May 03, 2004

I Aten't Dead

Quite.

Ambient Irony should return to it's irregular schedule around about Thursday.

Until then, I leave you with this selection of fine reading:

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:45 PM | Comments (13) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

May 01, 2004

Slowsilver

Just finished reading Quicksilver.

My take: Far too long. Stephenson needs to be ruthlessly edited. Or, you can take the view that it's not a novel, but a collection of short stories and essays, in which case it still needs to be ruthlessly edited.

It's a decent book, and interesting, but it would be a much better book if there was less of it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:31 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

now that i am flu nebraska

Has anyone else noticed that the subject lines in spam are trending towards the surreal? Or is it just me?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:14 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 30, 2004

Good Things Come In Pairs

AMD's CEO, Hector Ruiz, says that we'll be seeing dual-core Opterons next year:

One of the most powerful things next year is going to be our dual-core product. To me, that's going to really shock the hell out of everyone, because it's going to be hardware-compatible, infrastructure-compatible, pin-compatible. I mean, people that have a 2-P system can slap in a dual-core product and end up with a 4-P system for the price of a 2-P. That's been the biggest drawback, everyone tells me. What keeps them from going from a 2-P to a 4-P system? It's price.

Translation for the non-geeks: Until this happens, there is a big price gap between small servers (with one or two processors) and medium-sized ones (with 4 to 8 processors). So if you outgrow your existing server, you can end up having to spend a lot of money. This move will push that point up a lot higher.

And at the same time, some very nice quad-processor Opteron motherboards are starting to show up at reasonable prices. Which pushes the bar up to eight way. Whee!

(eWeek interview)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:38 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

I'm Eating a What?

My local branch of the Scottish Restaurant has a series of signs in one window that read as follows:

Take a peek at our eggs.

100% export quality Australian beef.

We just add a dash of pepper and salt.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:09 PM | Comments (15) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 29, 2004

Abuse & Misuse

The National Coalition for the Abuse and Misuse of Statistics* have been running ads on Streetvision** lately, proclaiming that:

Handguns kill over 400,000 people each year. 80% of them are women and children.***

Oh, that's not an Australian statistic, you say?

Funny, that.

So how many people are killed by handguns**** in Australia each year? This handy article in The Age, found in about 10 seconds of Googling, tells us that the number in 2001 was 49.

This represents a drop since tough new restrictions were put in place in 1996, from a 1991 figure of 29.

No, hang on - isn't 49 more than 29? I could've sworn...

And those numbers include accidents and suicides. Suicide is the single largest cause of death involving firearms, and accounted for 80% of such deaths over a ten-year period from 1991 to 2001.

And 90% of the victims in that ten-year period were men.

But far be it from me to accuse the National Coalition for Gun Control of being somewhat careless with the truth.

* Well, they call themselves the National Coalition for Gun Control, but...
** Television - 90% ads - projected at captive audiences in the underground stations in Sydney.
*** That may not be exact, but it's pretty close.
**** Yeah, I know. Guns don't kill people - I do.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:45 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Thanks. My ENGL class is currently talking about the misuse of statistics...this is a perfect example to point out to them!

Posted by: Sarah at April 29, 2004 10:13 PM (mU8BX)

2 And while I don't have a detailed breakdown of handgun deaths by cause, overall it works out to around 80% suicide, 10% accident, and 10% homicide. So the average number of people killed by handguns each year - deliberately, by other people, in Australia - is about 4.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 29, 2004 10:23 PM (+S1Ft)

3 Pixy,

Welcome to my world. lol Ol' Sam Clemens (that Twain fellow) often quoted Benjamin Disraeli on this subject. To loosely paraphrase there are 3 kinds of mistruths in the world; lies, damn lies & statistics.

In the U.S. the gun control debate has been raging a bit longer & hotter & the junk science used to back up the prohibitionists arguments are sometimes laughable. Perhaps the funniest of late wasn't about stats per se, but CNN did a story on "assault weapons". They showed a pre-ban & a post ban model being fired. The pre-ban assault weapon easily penetrated some cinderblocks while the post ban didn't seem to phase them. Turns out CNN got busted cause the post ban rifle wasn't being fired at the cinderblocks at all while they were filming. But why let truth get in the way of filming an ideological piece, right?

The Smallest Minority is a good source for busting badly used stats - one of my favorites is where he pointed out that the "children" a U.S. gun prohibition group was lamenting included 24 year olds.

Anyway, for this & a number of other reasons I generally try to direct any arguments away from stats & steer them towards logic &/or principles. It's easy as hell to find stats to support almost any position you'd want to support, & almost as easy to find stats to refute said position. It eventually comes down to a person believing one stat over the other for any number of reasons - so I avoid the stats thing when I can & try to make them actually think.

Posted by: Publicola at April 30, 2004 06:06 AM (Aao25)

4 Excellent piece! Linked!

Oh, and Publicola, I use the stats to help them think. Especially when they're twisted as blatantly as they are here.

People don't like being lied to.

Posted by: Kevin Baker at May 04, 2004 01:18 AM (gQkQa)

5 Nice try. The restrictions did not affect handguns at all. And you somehow forget to mention that gun deaths have halved. And Kevin fell for it.

Posted by: Tim Lambert at May 04, 2004 04:21 AM (myTQZ)

6 Yes, Tim, gun deaths have been reduced.

But the add was specifically addressing handguns, using completely bogus statistics. And there have been new restrictions on handguns in the past ten years. And deaths from handguns have increased.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 04, 2004 06:41 AM (+S1Ft)

7 Yeah, right. What restrictions were introduced on handguns in 1996? I haven't seen the ad. Maybe it did use bogus statistics, but that is no excuse for you to use bogus statistics.

Posted by: Tim Lambert at May 04, 2004 11:45 AM (myTQZ)

8 Kevin,
Now ya see why I prefer to avoid stats altogether? People like Mr. Lambert will generally be able to produce stats which seem on the surface to contradict any stats you throw out. Not that the counter stats are the correct ones, but unless you have some schooling in statistical analysis then most people odds are you'll believe the stats you hear most often (43 times mor elikely, etc...).

But where people such as Mr. Lambert can be shown the error of their ways (well, as much as possible) is through non-stat arguments. At least more spectators will be able to follow the discussion accurately & draw their own conclusions.

Not that arguing stats is not worthwhile or that it should be universally shunned (after all you do a good job of dissecting bogus stats), but for me I find it's often best to concentrate on other areas.

Besides, when it gets down to an "is not- is too" thing over which stats are accurate, then the debate has shifted from a Rights argument to a Policy argument. I'd much rather keep it as a Rights argument than delve into the policy thing. But that's just me & my absolutist self.

& I must speak the heresy that some would burn me at the stake for: stats are not the most important thing in many cases. Nor are they even conclusive of one point or another in some cases. Stats are just stats. Nothing more than a set of numbers. Useful things can be learned from them but they are not the last word on the wisdom or folly of most decisions.

Mr. Lambert,

I think you're confusing the issue. Pixy was talking about handgun deaths, whereas you brought up firearms deaths. See the difference? handguns are firearms but not all firearms are handguns.

Or were you berating Pixy that he didn't mention that all firearms deaths were reduced by half (if your claim is accurate) even though he was discussing a subset of firearms deaths specifically?

But the bigger question lies not in whose stats were correct or which stats should have been used, but how can you use a set of numbers with questionable origin & interpretation to justify denying me (or anyone else) a basic, Natural Right?

Pixy,

Doesn't all this make you want to be a gun blogger full time? lol

Posted by: Publicola at May 04, 2004 02:28 PM (Aao25)

9 Tim, I think further handgun restrictions were brought in during 2001.

Now, I didn't use bogus statistics, but I also failed to bring up some relevant information. You're right to mention that.

While I'm pro gun-ownership, I'm rather more strongly anti statistics-abuse. That was my point here.

If the ad had said "Up to 49 people die in Australia every year in incidents involving handguns", I would have had no complaints. I might have disagreed with the opinion expressed - therefor handguns should be banned but that is opinion and there's room for disagreement and compromise.

But the ad, as it is presented, provides an impression which is out of line with reality by 5 orders of magnitude, which is really a bit much. How would you feel about an ad that said:2 million people are killed by malaria each year. Half of those are children.If that ad was run by the Australian Council for the Legalisation and Promotion of DDT - calling for widespread spraying of our waterways? Would you point out that Australia has typically less than 10 deaths from malaria each year?

We don't have a major problem with malaria in Australia, and never have, and we don't need to spray DDT all over the place. The situation in other countries may be different.

Exactly the same applies with handguns and the ad in question.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 04, 2004 03:17 PM (kOqZ6)

10 Dear Mr Publicola,
Apparently you are unaware of the nature of the "tough new restrictions" that were brought into place in 1996. Pixy implies that these were restrictions on handguns. They weren't. He tries to paint the 1996 laws as a failure because deaths from handguns went up, but the 1996 laws did not affect handguns. They did affect long guns, and those deaths have halved.

He then compounds things with his statement that there have been new restrictions on handguns in the last ten years. Indeed there have. What Pixy somehow neglected to mention was that those restrictions were introduced after 2001. But Pixy tries to make it look like they were to blame for an increase in handgun deaths between 1991 and 2001.

Nice going. American pro-gunners just lap this stuff up. Pixy's bogus stats will probably now get repeated a bajillion times like that stupid email claiming that gun murders had increased by 300% after the 1996 laws.

And by the way, I've already stated that I do not think that the 1996 laws were a good idea.

Posted by: Tim Lambert at May 04, 2004 05:50 PM (tgbdA)

11 Dear Tim,

You're nuts.

Regards,

Pixy

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 04, 2004 06:58 PM (+S1Ft)

12 Tim's not nuts, just so focused on his particular specialty he can't see the forest for the trees.

He's "differently abled."

Posted by: Kevin Baker at May 05, 2004 11:22 AM (X3MkM)

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April 28, 2004

Eaten By Mice

Hi all.

I've been eaten by mice (again) so blogging will be very light to non-existent for a week or two.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:56 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 27, 2004

Where The Giraffes Are...

(and the zebra...)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:49 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 You really like that video, don't you?

Posted by: Susie at April 28, 2004 03:28 PM (CO8gV)

2 With their little knives and forks

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 28, 2004 07:53 PM (+S1Ft)

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April 26, 2004

Quicksilver

One has to be in a certain mood to enjoy a book like this - or at least, I have to be - not unlike the mood where I'm prepared to enjoy Cervantes or Sir Walter Scott. But since I am in such a mood right now, I am enjoying it very much.

It's certainly a rambling tale, but it rambles it's way past and through many points of interest, so I have few complaints. I was under the impression that the Old London Bridge had been destroyed by the time the novel is set (the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries), but it turns out that this is not the case - although the bridge was burned down in 1014, destroyed by a storm in 1091, burned down again in 1136, and the site of catastrophic fires in 1212 and 1633. It was replaced in 1831 by a less combustible stone structure, which was widened in 1904 whereupon it sank into the swamp. Well, it sank slowly, but still...

That sort of history boggles me just a little, as Sydney's famous Harbour Bridge is only seventy years old and has so far not been destroyed even once. To paraphrase someone: In England, a hundred miles is a long distance; in Australia, a hundred years is a long time.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:03 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 25, 2004

ANZAC Day

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

This is ANZAC Day.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:02 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

OurSQL

Upgraded the MuNu MT database to MySQL today, something I should have done long ago. If you're going to run Movable Type, it's definitely worth your time to use MySQL or PostgreSQL (or I think SQLite is also supported). For a brand new blog there isn't much difference, but on a very large installation like MuNu, a SQL* database can be as much as 10 times faster.

With this on top of the Minxification of Ambient Irony, I now have some of the fastest MT comments around. Leave me a comment, and marvel in the fastness of it! It's almost... adequate!

* I say "a SQL database" rather than "an SQL database" because in my head I pronounce SQL as "skwuhl".

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:56 PM | Comments (27) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 See! Fast!

Pity it keeps forgetting who I am...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 25, 2004 09:57 PM (+S1Ft)

2 Well let's just see...

Posted by: Simon at April 25, 2004 10:48 PM (+OTDr)

3 4 seconds. That's fast.

Posted by: Simon at April 25, 2004 10:49 PM (+OTDr)

4 I expect it's even faster if you're on the same side of the planet as the server

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 25, 2004 10:51 PM (+S1Ft)

5 (The actual processing seems to take less than 2 seconds.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 25, 2004 10:52 PM (+S1Ft)

6 Speed is cool. I like speed.

Posted by: Jim at April 25, 2004 11:00 PM (saeHM)

7 Woosh!

Posted by: Susie at April 26, 2004 02:10 AM (5H/6B)

8 Your comment system has one important flaw. All comments are downloaded with the main page whether the comments are desired or not. This isn't a big deal when there are few comments, but have a bunch of posts with large amounts of comments and the numbers start to add up.

Posted by: Rossz at April 26, 2004 08:14 AM (n5Jbg)

9 Pixy has done it again.

Ai was fiddling around in my templates this morning and rebuilding the index was so fast I did it twice because I didn't believe it the first time.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at April 26, 2004 10:23 AM (4819r)

10 Ross - This is true. But. Um...

You've got broadband anyway, so you won't even notice! Nyaa! (Basically it's a latency vs. bandwidth thing. Takes longer to load the main page, which can be fixed with more bandwidth - but - much less latency for reading comments, and it's a lot harder to reduce latency than to add bandwidth.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 26, 2004 03:52 PM (+S1Ft)

11 MYSQL has been a dream for me. easy to backup, easy to use. my comments are still slow mt comments, though. even slower with mt-blacklist. i need to look into Minxification.

Umm, does that come in a bottle?

Posted by: rammer at April 26, 2004 06:11 PM (VSkqV)

12 I always pronounce it "SQueaL", which has the added advantaget that SQL*Plus can be pronounced as "squeal splat plus"...

Posted by: Dominic at April 26, 2004 09:42 PM (0h0BM)

13 Minxification? Does it have anything to do with cheese?

Posted by: Mr Mouse at April 27, 2004 12:26 PM (yNckt)

14 True, the broadband does make it inconsequential. I suppose the dialup people might notice, but screw them - they don't count.

BTW, did I mention how much I'm paying for my 5Meg/500k DSL connection?

Posted by: Rossz at April 27, 2004 01:27 PM (n5Jbg)

15 GADZOOKS, man! Everything is running MUCH MUCH faster over at Miss Apropos' tuffet.

You. Are. A GOD!

Thankyouthankyouthankyou!

Posted by: Emma at April 28, 2004 07:43 AM (kpNlZ)

16 fast

Posted by: spacemonkey at April 28, 2004 03:08 PM (qSKHX)

17 Amazingly fast. What were we running before? I'm almost enticed to play with MySQL.

hln

Posted by: hln at April 29, 2004 08:56 AM (yJyUC)

18 Actually, it's still kind of slow. But it's a lot better than it was.

We were running Berkeley DB before. There's nothing wrong with Berkeley DB - I've used it for far larger databases and it's fast and robust. It's just that MT doesn't use it properly. It works much better with SQL databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite are supported, I think).

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 29, 2004 09:00 PM (+S1Ft)

19 Sound like a worthwhile upgrade... I'm currently using the BerkeleyDB method, how much of a pain in the arse is it to change over to MySQL?

Maybe I'll attempt that this weekend, along with installing PHP on my server so I can add more fun MT goodies...

-=kt=-

Posted by: ktpupp at April 29, 2004 10:29 PM (LJejX)

20 My SQL instructor said it was usually pronounced as "Sequel". But he thought it might have been an east coast thing 'cause most pros around here (Fabulous Las Vegas) pronounce the letters "Ess Que Ell". I always pronounce it "Squirrel".

Posted by: Enas Yorl at May 02, 2004 08:45 AM (pGeyo)

21 "Sequel" is certainly standard in the UK, above a certain level of familiarity at least. "Squirrel" I had never heard! I still like "squeal" best, though...

Posted by: Dominic at May 02, 2004 08:29 PM (evDgD)

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April 23, 2004

Emergency! Emergency!

An otherwise uninspiring day at work was brightened by the approach of three shiny red fire engines, sirens blaring.

Where are they heading?
Looks like they're stopping.
Which building?
Um... Ours.
But... If there's a fire in our building, shouldn't there be -
BEEEP! BEEEEP! BEEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEP!!
- an alarm?

Uh-oh. I grabbed my apple turnover and last night's backup tape, and headed downstairs. Where we milled about for ten minutes before the firepersons came back out and let us go back to work.

So the building completely failed to burn down, but the fire engines were particularly shiny.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:46 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 22, 2004

Fried Brains

It's what's for dinner.

No, wait! Pie! I have pie!

Mmm, pie...

[Well, that's next week's Bonfire entry sorted out. — Ed.]

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:30 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 21, 2004

You Can't Be Miracle Max, I'm Miracle Max!

Which Princess Bride Character are You?
this quiz was made by mysti

(Thanks to The Quizmistress of Chaos)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:28 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 No way! I was Miracle Max first!

Posted by: Jim at April 21, 2004 04:27 AM (IOwam)

2 My husband is Miracle Max too.

Posted by: 2flower at April 28, 2004 01:00 PM (3i0ii)

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April 20, 2004

And Now...

I just need something that folds and irons and puts away...

There are automatic ironing machines, but last I read they were not exactly practical. Until the day they reach the mass market, I will remain hopeful and slightly crumpled.

Oh, and the PostgreSQL load died with an error too boring to relate here. So it's MySQL for munu.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:13 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 19, 2004

Who Let The Brap Out?

I can't for the life of me work out why the mt-db2sql.cgi program is so slow. I put both the Berkeley DB (the old database) and the MySQL DB (the new database) in a ram disk, and it behaved exactly the same. Moofleglerp.

I'm familiar with Berkeley DB, and I've never seen it behave like that. I'm less familiar with MySQL, but I've never seen MySQL behave like that either. Right now I'm trying it with PostgreSQL, and any moment now... Crunch! As soon as it finishes with the comments and starts transferring the entries, performance drops to zero. It's not CPU bound, it doesn't seem to be I/O bound, it just sucks.

Well, I'll let it finish anyway, and then I'll have more numbers for comparison.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:06 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 18, 2004

Wash And Wear

I doubt it will surprise many of my readers that I went for the fancy whiz-bang (no, not that whiz-bang) condensing washer/dryer over its cheaper, less whiz-bang competition.

It washes! It dries! It washes and dries! And it doesn't steam up the laundry!

Should have it Tuesday. Since I have (counts) five clean shirts remaining, I expect I'll survive until then.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:54 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Yay!!

Posted by: Susie at April 19, 2004 12:23 AM (sf0L+)

2 I am always leery of whiz-bang that combines too many functions. What happens if the washer half of the gizmo craps out? You have to replace both.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at April 19, 2004 12:51 AM (4819r)

3 Pppppt!

Consider also that if I'd bought a separate washer and dryer (of that brand) it would have cost about 40% more.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 19, 2004 12:56 AM (+S1Ft)

4 Seems it would take a little longer, since you can't simultaneously wash a load while the dryer is running. The dryer is always the bottleneck. My dream laundry room would have two dryers. And a pretty laundry maid too, in a short frilly skirt.

Posted by: Ted at April 20, 2004 12:16 AM (blNMI)

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Cooking Up A Storm

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:50 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 17, 2004

Who Writes This Brap?

(Yeah, that's a typo, but I decided to leave it.)

As I've noted before, Movable Type is robust and rich in features, but really really slow.

I've wondered if it's something to do with using Berkeley DB. Some people on the MT support forum have claimed this is the case, but they have not impressed me as particularly knowledgable. Berkeley itself is very fast anyway, so it would have to be a problem with MT's use of it rather than Berkeley itself - though that is quite possible.

Anyway, there's a CGI script available in MT to convert from a Berkeley DB to MySQL or PostgreSQL. Two things to note: It only comes with the upgrade package, and not with the "full" version (minor oops), and it doesn't work (big oops).

Well, if you run it as the docs suggest, as a CGI program from your web browser, it will happily create the necessary tables in your SQL database and report that its work is done. Without, mind you, copying any of the data across.

If instead you run it from the command line, it will copy all your data, only very very slowly. It zips through the first part - I'm not sure exactly what that consisted of, but at least it was quick - but when it starts processing the entries it slows to a crawl. Crawwwwwwwwwl.

Once it's finished, which should be within the next 10 or 12 hours (seriously!), I'll rerun my little stress-test.

Oh, yes: I've written a template which exports your entire Movable Type system in a nice convenient format. Just the ticket if you want to move off MT and onto a more modern and efficient sytem. (Cough Minx cough.)

It takes two hours to run on mu.nu. That's on a lightly-loaded Athlon XP 2500+ with 1GB of memory.

Pfft. But at least it's better than mt-db2sql.cgi.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:24 PM | Comments (25) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

April 15, 2004

Bookies!

Stopped by Galaxy Bookshop this evening when I was done comparison-shopping for washing machines. (I'm torn between the low price of the Simpson front-loader - my old washing machine was a Simpson and lasted 14 years without servicing - and the convenience and gadget-value of the Omega condensing washer/dryer - put your clothes in, press a few buttons, and a couple of hours later they are clean and dry! Given that I have a bad habit of forgetting to take clothes out of the washing machine, sometimes for days, this is a good thing. It costs about twice as much as the Simpson, though.)

Well - (Oh, and I was reminded that I have a very small washing machine. Had a very small washing machine. Or have a very small ex-washing machine. Some of the models I looked at were huge. Convenient, I suppose, if you have three teenagers and a dog, but not something I need myself.)

Are you finished? (Yes, do go on.)

Right. Got to Galaxy and there's this huge pile near the door of Neal Stephenson's latest work, Confusion. It's the sequel to Quicksilver, which I hadn't bought previously, and both apparently have some connection to Cryptonomicon, which I never managed to get all the way through.

Stephenson is a good writer - I particularly enjoyed Zodiac and Snow Crash - but one of his points, for good or bad, is to wander off into diversions, sometimes for a dozen pages or more. (Speaking of which, most of my comparison shopping was done at Myers - what was Grace Bros., a fine and traditional name, before the mob from Melbourne bought them up. Actually, they've been trading as Grace Bros. for years even after that, but suddenly decided to change the name... A couple of months ago, I think. I sort of missed it, being occupied with other things. After that I went to Bing Lee, who have a new city store where the Sky Garden food court used to be. Wonder what they did with the food court... There used to be a restaurant there that did wonderful barbecue ribs. Anyway, Bing Lee is in theory a discount chain and Myers a mid-range department store, but the prices there were really no better than at Myers, and sometimes worse, and Myers were offering 10% off the marked price of all whitegoods.

What really struck me at Bing Lee, though, was the number of large-screen flat-panel televisions. They're everywhere. And they're not exactly cheap, so either people are buying these things and the economy isn't doing so badly after all or Bing Lee is about to go broke. I have a perfectly good Sony, a 34" model (84 cm to me) about six years old, which I bought just before the changeover to flat screens (flat CRTs, that is, rather than flat panels). It's vertically flat, at least; it's like a cut-away section of a cylinder, which is much easier to do without distorting the picture than a truly flat screen like my monitors. (Also Sony. Which have this horrible tendency to go over-bright over time - my third and final Sony monitor is not long for the world at this rate.)

I have no interest in buying a new TV, since my old one is both large enough and good enough, unless it is both high-definition and reasonably priced. And I have no real interest even then until high-definition material becomes available. And since I never watch broadcast TV these days and can't get cable because the cable companies are run by morons (I'm sure I've ranted about that here before) that means a new high-definition DVD player (which no-one currently makes) and new high-definition DVDs (see above). In the meantime, I have plenty of other ways to burn my money. I could buy a new washing machine, for a start.)

The diversions in Cryptonomicon, though, were rather too much for me. A friend noted how much he enjoyed the book, largely because of the diversions, which he found both entertaining and educational. For me, though, while they were amusing enough, my mind seems to run too closely to the same frequency as Stephenson's and my reaction after the first 400 diversion-packed pages was either get on with the story or I'm ditching the book.

He didn't, so I did. (One thing I did find, and which I have been looking for for some time, is a small, reasonably priced stereo that will play DVD-Rs full of MP3s. I don't know what appeals to you, but since a DVD-R costs me just over a dollar, and even with 256kb/s encoding will hold 40 hours of music, this seems very cool indeed to me. Pop in a disk, hit shuffle play, and that's music sorted out for the duration of the party.)

Now, though, I seem to be in the possession of both Quicksilver and Confusion, 1700 pages of 18th century diversions. (At least, I think it's 18th century. Benjamin Franklin's in it, I think.) And that's 1700 trade paperback pages, so it would probably be over 2000 in mass-market format. Not that there is a MMPB release yet - that I've seen. They're really milking this one.

Also Dan Simmons' Ilium. Dan Simmons is another writer I have mixed feelings about. His Hyperion is a fascinating work, a spin of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in a distant future on an enigmatic planet. The books that followed - The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion, progressively rubbed away at the enigma until nothing much interesting was left. In fact, I never actually read the final volume, having given Endymion a resounding blah on the Pixy Misa BLO scale.*

Well, the Book Shop Guy recommended it very highly, and I have enjoyed some of Simmons' recent non-SF work (specifically Hardcase and Hard Freeze. Darwin's Blade, on the other hand, was clearly written entirely on autopilot. It made me wonder if he has a word processor with functions to insert 500 words on guns here and ramble on about auto engines for 800 words there.), so I bought it too.

And Steven Brust's Sethra Lavode. I don't really have any conflicts about Brust - He's brilliant! Read him! - but this latest work, the third part of his homage to Dumas (The Phoenix Guards being The Three Musketeers, Five Hundred Years After being Twenty Years After among an elf-like race that lives a lot longer than we humans are wont to do, and The Viscount of Adrilankha being of course The Vicomte De Bragelonne. Viscount is itself split into three volumes, namely, The Paths of the Dead, The Lord of Castle Black, and this, the third. Sethra Lavode, remember?) hasn't grabbed me in the same way, possibly because it is divided into three parts like Gaul, and is filled with garlicky snails.

Or possibly just because the parts of what should be a single novel are appearing a year apart, just long enough for the previous volume to fade in the mind but not quite long enough for it to be an attractive re-read. I didn't finish The Lord of Castle Black because I really needed to re-read The Paths of the Dead to enjoy it properly, only I didn't. Now I have all three volumes in hand, and can do the work justice - and I just need to find the time.

Finally, Guy Gavriel Kay's The Last Light of the Sun. Guy Kay is one of my (many) favourite fantasy authors. Though admittedly his first work, The Fionavar Tapestry, was something of a mess (belonging to the fling fantasy tropes at the page and see what sticks school of writing), he redeemed himself and more with Tigana. His writing has improved since then, with A Song for Arbonne, The Lions of Al-Rassan, and most recently The Sarantine Mosaic, but none of those have resonated with me quite the way Tigana does.

Partly, it's the settings. Tigana has some vague flavour of the warring Italian states of, say, the 15th century, but it's clearly its own world, not just Italy with the names filed off. Arbonne is France, more or less, but again not just a cut-and-paste. Al-Rassan, though, is obviously Moorish Spain, and Sarantium is Byzantium, Constantinople, without any real effort to distinguish or disguise it.

I don't like that very much, even when the writing is good - and in Kay's case, it is.

More than that, though, there's the theme of Tigana: A country, defeated in war, and punished for its resistence by having its name taken away, wiped from the memories of its people by magic. And of the struggle of those few who remember to reclaim the memory of their land for their people. This struck me as a terribly, terribly painful thing - to be unable to recall the name of your own land, the land that you grew up in and loved. If you enjoy fantasy and haven't yet read Tigana, do. Even if you've read Fionavar and have since sworn off Kay's work - which would be akin to reading The Number of the Beast and swearing off Heinlein, as one of my friends did for years.

So, and so; 1700 pages of Stephenson, 600 of Simmons, 350 pages of Brust, who is normally commendably succinct, unless I should decide to re-read the whole of Viscount in which case the number is closer to 1100, and 500 pages of Kay.

If you don't hear much from me in the next few days, well, I'll be in the laundry.

* Book-Like Object. A term used to describe things printed on paper and bound between covers that cannot justly be described as books.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:52 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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