is mine. The house immediately to the right belongs to my neighbor Jeremy. Immediately in front of our houses is a row of four new Red Maple trees. Jeremy and I spent most of the day Saturday, and part of Sunday, digging out old sod, digging holes, planting trees, leveling ground, and laying in new sod.
Is It Not Magnificent?
Actually, Jeremy did the lion’s share of the heavy lifting; he had the trees in the ground before I returned home from Saturday morning practice. And he placed them so that, from a certain spot on either porch, none of our neighbors across the street are visible.
So now is the long, breathless wait to see if new leaves come in next spring.
As a side note, the paint job on the blue car to the left of the photo confounded me for a little while, until I realized that the different shades of blue are there to break up the visual outline of the car. The logic there being that if the owner happens to be driving the car in, say, the north Atlantic in late 1942, German U-boat skippers will have a hard time seeing how big the car actually is and which direction it is traveling, and will therefore have a difficult time aiming their torpedoes.
Pretty smart, that fella.
O God It Burns!
This is the take from my pepper plants this afternoon. 20 jalapenos (I gave five to a neighbor) and five super cayennes. I also have a habanero plant which has at least 30 peppers, which I will pick when they start to turn orange.
I have been making my own salsa since I first began harvesting peppers about a month ago, and lemme tellya, a jalapeno fresh from the plant makes a fine ingredient.
2 large tomatoes, diced
.5 of a large (tomato-sized) white onion, diced
1 good-sized yellow bell pepper. seeded and diced
1 can of corn kernels
2 regular, or 1 humongously heaping, tablespoons of finely chopped garlic
2 jalapenos and 1 cayenne pepper diced to about pixel-sized pieces
1 generous dusting of black pepper
1 light dusting of salt
1 light dribble of balsamic vinegar
Mix everything together and eat! Also good as a garnish over eggs.
In the same sense that any soup with beets as the main ingredient is technically borscht, any mix of chopped veggies that is predominantly tomatoes and hot peppers is technically salsa.
I think that next summer I will plant about a dozen pepper plants and maybe use some of them to make anti-personnel spray.
Social Responsibility
Well, I have been picking away at this project for a couple of weeks now, and I think I am ready to unleash it upon the world at large:
Announcing the Interactive Map of Grand Rapids, Michigan Criminal Incidents.
I first began toying around with this idea last October when someone broke into my car and stole my radio. As the week progressed at least half a dozen other cars on my block were broken into, quite probably by the same person. It got me thinking: If we could get some idea of the general time of the incidents, and find all car break-ins in the surrounding blocks, then the information could be used to catch the bastard.
I let this idea gestate for a while as other things — house, school, tai chi — took precedence.
A couple of months ago I grabbed a user key from Google Maps and started playing around with the API, exploring what could and could not be done, and how. I also started looking online for reports of the various crimes which happen in Grand Rapids every day. I was surprised (and quite disappointed) to see that there was practically no useful information about criminal activity available online. Statistics are out there, but those are cold numbers, with nothing like specific date, time, location and type of crimes.
As I continued to look I discovered that WOOD TV’s website was the only place in the whole of the worldwide web which consistently reported crime and — more importantly — archived the stories. So the WOODTV archives became my data set.
There are currently 47 incidents on the map. They were all I could find reported in 2006. They represent, I suppose, the worst of the crimes committed, but they also represent the least common crimes. News outlets don’t report when someone’s car is robbed, or when someone is mugged with no bloodshed. So assuming that the extremes of antisocial behavior are the result of day-to-day pressures the map gives a fairly accurate view of what is going on in Grand Rapids.
But it is not enough. At a rough guess, this is perhaps 10 percent of the activity in the city. The smaller incidents affect more people, and so ultimately they are the more important data. A friend has promised to connect me with a GRPD officer who may be able to provide me with the data I need. When that happens you will see a sharp jump in the number and variety of incidents pegged on the map.
HOW TO USE THE MAP:
Each colored icon represents a crime as reported at woodtv.com.
Different crimes are represented by different colors.
Click on the icons to see the associated details.
Use the dropdown menus above the map to filter the crimes by type, date, zip code, and city quadrant. Hit the “RESET” button to reset all of the filters.
Use the tool in the upper-left corner of the map to zoom in and out, and to scroll in the four cardinal directions. You can also click-and-drag anywhere on the map to move it around.
And most important — let me know what you think of my efforts. If you would like to see additional features, or if you know of additional sources of information, or anything else, please let me know.
The Soul-Sucking Bliss of Material Possessions
Have spent the past few days taking care of things around the house, and preparing for the arrival of a couple of new things. Just this morning I had the pleasure of spending an hour or so with the exceptionally talented Matt Van Heulen of Clear Advantage Mechanical, who got my air conditioner up and running just in time for (apparently) the Earth to plunge into the sun. I kid you not: I saw at least one dog burst into flames while being walked along my street this afternoon. Right now outside: 94 degrees and miserably humid. Right now inside: 78 degrees and dry.
On Wednesday I will receive my new (first,only) washer and dryer, which means no more trips to the laundromat. I think I will miss it, just a bit. Sunday morning is a fine time of day to be alone in a crowd with a notebook and a novel. Before I get those things up and running I get to play in the exciting world of installing a 240v line in my basement, hopefully without making myself smell like cooked bacon.
I just finished re-reading the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. When the books came out a couple of years ago, they were published at six-month intervals, so I read them at six-month intervals. A lot of the small details — and there were manymanymany small details — were lost. Having just read them (2700 pages!) back to back, I discovered that, taken in total, the Cycle is one of the finest stories I have ever read. If you have a couple of months to spare, I highly recommend putting forth the effort.
Last Sunday I took a break from Stephenson and read the latest installment in the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind: Phantom. It is a decently good book. Not Goodkind’s best work, but far from his worst. He seemed to reach his nadir a couple of volumes back, using his work as a platform for his political views at the expense of the story he had been telling. With the last two books he is back on track. Definitely worth picking up in paperback, or hardcover if you are a die-hard fan.
The big giant work project wound up today, which means relatively low-stress days for the next couple of weeks until the next big thing lands on me.
Time to go to the beach.
Longhorn
A longhorn beetle which I have not yet successfully identified. Photo taken in late May.