The previous Bill the Galactic Hero book was awesomely bad. This on starts out well: Bill, that’s what they called him. They called him that because that was his name. I didn’t realize when I started reading this series that only the previous book and this one are actually written by Harrison. The rest of…
linux.conf.au domain name
It looks to me like the linux.conf.au domain name is working again. I wonder what effect that will have on registrations? It would be interesting to see a graph of registration behavior over time…
Silverthorn
The characters of the Magician Books battle a new enemy in this book. The book centers around Prince Arthura’s poisoned wife and the quest to find the cure. There seems to have been some criticism of this book for being a fantasy cliche (something which people seem to say about a lot of Feist’s books),…
Mikal’s unreliable guide to buying secondhand sci fi in Mountain View
My algorithm goes something like this: If I am just browsing (I tend to target complete series before I start reading them, so am often buying things I don’t expect to read for months) and looking for a great deal I go to Rasputin’s Books. Sometimes they have nothing, and other times I walk away…
The android and I
I don’t talk much on this site about what I do at work. There are a couple of reasons for that — what I do is somewhat too specialist to describe easily (I am a member of the Site Reliability Engineering Group, who are tasked with making google.com the most reliable site on the Internet),…
The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus
This book is better than the Stainless Steel Rat books which insist on things like time or dimensional travel — this one sticks to the more traditional crime plot, which I think are generally better. Then again, its nowhere near the best Stainless Steel Rat book I have read. It feels a little like the…
Foundation and Chaos
This is the second book in the second Foundation trilogy, following on from Foundation’s Fear, which I didn’t enjoy. This book on the other hand is quite good. Its not the best book I’ve read recently, but its faithful to the universe that Asimov built, as well as resolving all the silly plot elements that…
Book covers
I was bored this afternoon, so I tweaked my bloxsom plugin which was already using ISBN number tags to produce links to LibraryThing. It now fetches cover art for the book (if available) and puts that into posts magically. If you’re interested in such things its really easy to fetch cover images from LibraryThing.
Magician: Master
Perhaps it would have been better if Feist had kept Magician all as one book. In the first book you hear of Guy (a bad guy!) briefly, and then nothing more. Then, hundreds of pages later in the second book he comes up again as a major plot element. If you haven’t recently read the…
Magician: Apprentice
This is the reworked version of Magician, although its split into two books and there is some content that was dropped as part of the editing process for the original version. This version was developed for the tenth anniversary of the original publication. I read the original version as a kid and was so proud…