2008 August « Pete Hindle

August 28, 2008

Sci-Fi Books

I’ve been trying to read things that don’t have a spaceship on the cover recently. Could it be the result of some sort of self-improvement kick? Well, maybe. But I have read most of the hard sf that’s out there at the minute, so it was also a good time to take a break.

My relationship with scifi starts with my father, who owns a large bookcase of classic sf. Everything from Asimov to Tanith Lee was all in one easy-to-access location. With no library fines. While my dad’s taste isn’t the same as mine, it gave me a really easy entry point to a great selection of scifi books. And it really is about the books for me; I stopped reading SFX when I realised that they were never going to cover the authors they reviewed about in the same way that they did the TV shows.

And without a source of information about the newest sf that was coming out, I was a bit stuck. I know that a lot of people – the majority, even – get pleasure from reading books that don’t have a trace of science fiction elements. So I thought I’d try some of them, as recommended by my friends. I can’t say that they all sucked, but I’ve not been struck by one of them yet.

Yesterday, I strolled through Waterstones, and I happened to notice that there was a large amount of books that I’d like to read, now available in paperback. These include William Gibson’s Spook County, which seemed to be only available in hardback for about a year (link goes to Guardian review when it first came out – a year ago!). In hardback, books by Ken McCleod and Iain M. Banks are around, and the start of September sees the release of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.

There’s one pressing reason I must pick up that last book, apart from my love of Stephenson’s writing. Earlier this year I travelled to London to see Stephenson give a lecture at Gresham college. The day after, I went with my father to take a look round the British Museum, when I saw Neal Stephenson posing in the main courtyard in front of some columns. So, apart from his prose, the plotline and everything related to the craft of writing, I really want to see the image for the author’s portrait.

Also of interest: Alistair Reynold’s new book, which is still too expensively hardback and Charles Stross’s Halting State which looks a lot better than his Hidden Family stuff (sorry Mr. Stross). If you are a fiend for sci-fi like me you might enjoy tor.com and i09, but be prepared for info overload!

August 26, 2008

Free Modems Suck

If you’ve been given a router from your internet provider, I’d recommend throwing it away and replacing it with something else. Anything else. A forty quid ADSL router and modem is going to be as good as the free turd-with-ethernet-port you get in the post. Got that?

Most of today has been an exercise in pointlessness, by trying to follow the help pages on BT’s website to plumb in a wireless router. This has the surprising effect of allowing half of a web-page to load before completely stopping all network access, including access to the setup page so you have to do a hard reset.

The device gets pretty close to working, but the BT router is so unfriendly that it has the giant greasy fingerprints of engineers all over it. I can’t think of the last time I needed to access some of the functions that are listed here, but the essential function (‘work with a wireless access point that my girlfriend brought on the high street’) is not there.

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August 17, 2008

Friends, I Left the House.

I often seem to myself like some sort of internet-appliance-made-flesh. And this month, we have the phone bill to prove it, with a massive overcharge for 47gb of ‘excess internet usage’. Thanks, BT! I love you too!

However, after my last post I managed to climb out of my stained office chair, throw on some clothes, and accompany Paul Grimmer on a video shoot. Paul was awarded a Triparks residency earlier this year, and he has been shooting high-definition video across Northumbria. He offered me the chance to go with him this week, and I got really excited and said yes without really thinking what it would mean.

What did it mean? Well, getting in a car, driving a while, getting out of the car, looking confused for a bit, getting back in and driving to a hill and then carrying a bad-ass tripod for a bit. Of course, that was just what I did; Paul, being a seasoned pro, carried the camera.

Paul was looking to take panoramic shots of the area, and we didn’t manage to get many before the rain rolled in.

While he shot the hills, I was looking at the countryside. On a bike, this is the sort of area I guess you don’t see, and I would like to go back there sometime. Even in the downpour that followed, the landscape was quite fun.

As an aside, I must point out that my recent injuries left me confined to a few small rooms for the best part of two months. This means that while a lot of my friends are complaining about this seasons horrible weather, I’m just happy to be outside.

Eventually, the rain got the better of us, and I convinced Paul to go back to the car for the thermos of hot coffee I’d brought with me. But not before mugging for one last shot – check out that water saturated look!

I’d like to thank Paul for letting me accompany him out to the country for the day, and if you want to follow his progress on the Triparks residency, check out the blog hes doing with fellow artist Bridget Kennedy here.

August 11, 2008

I heart Baby Monitors.

I’m terrible at getting things done. I’ve even read the book, but I still find it hard to get things finished; perhaps it’s the nearly persuasive presence of the Internet in my life. I have found myself wishing that I had somewhere to go that didn’t have the internet, so I could get more work done.

Last night, I noticed that the internet was acting a little screwy. I checked it out, and then sometime around half ten my wireless signal just faded to nothing. There was no way I could log onto it; no way I could spend the rest of the night reading about all sorts of crap. After much testing, and even doing a complete scrub-and-reset of my router, I was just giving up to go and do something else (tidy the front room and do the washing up) when I heard a baby crying next door.

Baby monitors operate on the same frequency as wifi networks, so this has solved the problem of where my network went. And perhaps it’s killed another problem too: now I can be more productive at home. After all, if both my favourite library and my studio have the internet, it is getting hard to unplug.

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August 2, 2008

Bug 863, Kernel Panics, and the Dog Days of my Laptop

Happily minding somebody else’s business, I was filling a bug report on Processing when my laptop finally up’d and died. I’ve been expecting it for a while though, but I thought I had a while left yet.

I’d recommend reading the bug report for a clearer picture on what happened.

Month: August, 2008