Monday Morning “Impediment to Productivity” – 20071029

Hi,

Sorry to have missed you all last week but you know how it is. After a week of wrangling silly code, downgrading laptop licenses,
meetings and setting up project management infrastructure, I was walking past Minotaur Books on the way home on Friday and decided that I deserved a treat, a book without the word MANUAL on it’s cover seemed like a good idea and I knew just the one. I was given a copy of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War for Christmas (thank you seona and phil) and loved it. So the question was “Is Book Two in the series waiting for me”? You bet and I think Ghost Brigade (that’s it’s title) is an even better read than the first.

Actually it was a toss up between Ghost Brigade and William Gibson new one. there is always NEXT Friday, mwa ha ha ha ha.

So with a glass of Aberlour Scotch and some ice it’s time to “Alez Sillies”

Lets start with Blame.
Jools is up First with an email titled “I say nothing”
“Just play it and…
http://funnytogo.com/games/6/exorcist-bunnies.htm
Love, Jools ”
And then she follows up with
“A potentially silly squishy time waster for the Impediments of the day of Mon.
http://www.ezone.com/games/slingoween/gamecode.htm
Love, Jools ”

Now seeing as though I am feeling a tad literary this week lets delve into the insane world(s) of Mr Pratchett. Terry Pratchett has churned out about 33 Discworld novels, actually in the few hours it takes between me writng this and the list software spitting it out to your mail boxes he will probably have released another one, but I digress. It becomes a tad tricky to work out where to start if you are stumbling across them for the forst time or recommending them to a friend. It doesn’t help that these books are not written in any main sequence, but rather in a bunch of interrelated series that follow the lives of many different characters and subplots. To Pratchett’s credit most of the books do pretty well at standing by themselves and you get the hang of all these characters stumbling in and from other books. Any way the point, yes there is point. There is a “Discworld Reading Order Guide” over at
http://www.lspace.org/books/reading-order-guides/ it’s a ripper.
Here is the link to the PDF in English

Click to access the-discworld-reading-order-guide-1-5.pdf

Rincewind was always my favourite character.

Lets see, Penguins, a seesaw, ice blocks, a Monday Morning. this isn’t going to end well is it?
http://www.knibble.com/games/play/g/11385/
I love the sounds.

More books. online this time. Mayer Brenner wrote a four volume fantasy series called the The Dance of Gods back in the late Eighties and to quote Mayer

“they did not, shall we say, distinguish themselves in the marketplace . The stories take an approach to magic more suited to engineers or programmers than mystics; more procedure-based than object-oriented, perhaps, but communing with nature is usually the last thing on these practitioners’ minds. For that matter, I’m not sure the combination of magic-code hackers, molecular nanotech, and network-mediated consensual reality of the gods is something that could ever be summarized on a back-of-the-book blurb… “

So following the lead of Cory Doctrow he is releasing them to the web under a Creative Commons Licence. I have been reading the first one on my Palmtop (Spell of Catastrophe), it isn’t bad. And lets face it you have to love a eries with a hero named ‘Maximillian the Vaguely Disreputable’ (I am not making this up).
http://www.mayerbrenner.com/download/

It’s only Rock and Roll Dept: This is a tad esoteric but for the musicians out there ( and I know that there a few of you, over at http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/createdigitalmusic/~3/174375273/ there is a piece on how Scandinavians test music gear. To be specific,a Shure SM58. It gets gets subjected to some serious torture testing, including:
Being used to hammer nails ( puts nailing the vocal into a whole new realm)
Dropped a couple of meters
Frozen
Dunked in water ( yeah. sure it was water)
Driven over by a car
And then something really nasty happens involving Beer and a microwave.
What cracked me up was that Shure donated the mic.

And if you are vaguely musical (ooh that would be me) have a look at this.
http://lab.andre-michelle.com/fl-909
Basically it’s a TR 909 done entirely in Flash. And, surprisingly, it’s not bad. Kiss your Monday good bye and if that not enough head to
http://lab.andre-michelle.com/
there are a bunch of other fun little musical toys (read Impediments To Productivity).

Over at http://www.notdeadyet.com.au/ you will find the an interesting collection this week. Jools found “Trolle SiebenHaar” and her latest favourite “Oh Laura”. Seriously they are a killer band. I was off in a strange place “Shortwave Dahlia” and “Celebration” were the ones that have stayed with me. Head over and have a listen to “Damon & Naomi” as well.

thatch

{Currently listening to Linkin Park (Minutes To Midnight is a killer album) and }
{Currently reading: John Scalzi’s Ghost Brigades (I finished it. back to Minotaur for more)}
{Quick Status Check: Going to Hell }
{Crop Circle Status: It’s over for another year. Bother. http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2007/2007.html }