jpurdie

Been a bit lax in posts lately, partly because I had little to write about but mainly because I've been a bit lazy blog wise, deferring and deferring doing some posts.

I’ve also been wondering if I’m turning into a grumpy old man. I've bought a lot of books lately and have been disappointed and pissed off with most of them.

I've bought a fair amount of nonfiction recently, which is quite rare as I generally think twice and then think for a third time before buying nonfiction books, in the main because they are more expensive than fiction, and I feel have a reduced re read factor (fiction authors must be bitches; having a higher cover price the nonfiction crew would be getting higher royalties). And I've found Penguin books in particular to be horrendously expensive. Doubly so in that they also produce a lot of public domain material where no royalties are paid and yet those books are still expensive.

I picked up How To Destroy The Universe and dipped in and out of it and it is pure mince. For a start the author (Paul Parsons) accepts Man Made Global Warming - particularly ironic as another chapter is How To Predict the Weather where he concludes we can't because the system is so complex; but one tiny trace gas from us can overrule this complex system and cause global warming - the chapters bear little resemblance to the chapter headings and are short, both in length and content.

I was very intrigued by Empire State by Adam Christopher, and picked it up a few times in some shops before buying it from WH Smith. Unfortunately I couldn't get past Chapter Two as in the first chapter the point of view kept appearing to flip back and forward between Rex and Jerome which made it feel confusing. Chapter Three also started on Rex and I'm thinking 'where's this Red Bradley that's talked about on the blurb on the back?' Does this author know nothing? Chapter three and the main character hasn't been introduced yet? How did he get this published?

Year's Best SF 16 was snaffled from Waterstone's and I was looking forward to some good short stories. It was priced at £6.99 and was an American import. Unfortunately I was disappointed as it seems the art of short story writing has been lost. Meandering pish is the phrase that springs to mind most. Very few stories hooked me from the beginning, developed the story or idea and finished with a punch. David Langford's story started off well and developed quite nicely but there was no payoff, and the ending was a bit of a let down (Sorry Dave). Terry Bisson's story felt like it finished halfway through. Alastair Reynold's story didn't develop and I dropped it several pages in from boredom. There were a few I couldn't get into right from the off. This is the best SF there is? The book is barely a year old and has a wide variety of authors, but as I said, the art of the short story seems to have been lost.

I also saw the remake of Conan The Barbarian (there are too many elements from the Arnie film for it not to be a remake) and was as disappointed as I thought I would be. Visually it was quite good, but as everyone says looks aren’t everything. The script was bad, the acting was bad and the fight scenes were too long. In the end it was the little things such as pronunciation that got to me. Hyrkania was repeatedly referred to as high re kania by the 'pureblood.' Archeron was pronounced asheron. I don’t know about anyone else but when I read Howard and that work came up it was pronounced in my head arkeron, as in arachnid. And I swear that after the slaves were freed the theme tune to the Old Grey Whistle Test was played. Conan was unrecognisable as a character from the Howard stories and the locations bore no resemblance to the world Howard created. Particularly irritating was the ‘I love you son’ bit from Hellboy and similar mushy stuff of the same ilk. Yeah, that's how barbarians behave in the face of death, get all soppy.

There have been some good things. I bought City of Ruin by Mark Charan Newton and it was a joy to read. I don't normally go in much for fantasy fiction or variants thereof (Bob Howard pretty much predates the genre and so doesn't count) but the writing style and world building made it as enjoyable a read as I've had in a while. Plus I've got a couple of old Neal Asher books which have elbowed their way up my reading list, including Africa Zero, which a few weeks ago was impossible to find on the internet. A revised biography of R E Howard was ordered as soon as I knew it had been announced and with any luck will be with me by the end of the month.

No much going on recently, hence the lack of any posts. More keys are not working on my main laptop, which means it is getting unusable as the keys that have no gone are letters. I'm now uninstalling as much software from the computer as I can while I can. Loosing letters makes it far more difficult to use the computer. However, if I can use a USB mouse there's no reason I can't use a USB keyboard, and hence extend the life of the laptop. It' something to look into.

I've bought a lot of books recently, including tomes from Rhys Hughes and Neal Asher(direct and signed by the author!) so I have a lot to read through. There have also been books bought in shops as I used up most of my points on my Waterstone's card. Since they dropped the 3 for 2 it's hardly worth browsing let alone buying. It's a sad day when newsagents give better deals than dedicated bookshops.

Not had much worth blogging about lately. Everything has been calm and quiet.

I ordered The Worlds of Philip Jose Farmer Volume 2 Of Dust and Soul a while ago and it arrived a few weeks back. Not only that but I got a nice little bookmark thanking me for being one of the first one hundred to order the book. I've read through some of it and enjoyed what I've read so far but I'm saving the novella for later on. It's a numbered limited edition and I got the same number as volume one.

Also a limited edition is Spicy Adventures by Robert E Howard, which arrived last week, and again I received the same number as previous books bought. The stories were published in the pulps and in a paperback in the 1980s. I have the 1980s paperback and it's in quite good nick: apparently it's a bit of a rare item. Again this is a well made book, solid and bright with clean bright white pages. Taken from the original manuscripts the stories are supposed to be substantially different from the previously published versions, and I'm looking forward to reading these and the extras included in the book. I might even dig out the old paperback and see what the differences were from the previously published versions to the original manuscripts.

I noticed that the Waterstone’s shop I frequent most has totally redesigned their layout. The Science Fiction section has been moved and revamped, beefed up a bit.

I've recently picked up a couple of Neal Asher novels. I got his newest hardback, The Departure, and in the main quite liked it. At present I'm reading Orbus, which I picked up at Waterstone's in hardback for £5.99. It was in a section for reduced and remaindered books. Remaindered books used to be a few boxes on a table the back of the shop. I also got a collection of three stories by Elmore Leonard. I’ve read a couple and they’re quite good.

I visited Hanselled Books some months ago and decided to take a trip in again. I went a bit mad and got a fair few books, including quite a bit of non-fiction. I picked up books from a few new to me authors that piqued my interest and a couple from favourite authors. The non-fiction mainly centred on Scottish myths and tales and a couple of books about the Medieval period. The fiction was either SF or crime fiction.

It’s been a long time, as the song says.

There hasn’t been much activity on the Bob Shaw front. I’ve only got one of his books to get in hardback, Palace of Eternity, before my Gollancz collection is complete. I did try to buy it on eBay but my best offers kept getting knocked back.

Once the hardbacks are complete it is then on to getting all his short stories, which means various Science Fiction magazines.

But, bought from eBay, was the special edition of Interzone by and about Bob Shaw: number 67 from January 1993. According to the Editorial is was due to appear a year previously but was delayed due to the death of Bob’s wife: indeed the issue is dedicated to the memory Sadie Shaw.

There’s two Bob Shaw stories in this issue, A Time To Kill and Alien Porn. There’s an interview with Bob Shaw by Helen Wake, Brian Stableford does a review of Shaw’s work and finally there are extracts from Shaw’s non-fiction book How To Write Science Fiction.

The only thing new to me is A Time To Kill, seeing as the other piece of fiction, Alien Porn, is an extract from Warren Peace – which is nicely placed at the middle of the magazine, and therefore has the staples going through it.*

I’m saving A Time To Kill for later on in the week, when I can sit down, read and savour a brand new (to me) Shaw story.

There were a couple of interesting titbits throughout the magazine though. Apparently The Ceres Solution was heavily edited for the UK edition – I’ll have to buy a US version to re read it – and there was hint that a revised edition (‘new, improved version’) of this novel could be released in the UK. That never happened but there’s nothing stopping Gollancz doing it. Bob Shaw himself provided the cartoons for the How To Write Science Fiction section. Also revealed was that the character from Who Goes Here, Warren Peace, was to have appeared in two more novels after Warren Peace. One wonders how far, if at all, Bob Shaw got with these?

I was also able to compare Interzone past and present. Interzone is still going strong, although it doesn’t appear to number issues any more, and is bloody good value for money nowadays considering the cover price of the 1993 issue was £2.50 (put up that very issue) and the cover price for Interzone now is £3.95. I don’t think that’s much of an increase over nearly twenty years.

*You have to read either Warren Peace or the story to understand this reference.

On the whole I find Microsoft products quite competent and usable. I came across Webmatrix quite recently, billed as a simple web page design tool, where websites can be created and published for free. The home page for the application had the Wordpress logo on it so I thought it was worth downloading and having a look. I already have Artisteer, and – now that a few settings have been changed on my servers – installing plugins and updating Wordpress directly is a breeze.

The first red flag for Webmatrix was that you can’t download and install it directly. It has to download a stub and then there are online downloads and installations that happen within another program. Twelve products in all were downloaded and the ‘minutes’ that it was supposed to take was closer to half an hour.

When it was finished dumping software on my hard drive I launched the app and selected the create Wordpress page option, whereupon it told me that MySql wasn’t installed and would I like to install it? I select yes and am presented with a request for username and password. Tip for Microsoft: don’t create and distribute programs that have this level of failure at the ‘create document’ stage.

It was probably the quickest time software was on my computer before being removed. And, of course, all the twelve applications had to be uninstalled one at a time.

Someone should tell Microsoft that installing the Microsoft Web Platform Installer to then install Webmatrix and add ons before installing the latest version of web applications is not simple but is in fact a fairly complicated procedure; particularly in comparison to something like Wordpress which does in fact have a simple five minute install. The database stuff for Wordpress is dealt with before installing Wordpress, not after. Simple fact, if software isn’t usable it wont get used.

I upgraded Artisteer – or, rather, bought a year of updates. It’s up to version three now and had a few new features that looked cool. So I spent the money and downloaded then activated the latest version. It seems a little slower but at least it was able to upload successfully to blogger. The last time I tried that the whole blog went haywire and I had to chose one of the default templates, which I’ve been using ever since. A few clicks in Artisteer and then uploading it and the new template is fine.

I bought a second hand computer with Windows 7 on it – the 64 bit version. I’m not too impressed. I can’t run Virtual PC on it -  well I can but it’s the new version that is integrated into Windows (with no uninstall) which is vastly inferior to the previous standalone version. It wont boot half the Virtual Discs I have and wont install without a fight some of the operating systems I have. I might have to install Sun’s VBox, which worked quite well with most of the old OSs I have.

I also did the usual uninstalling of software not needed to create more space on the hard drive. I came across a shook: Adobe Reader 9 MUI takes up 650 MB of space! For a PDF reader! What are they thinking? Microsoft Works took 750MB; it too was unceremoniously dumped as it’s the new ‘with ads’ version. If I need Works I have plenty of previous versions lying around. The apps taking up a lot of space might be the difference between 32 and 64 bit software but that’s a hell of a lot of space for a limited program such as the Adobe Reader; and considering a word processor, spreadsheet and database suite only took one hundred megabytes more.

The good news is that I was able to register my copy of Microsoft Office 2007 on it. I bought a 3 licence copy a few years ago. I’ve successfully installed and registered four copies, which over about three years is good – even though technically I’m only allowed three installations. There’s probably some leeway within the system; as long as I’m not installing it on hundreds of systems they’ll probably allow a little over the amount.

I bought and read One Who Walks Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis. It’s her reminiscing about the time she spent with Robert E Howard. I’ve been re reading a lot of Howard lately and one of the books I flipped through was the paperback edition (first time in paperback the cover declares) of Dark Valley Destiny by The de Camps and Jane Whittington Griffin. I bought it in the eighties at the Science Fiction Bookshop in Edinburgh and was a little disappointed at it when I first read it. There wasn’t too much available about Howard in the early eighties Scotland and it was like gold dust as far as I was concerned. On first reading it I was perturbed by the constant harping and sniping at Howard’s writing by De Camp: there are constant snipes at the stories Howard wrote, more often than not putting them down. I was puzzled at the time but now I think it was just jealousy on the part of de Camp.

Anyway, apparently Novalyne Price Ellis was angry at the way Howard was portrayed by de Camp and dug out her diaries to set the record straight. The result was the book, also filmed as The Whole Wide World. Another book followed later.

It was a good read but about a third too long for my tastes. I began to loose interest near the end as I felt I was just slogging through it and she was beginning to repeat herself. It did shed a lot of (her) light on Howard and was a good peek into the way they lived their lives in a small Texas town in the thirties.

My didn’t May fly by?

After reading the two Howard books that arrived recently I went back to my collection and dug out some other books by Howard to read. I’ve went through a fair bit. I have an old hard back of Skull Face and Others and dipped in and out of that, along with paperbacks of Solomon Kane stories and other collections. (As an aside I recently saw the film Solomon Kane, released last year or the year before: abysmal, Howard would go on a bloody rampage against the film makers for such drivel.) His stories set in the Crusades are brilliant. A recent 3 for 2 at Waterstone’s had a – shock horror – short story collection among them. Collections of short stories are getting rarer and rarer nowadays: not like the old days when, particularly in Science Fiction, they were ten a penny. I remember I had more Robert Silverberg short story collections than novels from him.

Other recent rediscoveries were playing the guitar. I dug my guitar out and put new strings on it, and then dug out the 8 track recorder. I have an effects pedal somewhere but with the 8 track it’s superfluous.  It’s a Boss CR-600 and a few years old but is still full of surprises as to the amount of things it can do. It’ll take me a while to build up the muscles on my left hand and harden my fingertips again – and get back into making half decent music – but it’s fun playing once more.

Easter weekend and the weather has been so so, which means I can’t get out and cut the grass; the dampness would make it too tricky to cut properly. (That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.)

I have no idea what happened on the laptop but something changed configurations leading to the DVD drive not being recognised, among a few other operating system anomalies.  They were quickly sorted out though - after a few trips to the internet to remind me how to fix them.

I picked up a fair bunch of books at Waterstone’s, including some on special offer plus the usual three for two. The Templars and The Shroud of Christ by Barbara Frale was quite a well written and engaging book but had very little to to with the Templars; indeed it veered off in other directions quite a bit. Even more disappointing is the fact that it wasn’t the full story; the rest is to be in a second book. California by Ray Banks was bought because it was cheap and advertised in a small box as by a local author. It’s a novella – or novelette, could never quite get the distinction between those two – and started off quite well but sort of lost its way and in the end petered out. Entertaining but a disappointing end.

Possession by Peter James must have set a personal record; I decided to stop reading about one and a half pages in. It only cost £2.99 and is over a decade old but failed to set up anything straightaway, or engage my attention, and I stopped at a contradiction on the second page where the writer said it was ‘still dark’ outside whereas he had started the book with a pink dawn. The was a real lack of any explanation in the first page and a bit of where the main character was: if he does that right at the start I’m figuring he’s going to continue doing it.

The good news is that the Pars won the local top of the table derby clash and damn near championship decider on Saturday. They beat Raith Rovers two one and more or less (touch wood) clinched the first division championship and promotion to the silly pillock league. I nearly went to the game but in the end never got round to it. It was a sell out and quite a good game; I listened to it on the radio as Radio Scotland were doing live commentary. So with Kirkcaldy Kuffed it made an enjoyable end to an irritating day.

The computer seems to be fighting back recently. Or at least being a little recalcitrant. I’ve been into emulation quite a lot. I already have Amiga Forever on my laptop, which emulates the Amiga, and still use it quite a bit. I also have MS Virtual PC on the computer for older operating systems and trying out software I’m unsure of before installing it (or not) on the laptop.

Recently I bought some software from eBay and it turned out to be for the Mac and not PC (no response from the seller yet) so I installed a Mac emulator and used the software. That was very weird as I had a Mac emulator running inside an emulated PC. Emulation within emulation.

It’s been yonks since I used Macs; way back in the eighties when they looked much like the average PC – big monitor, box, keyboard – if not behaved like them.

I have some spare copies of old operating systems (PC ones) lying around so I thought I’d create some virtual machines while I was using Virtual PC. I got a shock when the cd for Windows NT 4 exploded in the drive. It broke into three pieces, spitting out one and dislodging the lip of the DVD drive. Luckily it didn’t harm the drive, which still reads CDs and DVDs, and the broken lip was easily clipped back into place. There must have been a crack in the CD or something, but it wasn’t noticeable before I put it in the drive: damn noticeable afterward.

I purchased Project:Messiah (bought three licenses actually) when they ran their Dare to Share promotion. It was a no brainer. A thousand dollar software program for $40 (about thirty odd quid after currency conversion). Duh.

It has tight integration with Lightwave and there are lots of video tutorials helping new users into the program. It is fantastic and I wish I could use it all day every day but my use is limited to a few hours here and there. It is the full animation package, lacking only a detailed modeller. It does setup, animation and rendering, which are very easy to do within the program, although rendering requires a lot of work to get things right. It started off as a plug-in for Lightwave but has since grown into a full package in its own right which is just as broad and varied as Lightwave.

I’ve been able to do a fair few things with Messiah. Although a lot of these same things can be done in Lightwave it seems easier and more pleasurable in Messiah. Morphs are a problem though. It’s tricky to get the facial expressions just right in Lightwave; it’s a lot easier in another program I have, Quidam, and I have considered purchasing an upgrade to Quidam as it does morphs in a new feature in the newest version but their web store is currently unavailable and I’m not able to upgrade at the moment.

I’m getting a bit fed up with Google Reader. Although it saves a lot of time and a lot of surfing it is annoying in that I can’t get rid of some blogs. A few of the blogs I follow either stopped or changed location – and feeds – so I make changes in Google Reader don’t I? The thing is Reader doesn’t want to accept those changes. The blogs I deleted turn up again. Then I move them to another folder and they turn up in the main list again. I’ve tried to get rid of them a few times now and in the end I just gave up. I ignore them whenever I log into Google.

I’m reading and enjoying the two R E Howard books that arrived recently; lots of good stories. I’m also reading a lot of non-fiction (another three for two at Waterstones’ which are building up points on the Waterstones’ card). I also bought Eye In The Sky by P K Dick. I’ve got buckets of his books but never got this one for some reason. Going through the list of books inside Eye in The Sky it seems there are still a few of his novels I still haven’t got or read. Also just got another Neal Asher book, a second hand copy of Cowl. I’ve just finished The Technician by Neal Asher and that was a great book; looking forward to Cowl. Also arrived fresh from the states – finally – is Up The bright River by Philip Jose Farmer.