Author: geoff

So many T-shirts, so little time

J!NXJust stumbled across J!NX, a delightfully bizarre collection of l33t T-shirts. I can imagine wearing at least half of them to work…. Favourites: Computers are fun and useful, Your skill in Reading has increased by 1 point (one for the Fellowship, I fancy), It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. (how I spent the early 1980s), and neurochemistry hacker. Very cool. (Even the gross and edgy stuff.)

On Apple, BMW, and Minis

Like many Mac users, I’ve dismissed talk of Apple’s miniscule share of the personal computer market by (a) pointing out that many of those PCs are just glorified 3270s/VT100s/Wang word processors/cash registers, and (b) invoking the “BMW argument”: what market share does BMW have – and does that stop them from being a really important, cool, desirable brand? So now Apple goes and releases a couple of down-market products, and various people are asking, understandably, “is Apple blowing its BMW model?”. Frank Steele has a nice response: “Perhaps BMW could create (or purchase) a second brand that sold cars that were not quite so expensive. Maybe comparable in price to other cars, but maybe a little smaller, and fun. […] But what could BMW possibly call such a company?”

(Via Oren.)

Review: Iain M. Banks: "The Algebraist"

Back on December 10, I reported that I’d acquired a new Iain M. Banks novel, The Algebraist. As I noted on my books page, Iain M. Banks is at the top of the list of authors I will buy sight unseen.
So how come I’m only reporting on it now?
This is an odd book. It’s fairly long (544 pages), and I found myself reading the first 300 pages relatively slowly. Huge amounts of detail, a back story stretching over billions of years, a wide variety of alien species for whom conventionally anthropomorphic thinking was unhelpful…. Over a couple of weeks I read on, fascinated, but only able to absorb one or two chapters at a sitting. And then on December 25th we flew out to Seattle, and after we returned I got sick, and the great grey tome sat there, unread.
As I surfaced from the flu, I hesitatingly picked up the book, and started back in. Fairly quickly, I found things changing. The tempo picks up, then becomes almost giddying as armadas of starships battle and needle-ships corkscrew through one wormhole after another, ricocheting around the universe like badly aimed fireworks. An underlying pattern on a galactic scale emerges, and is purposefully erased. Characters and plotlines are abruptly trashed. And as the deus ex machina recedes, the book ends on a wholly unexpected note. If the first 300 pages took me 10 days, the last 250 zipped by in 5 or 6 hours over two days.
I really don’t know how to judge this book. (I note that other reviewers have felt the same way.) Fundamentally it falls between two stools. There’s a taut, 300 page space opera in here just begging to get out: simplify the back story, eliminate half the characters and three quarters of the species, and let it rip. But there’s also a 1,200 page epic here, balancing the thoughtful and detailed preamble with a more complex and challenging quest for the central character and better resolution of some of the secondary themes. In either case I’d also want more autonomy for our human hero, rather than feeling that he’s simply dragged around the galaxy by forces larger than himself. It’s hard to identify and empathize with supercargo.
Overall, I’m really glad that I read the book: there are more ideas here than most sci-fi writers can achieve over a lifetime. But it’s frustrating. And US fans of Banks’ work will have to buy from the UK; there’s still no US publication date set as far as I can see.

Quick review: Lemony Snicket

On a whim, the “Fellowship” gathered this evening in Burlington to eat Korean food and see Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. The food was good (after a certain sharp-eyed person spotted shrimp in a supposedly vegetarian appetizer, thereby saving two allergic people from a horrible experience), and the film was sheer magic. From the spoof introduction to the mind-bending credits, the whole thing was delightful. Excellent performances from Liam Aiken and Emily Browning as Klaus and Violet, Billy Connolly as Uncle Monty, and Jim Carrey as Count Olaf; the best, however, was Meryl Streep’s tour de force as Aunt Josephine. I had not read the books; I had no idea what to expect; I haven’t laughed so hard in many, many films.

Not waving, but dialling….

OK, I admit it: the only reason to blog about this was because I couldn’t resist using this subject line. gumbies.jpgAs CNET reports, Samsung is launching a motion-sensitive mobile phone: “Samsung said the phone is also able to recognize and translate more complex movements, including dialing numbers drawn in the air using the handset or recognizing an ‘o’ or an ‘x’ drawn in the air as a yes or no command. “ I imagine they’ll use “gumby” clips from Monty Python in the TV ads…

(Via L’Inq.)

Illogic

From Reuters via Yahoo!: “White House spokesman Scott McClellan said […] that ‘based on what we know today, the president would have taken the same action’ — war with Iraq — in order to ‘confront a threat posed by Saddam Hussein.”

Since we know today that Saddam Hussein possessed no WMDs, what exactly was the threat that he posed? Does McClellan realize how stupid he sounds?

All the news that's fit to gloss over….

The number of people who believe that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq actually possessed weapons of mass destruction must by now be in single digits. However the fact that the US has finally abandoned the search for WMD still seems newsworthy – after all, wasn’t a war launched on the strength of that falsehood, resulting in thousands of deaths and years of bloody chaos? But as Salon reports: “If you missed this bit of news, that’s because in our town’s newspaper, a little publication called the New York Times […] it was buried inside on A10 in a 240-word news brief.” (My emphasis.)

(I can’t wait to see how Daniel Okrent, the NYT “public editor”, explains this one.)