emily's journal

Reassembling code into human-think.

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:45:10 GMT

The Bug is a novel that my father gave me for Christmas last year; I put off reading it until the summer because I wasn't sure I could read it in good humor while still taking a programming class.

The two novels it most reminds me of couldn't be more different. It's like Microserfs in the way it chronicles the social fabric of a technology project--the collaborations, rivalries, and moments of shared insight. But it's much more literary than Coupland; it also reminds me of Netherland in the way it plumbs the unique thoughts of someone who is falling apart in the echo chamber of their own head.

The Bug focuses on two figures. The narrator is Roberta Walton, a linguistics Ph.D. from Yale who, having not found rewarding work in academia, grudging takes a job as a tester at a software company. Over the course of the project, she becomes obsessed with a bug that she discovered, and delights in learning C in order to track it down. But more of the pages are devoted to Ethan Levin, a programmer at the same company. It is his job to fix the bug Roberta found, but he can't. He's a computer science Ph.D. dropout and the bug provides a focus for all his preoccupation and self-doubt. The bug comes to feel like a portent of disaster in his personal life. The bug is a sort of character, too. It's a flaky bug that only seems to crop up in important presentations to investors or customers. No one can reproduce it to study it. When its definition and causes are finally explained, it is satisfying but also has a realistic sense of "Oh, for Pete's sake, it was just _____."

I especially liked the author's skill in explaining concepts like pointers and loops, right in the story, and the way Roberta turns her linguist's eye towards programming.

I admit that when I first learned all this about computer memory allocation, I was disappointed--no, offended!--in a linguistic sense. Programmers were so inept at metaphor-creation, I thought. Memory leak: this wasn't a "leak" of memory at all. ... Why not name it to show the origin of the problem, with the programmer? "Memory gluttony," it should have been called. Or "memory hogging." Even the routine they used to request memory from the operating system had been named incorrectly. It was called "malloc," short for memory allocation, "m" "alloc." But of course human beings don't read "m" then "alloc" unless there is a separator, a space, a dash. No, by the implicit structures of the English language, everyone pronounces it "MAL-loc." Mal, loc. Mal: bad. Loc: Location. Bad location! But of course they'd have trouble keeping track of memory when they'd named their tool so stupidly!

This quote isn't terribly representative, but it struck me because that is my kind of tangent. Mostly the book is not technical, and has some great scenes and descriptions, like when a drunk person in an argument "felt his tongue start to slide around in his mouth like a bar of soap on a wet shower floor."

This was a very pleasing read for me, and the only reason I'm giving it four smileys rather than five is that it has some twists that would lessen its reread value.

The Bug: Four smileys
Recommended for: online_stalker, ennnis

Writer's Block: Le Quatorze Juillet

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:37:21 GMT

Happy Bastille Day! Today the French celebrate the event that sparked the French revolution. In honor of our Francophone friends, what is your favorite French thing? Bonus points for answers en français.

View other answers

J'aime bien la cuisine française, surtout la crème fraîche. J'en ai mangé au déjeuner aujourd'hui ! J'essaie aussi de ne pas oublier le français. Donc j'ai recemment acheté un livre (ebook!) en français que j'ai, par hasard, commencé à lire hier. On verra si c'est plus satisfaisant que le livre allemand que j'ai lu le mois passé. C'est dommage qu'on ne me demande pas d'écrire quelquechose en français quelques semaines plus tard parce que je suis sûre que je me rappelera de beaucoup en le lisant.

(If you can't read French, you're not missing anything. I am merely babbling to convince myself I can still form sentences.)

Moderate affinity.

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:02:06 GMT

It took a hell of a long time, but I've made it through The Reality Dysfunction, the first volume in a trilogy recommended to me by ennnis. It's a "space opera" about a futuristic society plagued by an evil force that "sequestrates," or maybe just possesses, people.

The story takes place in the Confederation in the 2600s. The set-up is quite detailed and interesting. One group, the Adamists, lives on a failing planet Earth and various other planets. The Adamists are mostly like the people of today, but with neural implants that allow them to "datavise" or communicate directly with computers. They have starships and nuclear weapons and whatnot. Another group, the Edenists, has a different kind of technology that is organic. Edenists have genetic changes that allow them to have an affinity bond with each other and with their habitats, which are miniplanets made entirely of organic matter. This bond allows them to share thoughts and feelings inside their own heads, without speaking, and to see through other people's eyes. They also have spaceships that are organic and have personalities and memories. When Edenists die, the intangible part of them is absorbed into the habitat. The distinction between the two groups is essentially religious; they trade and coexist more or less peacefully.

The plot of the book revolves around a new planet, Lalonde, which is being settled under a Dutch East India Company-esque scheme. Colonists have bought in, and come from Earth or other failing urban planets to farm. We see a group of the colonists struggling to get their village, Aberdale, up and running. This is fresh stuff--after all, in sci-fi like Star Wars and Firefly, the farmers are just there as redshirts or comic relief. However, an evil force appears on the planet and begins to take over villages and people in a mysterious way. The book has a huge number of characters, including Joshua "Self-Insert" Calvert, a strapping starship captain with remarkable sexual and technical skills, and many female figures that are almost characterized well enough for you to be able to tell them apart. There is a planet with a culture nostalgic for 19th century England and a bunch of marines who have huge machine guns welded to their forearms. So while Lalonde turns out to be central to the plot, it doesn't dominate in terms of number of pages. There is a lot going on here, and some if it must pertain to the later volumes of the trilogy, since it doesn't pan out in this one.

This book is either rather good or completely terrible. The author is certainly inventive, but I often had occasion to wish that he'd handed over his ideas to someone else to write. The pacing here is frustrating. At times, he is so enamored of discussing planetary trajectories and technology that you wonder if you will ever see a sentient being again. There seems to be little structure governing the arrangement of scenes. There are problems with the POV. You'll be reading about Person A doing something from the point of view of Person B, watching them from 20 yards away. Then all of a sudden you're in Person A's head. Or, scenes of a space battle cut back and forth between the POVs of people in different, even opposing spaceships, with no notice. This problem is so basic to telling a story that I'd expect even a novice to avoid it instinctually.

The novel is quite long and there are two volumes left. In the end, I feel about it the way I did about A Game of Thrones. It has its good and bad points, and I thought I was intrigued enough by the plot to read the sequels, but I never did. We'll see about this one.

The Reality Dysfunction: Two smileys, I guess. Would have been three if the author had cut 500 pages.

End of June.

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:57:27 GMT

Summer goals update.

1. Library website: launched. (Let me know if you don't know the URL and want to see it.)
2. Discrete Math: halfway done, got an A on the problem set we got back so far.
3. Ginny cardigan: 1/3 of the way through the sleeves, which I always do both at once. Then I just have to knit the cuffs, block, and assemble. I should be able to get it done before Fall.
4. Build and/or program a robot: this goal turns out be too inchoate. I was inspired by seeing a bunch of the supplies for a physical computing class at the bookstore when I was waiting for dennis_obell one evening (this was during emergency computer replacement #1). It made me remember a robotics class I took at the Franklin Institute the summer I was 8. It was really fun, but I didn't have the manual dexterity to do a good job assembling all the little pieces of the robot kit. Now, obviously, I would. But what do I really want to get out of this project? It's more of a "why not?" thing. I could get a kit to just make a little robot similar to the old one without soldering. I could get a pre-assembled programmable robot. I could get a kit to make (non-rolling-around, thus non-robot-looking) electronics projects. Wow, 2009 must be a great time to be an 8-year-old--there are too many sites selling this stuff for me to have any idea what would be the best lark.
5. Go running or at least spend more time outside: I've run on and off, and gone to the garden most weekends. Two weeks ago I hiked Bear Mountain.
6. Foreign language books: I recently finished a German novel that takes place during the Peasants' War. Setting was interesting, but the book was a bit draggy, and I was too busy to write a review and now the moment has passed. I also bought a French book but am reading an English one first, as a palate-cleanser.
7. The Wire, Season 4: Just finished. Best season yet of a really, really good show.
8. New Drupal theme: I haven't started this yet because the CSS that I did in 2007 isn't as nice as I remembered (i.e. I've gotten a lot better at it), plus I have no image-editing software on my new computer. I may buy Fireworks for home with my educational discount; then I should be in business.

Unreassuring revisionism.

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:11:34 GMT

I don't generally enjoy true-crime books, so why read Columbine? It would be almost impossible to remain unaware of the Columbine story--I remember watching it unfold on closed-captioned TV from an elliptical machine at the gym. Hours of TV coverage unleashed all sorts of theories. But it turns out that most of what we learned immediately after the event was wrong, due to confusion and a deliberate cover-up. David Cullen has tried to put together a complete picture.

Many of the stories, like the martyrdom of Cassie Bernall have already been debunked. The most insightful parts of this book set the record straight about the two boys, Harris and Klebold. There was a group at the school known as the Trenchcoat Mafia, but they weren't part of it. They weren't bullied; if anything, they were bullies. They weren't loners; they had friends and one of them even attended prom the weekend before the attack. And the attack wasn't a complete surprise in the sense that both boys had a history of scrapes with the law and had leaked parts of the plan--the guns, their attempts to make napalm--to other kids. In fact, Harris sufficiently freaked out the mother of one ex-friend that she repeatedly called the police and an officer filled out a search warrant for the Harris home. The warrant was never filed, and the police attempted to destroy records of it after the massacre.

In this assessment, Klebold emerges as seriously depressed and messed up, but perhaps not significantly more messed up than the most messed-up kid at any other high school. His problems, crushes, friendships, and fallings-out are completely banal. In another situation, he would have been a suicide. But he was friends with Harris, whom Cullen pegs as a true psychopath. Harris saw everyone else in the world as worthless, and wanted to exterminate them, theatrically. There were no targets in the massacre, they only wanted to kill as many people as possible. In fact, the attack was not meant to be a shooting but rather an Oklahoma City-style bombing, only Harris's bombs failed to explode. The two boys fed on each other's hatred and anger and prevented each other from abandoning the scheme during their year-long planning. Cullen mentions that other killers have worked in a "dyad" like this, for example, the Beltway snipers. (An earlier version of Cullen's discussion appears in this Slate article.)

This book is organized in cross-cut chapters that start with the massacre, then flip between the planning and the aftermath, and end with the killers' suicide. The book sometimes does not feel complete enough for what purports to be a definitive account. For example, several of the thirteen victims are never mentioned by name. Cullen clearly was limited by what families were willing to participate. I also came away from the book unsure what the author meant to accomplish with his discussions of the effects of the massacre on the survivors. If the account of the massacre is history, and the discussion of the boys is psychology, the chapters on the investigation and healing are a bit more like an episode of 20/20.

Still, the book is worth a look (or, if you want a summary of one part of it, click on that article link). The story of the Columbine massacre is already sitting in your head--you might as well have the right story.

Columbine: Three smileys

Seeing red.

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 18:31:49 GMT

When I worked in publishing, I would often read books just out of curiosity about what the author's style was like, or what drew their fans in. One author I was familiar with, but never read, was Alice Hoffman. I recently read The Ice Queen, which is about a librarian, so hey, why not.

The protagonist loses her mother at age 8, for which she blames herself. She grows up into a sort of nonperson, with no friends, only a lover whom she keeps at arm's length. After the death of their grandmother, her brother moves her to his town in Florida, but shortly after arriving, she is struck by lightning. Her perception of the world around her changes, she begins to notice elements of magic around her, and she develops new relationships. After being frozen by her mother's death, the fire of the lightning strike eventually turns her into a real person.

This is the kind of midlist book that is exactly clever enough to sustain one reading club session, but no more. For example, after the lightning strike the nameless protagonist loses the ability to see the color red (she sees it, nonsensically, as white). She embarks on a torrid love affair, which has no effect on her, but when she seals a real friendship, suddenly she can see red again. Gee, I wonder what that means.

I found myself irritated by the implausibility of the details. The protagonist's brother is supposed to be a meteorologist but he gives a paper on fairy tales and chaos theory (I don't think Hoffman knows what this is) at a meteorology conference and is received with a standing ovation. I don't go to a lot of meteorology conferences, but I'm pretty sure this wouldn't happen. One character is supposed to be majoring in architecture, which involves building models of Greek temples, like in the seventh grade. And the library stuff! Ugh!*

The author obviously did a little research on the effects of lightning strikes, with interesting results, and the novel is certainly competent, but I still don't totally get the appeal of literary lite. I'd rather split my time between actually highbrow literature and stuff that is pure fun; this was neither.

The Ice Queen: Two smileys

*For the librarians: Let's set aside the fact that the author seems to have chosen librarianship as a profession for her character in order to demonstrate how she is an emotionally stunted, badly dressed loser who has sex with strange men in the parking lot. For some reason, her job as a "librarian" seems to be the same assistant job that I had at a pre-ILS public library as a 14-year-old in 1991. It's not just clerical, though! She also shelves and dusts! For some reason, her library keeps meticulous, permanent records on what everyone has ever checked out (or as she calls it, withdrawn). At one point, she decides to retype these records (why?) which leads her into snooping into the records of everyone she knows. I could go on, but I'm sure this is enough to show why the portrayal is annoying, like a novel about an ambulance-chasing lawyer or a vapid blonde publicist.

Infanta Catalina becomes Queen Katherine.

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:18:35 GMT

I picked up The Constant Princess because it was too noisy and distracting in the hospital to read the German book I was in the middle of. Essentially a prequel to The Other Boleyn Girl, this is Philippa Gregory's novel about Katherine of Aragon. While the story in The Other Boleyn Girl is unfamiliar because it's largely made up, I thought this novel was a reasonable attempt to shed a little light on facts not explored by commercial fiction: Katherine's marriage to Henry VIII's older brother, widowhood, and remarriage to Henry. The book ends before Princess Mary is born. While we can perceive hints of Henry's future infidelity in moments of dramatic irony, here he is a young, slim prince who looks up to his exotic wife.

Usually we only see Katherine as the dour, cheerlessly Catholic wife whom Henry is trying to dump in favor of merry Anne Boleyn--which is how she appears in Gregory's novel about the Boleyns. The descriptions here of Katherine's childhood in Spain, as the Infanta Catalina, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, are colorful, and Gregory constructs a story to explain why Katherine insisted her first marriage was never consummated. It was a diverting enough read. Apparently Gregory has written a third novel that covers all the other wives of Henry VIII, and I'm sure I'll read that at some other time when I'm traveling, sick, or otherwise in need of light reading.

The Constant Princess: Three smileys

Paging New Yorkers.

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:42:23 GMT

Once again, I'm getting emails from the Blood Bank saying they're desperate for blood, especially type O negative (but all types welcome). Just think, dennis_obell actually needed some of this blood recently. Unfortunately, I'm not eligible to donate, but I'll have lunch with you if you shlep out here. They also give you a movie voucher.

Too much is never enough.

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:55:09 GMT

Not that anyone asked my opinion, but here are some thoughts on national healthcare. (I'm not trying to avoid commenting on shabbyrosy's post, but it's friendslocked and this is quite digressive anyway.)

I'm in favor of a healthcare system overhaul, and national healthcare seems like the manifestation that will be available, so I'm in favor of considering it. These are the main reasons:

1. Insurance should spread risk. You pay a (comparatively) small fee and much of the time, get little or nothing in return. But some of the time, you need a lot in return. For this to work you need a lot of people, people in different stages of need. For-profit health insurance has turned this on its head by separating people into relatively small and homogenous pools; they try to pull in young and healthy working people, then refuse to cover those who are unhealthy or might be soon. Imagine getting cancer at age 40 and being uninsurable until you're old enough for Medicare.

This is extremely profitable, but it doesn't fulfill what most of us would perceive as the goal of insurance. Any system that pools larger, more heterogenous groups of people (like everyone in a state) is going to work better in this respect. Insurance companies had a chance to do this, and screwed it up catastrophically. Someone else--whether it's states, nonprofits, or the federal government--should take a shot.

2. More healthcare does not equal better healthcare. There are so many discussions of this out there that it's hardly worth tracking down links. Some people may feel better if they can have a CAT scan every time they get the sniffles, but they shouldn't be allowed to do this at other people's expense. It is possible to do studies to establish whether a therapy is worthwhile in a given situation.

I find the conundrum of too much end-of-life care particularly troubling. Take the case of my sharp-witted 99-year-old great-grandmother. She suffered some sort of seizure and was resuscitated in order to spend the remaining three months of her life mute, disoriented, and living on pureed food. Americans want as much healthcare as they can get, but they should learn more about how this affects their quality of life.

3. Countries like Germany and England may be a bit to the left of us, but they're not Soviet Russia. For every nightmare anecdote about treatment denied, you can find a pretty persuasive statistic showing that countries with national healthcare have lower infant mortality or various other metrics revealing that our level of health is actually quite poor. The amount of money Americans spend on healthcare has gone up continually, and yet we are not healthier. It stands to reason that we should be able to spend less on healthcare and not be less healthy for it.

4. Among my friends, the more they know about the healthcare system, the more convinced they seem that new solutions should be examined. I don't mean that I blindly adopt their opinions. It's just that if someone whose judgment I respect in general has spent a lot of time studying a particular topic, I'm likely to think that they came to a correct conclusion on that topic. Any of them would be able to come up with better arguments and more specific evidence than I've done here.

Ten years.

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:25:36 GMT

Ten years ago today I moved to NYC. I'd hung out at home in Pennsylvania for about a week after graduation, and on Saturday my dad drove me and my stuff up to the East Village. My job was starting on Monday. My preferences for places to move after college had been Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, and NYC, in that order.

The first year I was here, I hardly knew anybody and had a low-paying job that required long, pointless hours. On the plus side, I had a decent apartment share in the East Village, and my two college friends liked opera and eating out. Then I got a better job in publishing, but moved to a slummy Murray Hill apartment, which was worthwhile because I had great roommates--five of them over two years. I met dennis_obell and his friends and became confident that I could meet people I liked in the city if I stuck it out. I moved to a better apartment, and started to get to know Brooklyn, but then my boss retired and I ended up in a worse job, the job at Limorgk. Then we got engaged and bought our apartment in Prospect Heights--my best apartment yet. We got married and got a cat. In the post-wedding calm, we made new friends in our neighborhood and met a lot of my friendslist in real life. I was able to quit my job and go to library school. I had the time to do a serious job search and ended up with my current job, which is the best one I've had yet. And, as an unexpected bonus, tuition remission lets me learn something new and fun.

I meant to post five years ago about my first five years here, and it's too bad I didn't get around to it, because I wonder what I would have said. I started out pretty lonely and the jobs I had were, in retrospect, pointless, but I was intoxicated by the variety. The second five years I've definitely spent in a less glamorous way, but I think that's because I discovered my "own" NYC and could just put my energy into the things and people I care about. I would have said that I loved the first five years, but the second five years have been better spent.

People who know me know that I like projects--attacking something and then being able to say "I can read Dutch" or "I made the hardest sweater from that book of patterns." NYC is probably my biggest project ever. I moved here with no network, experience, or capital, and nothing really about me that would make people say "Oh, she'll do great in NYC." Now I have a husband, a cat, lots of friends, a graduate degree, a job I like that gives me time to do things I enjoy, my own home (with a European refrigerator, no less), a neighborhood that I'm involved in, and the local knowledge to give directions and recommendations to other people. As those commercials that made me so sniffly after 9/11 said, "I love New York." But in a way, I feel like I've cracked it. I love New York, but I probably won't stay here forever.

At court.

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:28:03 GMT

Sex with Kings was a book I got from the library on a lark and read only half of. It's meant to be a history of kings' mistresses in Western Europe focusing on the period from 1500 to 1850, but I'm not sure it deserves the appellation "history."

The author mentions the relationship of the mistress to the king (more diversion than confidante), the mistress's rivalry with the queen, and the threat of younger, prettier women to the mistress's status. The title is catchy, and there are some startling facts here. We learn of the tremendous expense kings undertook to maintain their mistresses and of many awkward encounters between wives and mistresses or between the new mistress and the old. (A theme better exploited by The Other Boleyn Girl.)

But the book is quite poorly organized. The author attempts to organize her anecdotes by theme, with the result that we visit the same mistresses again and again, which becomes tiresome and confusing. It would be more illuminating to read this material in the hands of an actual historian who digested and analyzed the facts. (Or what about an actual feminist, eh? That would also have possibilities. And while we're talking gender, the author really sacrificed something when she chose her title; could any book on this topic be complete without Catherine the Great? Or how about Marie Antoinette and Count von Fersen? Speaking of whom...)

Abundance is another library book, a first-person retelling of the marriage and reign of Marie Antoinette. The queen is portrayed here as a creature of the court who wishes to please her mother and husband; the impetuous creature of Queen of Fashion is hard to spot in these pages. This Marie Antoinette is regal and decisive, yet totally naive: she seems to take every poetic compliment of her beauty at face value and never perceives the irony of her pastoral fantasies. Her total belief in her right to rule and enjoy luxury gives her an almost bovine complacency, weirdly married to a flamboyantly gracious manner. She comes off like an Emma Woodhouse living out her flaws and comeuppance at a heightened level of grandeur and terror.

The book is too long and the author's commitment to the queen's voice greatly constrains her ability to convey a complete historical truth, but counterintuitively, it grew on me the further I read. Rather than an attempt at history or even biography, this novel seems like a successful attempt to totally inhabit the vanished mindset of absolute monarchy.

Sex with Kings: Two smileys
Abundance: Three smileys

Paging iPhone/iPod Touch users.

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 19:39:40 GMT

I've got some content that is going to be damned hard to squash to fit on a mobile device held vertically. Do I bump the font size down more than I consider desirable, or assume that people can handle rotating the device?

View Poll: iPhone/iPod Touch users

Not-a-book-review.

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:56:14 GMT

I first tried to read Quicksilver on our trip to Sweden three years ago, and only got about one chapter into it. Over Memorial Day weekend, I started over and made it about 150 pp. in and am forced to conclude that this just isn't the book for me.

I'm not going to be able to summarize it very well, since I read less than a quarter. The section I read is about a man who grew up in 17th century England, the son of a prominent Puritan agitator, and went to college with Isaac Newton. As a sort of prologue, we meet this character as an old man in Boston, where he resolves to return to England to patch up a dispute between Newton and Leibniz, whom he apparently also knows. This character's story apparently only occupies the first third of the book; other characters in other locales are featured in the other sections.

Why did I not like this book? Well, first of all, if I never read another description of Newton probing his eye with a darning needle, I will die happy. But in a broader sense, the author (Neal Stephenson) didn't succeed in making me care what happens to his protagonist, whose name I have already forgotten, or trust that he was even going to get the point and tell me what happens to him. Instead, Stephenson seems to enjoy the sound of his own voice, as he describes everything in minute detail and relates endless conversations. I think we are meant to be amazed by the stylishness with which he writes about people discussing facts that are elementary to us as 21st century people. He also seems to rejoice in making little connections; for example, in the colonial Boston of the opening scenes, there is a clever boy named Ben. Well, of course this is going to turn out to be Ben Franklin. I think the reader is meant to feel a fun sense of recognition, but I was inclined to roll my eyes. The overall effect was extremely cloying.

Is this a novel or a history of science lesson masquerading as an MFA exercise (or vice-versa)? You'd think this was up my alley, but in the end I was just plain bored.

Celestial.

Mon, 25 May 2009 14:43:11 GMT

Presently I'm in the middle of several series that I'm trying to parcel out, rather than racing through every book all in one week. Last week, I finally allowed myself to move on to the second book in the Temeraire series, which ennnis had mentioned was one of the best.

In Throne of Jade, Temeraire and his captain Laurence travel unwillingly to China. (The year is 1806.) A Chinese prince insists that the British must return the dragon, but Temeraire refuses to be separated from Laurence. So they set off for China on a transport ship captained by one of Laurence's former crew. Other passengers include the Chinese prince and his retinue, who are not what they seem, and a would-be British ambassador who wants to use Temeraire as a bargaining chip to achieve diplomatic aims and trade concessions. The group travels down around the Cape, across the Indian Ocean, and finally into the closed and mysterious land of China. Along the way, they encounter monsters, slave ships, and rivalries amongst the crew. Once in China, they are involved in a palace intrigue, the nature of which they discover just in time.

The first book the series was great, but I agree with ennnis that this one was better. The author manages to offer fresh details, observations, and experiences all through the book, without there ever being a misstep that feels historically inaccurate--or at least false to the world she has created. The pacing, too, is superbly controlled.

Throne of Jade: 4 smileys

Summer vacation.

Fri, 22 May 2009 20:11:06 GMT

Things to do this summer, in addition to Discrete Math and finalizing library website:
1. Finish Ginny cardigan for fall
2. Build and/or program a robot
3. Go running or at least spend more time outside, e.g. in the Botanic Garden
4. Find books to read in foreign languages and read them (maybe this will be a way to obtain some)
5. The Wire, season 4
6. Take the nice CSS I designed for my old project website and make it into a Drupal theme for my homepage

This is the first of, like, three conversations that leads to you being a Wiccan

Mon, 18 May 2009 03:02:16 GMT

Having recently read some long, diverting medieval novels, I thought it would be fun to reread The Mists of Avalon since it was on sale and I remembered liking it when I was about 15.

The book is laudable as a coherent reimagining of Arthurian legend from the point of view of the female characters. They aren't just witnesses; the book portrays the women as agents in a battle between the old, druidic religion of the British Isles and encroaching Christianity. Morgaine, the protagonist, is the de facto head of the pagan contingent, and contends to influence Arthur against his Christian queen, Gwenhwyfar. All the other characters and events are ordered around this premise. Morgaine struggles over many years to determine her obligations as a lapsed priestess living at court, and to see ways to work events to her advantage.

The approach freshens the story, and it also sometimes provides better motivation for characters' actions than traditional tellings. That is to say, the characters do more or less the same things as they always do--the author didn't change the story--but their reasons for doing those things make more sense. The novel takes events that could be told in a completely episodic, even picaresque way, and forms them into a single epic storyline.

Unfortunately, the author takes Morgaine's mystical paganism all too seriously, with the result that the book contains a large number of soliloquies about the Goddess, nature, fate, and various other hooey. (At least we see Gwenhwyfar's Christian self-doubt and repentance more fleetingly.) The pace is sometimes slow: the author has created an exciting overarching plot, but hasn't given each chapter its own mini-intrigue to keep things moving.

All in all, I think this is a novel that is worth reading once, but I'm not sure I really needed to pick it up again.

The Mists of Avalon: Three smileys as a first read, two as a reread

Snack Daddy's adventures abroad.

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:32:22 GMT

Absurdistan is Gary Schtyengart's second novel, the first having been The Russian Debutante's Handbook, which I liked. As in the previous book, Schteyngart exiles his character to an invented country on the very edge of Europe.

In this novel Misha Vainberg, a Russian Jew sent to the U.S. for college, spends his twenties in New York City, but then finds himself stuck back in Russia with visa problems. He is separated from his American girlfriend Rouenna, whom, he reports, he "roused from the Bronx working-class nightmare of her youth and deposited at Hunter College, where she is studying to become an executive secretary" at his expense. In exile, Misha whiles away his time with food, drink, and friends; mourns the recent death of his larger-than-life father; and strategizes about how to get back in the U.S. Eventually he travels to the small Caspian-Sea country of Absurdistan (from which he believes he can get to Belgium) only to become stranded in a civil war between the Sevo and Svani ethic groups. Or is it something other than a civil war? There are many American contractors around, and they seem to be up to something.

Many of the best passages of this book sound a lot like Nabokov. When we see the classically overeducated Misha trying to explain the ways of the world to a brash, mouthy Rouenna, it's easy to see shades of suave Humbert bickering with louche, lollipop-sucking Lolita. You can also see Nabokov in inventions like Misha's alma mater, "Accidental College," or in small observations like "two overturned cylindrical freight cards, one sporting the stenciled legend POLY, the other MERS." But there are also significant portions of the book that describe, with Rabelaisian relish, the excesses of Misha's lifestyle and sexual history, which I found rather monotonous in the long run.

A lot of this book is about missing NYC. At one point, Misha and a girlfriend invent a game called "Food, Decor, Service," in which they attempt to guess restaurants based on their Zagat descriptions. Although the author is often described as funny, he's almost never ha-ha funny, but rather droll, ironic, or sardonic.

I enjoyed the first half of this novel more than the second half, and it's probably too long. I would say that it's a three-smiley novel liberally studded with five-smiley moments. I guess that averages out to a four.

Banking: a necessary evil? Or boon to society?

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 15:11:14 GMT

I was expecting The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson to be a lot like A Splendid Exchange: a history of trade around the world. Instead, it is much more narrowly a history of banking, centering on Western Europe and the U.S.

The author explains the banking system in chapters, starting with money itself, then moving on to bonds, joint stock and limited liability companies, insurance, real estate, hedge funds--all in increasing order of complication, until he gets to those newfangled and regrettable inventions we've been hearing about, like credit default swaps. This presentation is quite effective. While other resources may enable you to parrot back what a CDS is, this book puts them in sufficient context that you really understand what they were for, why they seemed like a good idea, and what has gone wrong with them. Ferguson does a good job of presenting familiar examples, such as the Dutch East India Company, the British opium trade, German hyperinflation of the 1920s, and Long Term Capital Management. He argues that banking is necessary for the activities of sophisticated society; that poor countries and neighborhoods suffer from a lack of banking resources, not from predatory bankers.

dennis_obell and I made a game of trying to figure out exactly when this book was written, based on the attitude and some of the details. Our conclusion is that it was probably finished in 2007, but touched up with new details around the time of JP Morgan buying Bear Stearns. It clearly predates the collapse of Lehman and the bank bailout.

There are moments where the author gets technical, apparently unconsciously sliding into financial lingo. If you have a good vocabulary and know your political history, this isn't a problem. There are other moments where he rather lamely shoehorns in references to popular movies to liven things up. Not only do these read like they were added later, at the suggestion of an editor, they actually read like they may have been added by a different author altogether. There's no getting around the fact that this is a serious book.

It's also a timely book, and one that I found fundamentally readable. So, four smileys.

Rowena and friends.

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:23:40 GMT

When I told one of my colleagues that I'd gotten a Mac and that my husband was excited about it, he asked, "Oh, so does he name his computers too?" (Our department has an ongoing Mac/Windows pseudofeud, with much ribbing.)

Is naming your computers really a Mac thing? I always have, although they've gotten more lowbrow over time.

1993: Paris-Dakar (my father named this one), Mac IIsi
1995: Casaubon (Eco reference, not Eliot, highwater-mark of literary allusion), Powerbook 520
2001: Miranda (second hard drive was Prospero), Sony Vaio SR17
2005: Rowena (with peripherals Godwin, Helga, and Salazar), Gateway FX400X
2009: Temeraire (based on the "what have I read in the past few weeks" principle, also switching OSes on a lark is imprudent), Mac Mini

R.I.P. Rowena, 2005-2009.

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:19:36 GMT

Thank you for your patience with my unending computer saga, and your suggestions. It turns out that, during the last two weeks of the semester when a lot of programming assignments are due, a working computer with an Internet connection rates high on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Above sleep, in any case.

To make what could be a long story short, we eventually decided that the amount of parts and work that would go into resuscitating the computer probably weren't worth it in light of its age (3.75 years). Replacing the power supply did make it start-uppable, but it still cut out during my attempt to install Windows, and then when I had Windows going and was trying to scrounge up the right drivers (not an easy task in itself), it went off again...

What is a savings account for, if not for when two computers die in the same month? So, here's the shocking compromise: I didn't want to get Vista, I didn't want to get a new Windows XP machine in 2009 (especially if I had to pay extra for the downgrade), and I don't have time to curate Linux beyond the kind of simple stuff that I do on the Eee. But I also didn't want to spent a lot of money or buy new peripherals. So last night we went back to the university computer store and got a Mac Mini, which Chris set up last night while I was doing homework on a loaner laptop from the library. (Which incidentally, weighed about 12 pounds and made me happy I have an Eee.) Then I put Boot Camp and Windows on it. By that hour, I was ready to collapse, since I've been spending every waking hour--and plenty of hours that shouldn't have been waking--on this. So I haven't really done anything with the Mac part of it yet.

I'm sure I'll have something to say about my Mac-Windows-Mac oscillation in the future. But really, it was a way to get a cheap, small computer that works with my peripherals. If I like it, I can upgrade to one of their behemoth towers later. If I don't, dennis_obell will eventually inherit the media center he's always wanted. It seemed like an okay compromise.

This is not going so well.

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:52:31 GMT

dennis_obell went out at lunch and got me a new power supply (his office is much closer to J&R). Now I've got power (yay) but Windows is pretty borked. I can start up into Windows, but it hangs with no taskbar and you can't open or run anything. I can sometimes start into Safe Mode, where running antivirus or antimalware programs eventually results into the too-quick-to-read-BSOD and abrupt shutdown. (While in Safe Mode, I checked my backups and they seem to be up to date.) I can't boot to the Windows CD to repair or reinstall because GRUB takes over. I've found some solutions for that, but they're all very involved and require going into Ubuntu, which I can't do (won't boot--still get kernel panic message).

Is it time for Boot and Nuke? I've got a pretty good backup on an external drive and an additional partial backup on a web drive. I also have a burned ISO of Windows XP from when I was a student, which I presume I can reuse once I get GRUB out of the way. This does seem a little extreme, though. But it would help in the sense that I would probably end up with either a working (but blank) computer or fairly conclusive evidence that I have a hardware failure that is not cost-effective to fix. That creates a new kettle of fish: I really don't want a Vista machine, so I'm not sure what I'd get if I had to replace it.

This really is the best weekend ever.

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:21:15 GMT

Now that my computer is 100% dead, I am at the office trying to finish my homework. Except that the compiler I found for this homework project, which was the fourth configuration I'd attempted on my home computer, does not work on this one at all, and I have no idea why. Of course, I also don't understand why we have a homework assignment in a language that the department no longer supports on its own machines. Anyway, I now have a choice between turning in the working but klutzy version from last week, which I doubt is worth full marks, or the improved version, which I have not been able to even attempt to compile. Hmmm. I have been here four hours and have accomplished only a little bit of work, on an unrelated assignment.

Anyone want a ticket to see Lily Allen with dennis_obell, prettykate, and obifu tomorrow night?

Just my luck.

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 13:59:23 GMT

It's going to be 75 today, I don't have that much homework left...and my computer is totally fried. It turned itself off abruptly last night. I thought it might have overheated because yesterday was the warmest it had been since I installed a new video card. I let it cool down, which temporarily seemed to help, because I could restart, but this morning it stopped itself again when SpeedFan showed a temperature that was very normal for it. I opened it, and it's not dusty, and the fans do seem to be running.

When I try to start it up, it shows the Gateway screen. Then (because I have Linux installed) it goes to the GRUB menu, from which I choose Windows. Then the BSOD flashes, way too fast for me to read it, and it dies again immediately. If I can get to the Safe Mode screen, which has happened a few times, I can get into Windows by choosing Last known good configuration, but it still dies about a minute after I get there. Safe Mode doesn't prevent the BSOD and I can't seem to get it to boot from a Windows CD. I tried going to System Restore during one of the two times I managed to get into Windows, and chose a point a few weeks ago, but it still died after about a minute. Also I haven't installed anything or changed any settings lately, so I don't see why that would matter.

Any ideas that could salvage this enough that I might be able to get 15 minutes outside today? Sigh.

Livejournal entry makes fun of book titles.

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:11:49 GMT

The Brooklyn Public Library may be developing a nice collection of ebook titles, but the findability leaves something to be desired. There's no way to filter ebooks from audiobooks, so you can't browse by genre without weeding through all the audiobooks. Instead, I usually look at "all ebooks" ordered by date added.

In that mode, I get to scroll past all the recently added romance novels. Some of them have the kind of title you'd imagine, like "An Improper Aristocrat," but tons more have titles that are like newspaper headlines for the plot. Is this a hilarious new fad among Harlequin writers? Here are some of my favorites; I'm too lazy to make links.

Pleasured by the English Spy
Promoted: Secretary to Bride!
She Thinks Her Ex Is Sexy
The Spanish Billionaire's Pregnant Wife
Blackmailed Into a Fake Engagement
Bought for the Sicilian Billionaire's Bed
The C.O.O. Must Marry

As usual, it looks like the library is up to date with recent social trends.

Nasty, brutish, and long.

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:22:14 GMT

Ken Follett is a clever man. Having written the bestseller The Pillars of the Earth, he then wrote an even longer sequel called World Without End which is strikingly similar in tone, plot, and characters. But he waited nearly twenty years to do it. Instead of saying, "Ken Follett is a one-trick pony," people said, "Oh, hooray! I remember that I really liked that book."

World Without End actually takes place several hundred years after The Pillars of the Earth but since we're dealing with the Middle Ages, you'd hardly know it. The world is much the same as it was when the cathedral of the fictional town of Kingsbridge was built, and most of the inhabitants do the same jobs--there are nuns, monks, a powerful prior, wool merchants, an alderman, serfs, and so forth. They still fight over essentially the same issues and privileges.

Where the first book dealt with the tension between secular and ecclesiastical authority, this one sets up a power struggle between inventive merchants and peasants, on one hand, and conservative priests and nobles, on the other. The modern reader deeply feels the frustration of men and women who want to grow cash crops, move to towns that offer higher wages, open hospitals, and build bridges. This book would make anyone a capitalist.

The characters are, to be honest, somewhat interchangeable with the figures from the first book: a clever female merchant, a steady and reliable builder, and a devious clergyman. But the book creates new intrigues between them, and Follett is, like his protagonist, a good architect. He builds up layers of conflict and mystery for the first two-thirds of the book, and then meticulously resolves them, in roughly the reverse order, as the book winds gracefully to a close.

This is certainly not a literary book, but it's well-constructed; it's not erudite, but shows an understanding of history. Like its predecessor, it's just a satisfying read. Incidentally, several of my favorite former publishing colleagues are thanked in the afterword.

World Without End: Four smileys