The Belgariad is a pretty formula fantasy epic, with striking similarities to things like stories of King Arthur. The series is written in a style which is very accessible to younger readers, which might explain why I loved these books as a kid. Its also a pretty “safe” story, in that nothing truly bad is…
Hotel Max
When I was looking for a hotel to stay at for SIGCOMM 2008, I had trouble finding one in downtown Seattle which wasn’t insanely expensive. In the end I picked Hotel Max because it was only moderately expensive, instead of insane like the Grant Hyatt. The hotel is interesting because apparently it was quite run…
Cloud Warrior
I read this post-nuclear holocaust book as a kid and liked it, so I thought I’d give it a try again. Given most second hand science fiction books are $2, the barrier to entry is admittedly quite low as well. This book revolves around two groups — the Amtrak Federation (a military society formed from…
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series
I’m getting really into reading second hand science fiction from the 1950s onwards. I read a few (but nowhere near all) of the Foundation series as a child, and I remember liking them a lot. Stolen from Wikipedia as well as other online sources, here is a list of the books in The Foundation series…
Robot Dreams
Robot Dreams is another of the robot short story books from Asimov. It is a bit deceptive though and frankly quite annoying because only one of the stories in the book is a robot story, and its not very long.I am of course ignoring the robot stories that already appear in I, Robot and The…
MythNetTV mailing list
I get a few support requests for MythNetTV, and I must admit that I sometimes get quite behind on my personal email, especially when I’m travelling. I’ve therefore created a mailing list for announcements and discussion in the hope that people will chat and come up with great ideas, as well as being able to…
MythNetTV release 4
New things in this release: Removed gflags because people found it hard to find Bug fix patch from David Linville applied Fixed broken imports caused by refactoring Transcode not needed for avc1 and m4v Another bug fix patch from David Linville applied Store filesize in the db Removed some namespace imports I am not a…
Getting rid of cable TV?
I’m thinking of getting rid of comcast and getting a high def over the air tuner as well as a netflix subscription. I’d be interested in people’s opinions of netflix. I guess I’m just fed up with comcast’s woeful customer service, quite ordinary analog reception, and complete lack of any new programming. Its been about…
Discovering the CASE statement
In an effort to speed up my database updates, I’ve been looking for ways to batch some of my updates. CASE seems like the way to go: mysql> create table bar(a tinyint, b tinyint); Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec) mysql> insert into bar(a) values(1), (2), (3), (4), (5); Query OK, 5 rows affected…
The Complete Robot
This is another of Asimov’s robot short story collections, and many of the stories appear in earlier works. In fact, I would recommend getting I, Robot and this book, and avoiding The Rest of the Robots if you’re not interested in owning a complete collection of books, but do want to have all of the…