Book 23 and 24: Uglies and Pretties

S has had these books for a while, and hasn’t gotten around to reading them. I’d seen some good reviews, but had largely delegated them to the “books for teenage girls” category. We audio books for S for our trip to New Jersey, so when I drove down to Florida a few weeks ago, I listened to them to pass the time – Uglies on the way down and Pretties on the way back.

They are post-apocalyptic dystopian kinds of books, both criticizing the way we live now, as well as presenting an even worse, Brave New World mixed with 1984 kind of future. Brilliant. I’m really looking forward to finishing Specials, which we started on the way back.

Book 22: Warriors: Into The Wild

Z has been bugging me for some time to read Warriors: Into The Wild, and I have been avoiding it because I rather assumed it was rubbish. Or, at best, that it was aimed squarely at 10-year-old boys, and I would find it tedious and silly.

It took forever to get started, but the setup was worth the wait. Also, this book was the setup for an enormous series, so presumably a lot of setup was required. Anyways, by the end, I was starting to care about the characters, and will probably read the next book in the series.

The concept is that a house cat joins one of the forest clans of wild cats and becomes one of them. However the “ignorant outsider as excuse to explain stuff” technique is not overused, and you’re mostly allowed to learn about things by watching, rather than by being lectured by the other characters. (See: Harry Potter.)

While it will likely be a while before I get around to it (my list is long, and growing) I will almost surely read the next book in the series at some point.

OSX Lion: Different

I upgraded to OSX Lion yesterday. So far, it’s different. Not better or worse. Just different.

Of course, I could argue that this makes it worse, in that I have to unlearn old habits and learn new ones, and there’s certainly some of that.

I’ve read through the marketing hype, but I can’t figure out anything that’s actually *better*. I’m sure there’s something, but it’s not evident. Frustratingly, I felt the same way with Snow Leopard. Things were just different, but nothing was innovative, or even really improved.

It appears that Apple is focusing their geniuses on their mobile platform, and the desktop OS gets a little bit of a paint job now and then.

Book 21 – Tess of the D’Urbervilles

I finished Tess of the D’Urbervilles several weeks ago and have been thrashing around since then trying to start something else. I’ve started several books – Barchester Towers, The Bourne Identity, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and now Jude the Obscure – and just not felt that they were worth the time to finish.

Anyways, Tess made me angry pretty much the whole way through. I presume that this was Hardy’s intent – to get me outraged about injustice. The way that everyone in the story accepts the injustice as though it was the right and proper thing was very irritating.

I think I like Dickens’ way of calling out injustice with caustic sarcasm over this style of writing about it as though it is proper, and thus making me angry both at the injustice and the author. I wonder, however, how folks at the time received it. I expect that large parts of the audience missed his point entirely, and thought it was merely an inoffensive story.

Book 20 – Tower of Glass

I read Tower of Glass with my Beloved, and it took a long time, as the baby seldom lets us read for very long at a time any more. Borrowing heavily from themes in Brave New World, this book tells of a story where all the menial labor is done by androids, of the egotistical man who invented them, and of the religion that they form around him.

Fascinating, and very thought provoking, particularly if you accept the notion that we could one day create cloned humans.

This was recommended by @stevestoneky, one morning at the bus stop.

Book 19 – A Prayer for Owen Meany

It’s actually been a few weeks since I finished A Prayer for Owen Meany. It was loaned to us almost a year ago, and it took me a while to get around to it. I had previously attempted to read Cider House Rules, and it didn’t really catch my attention. But Owen Meany had me hooked almost from the start.

Set in the Vietnam war era, and in the years just before and after, it tells the story of two young friends as they grow up together in a small town.

I found the heavy-handed use of foreshadowing and leaping back and forth in time to be a little much, but it turned out to be the hook everything hung on, so it’s worth putting up with. The story is great, and the characters are enjoyable and believable.

Apparently there’s been a movie loosely based on the book, but from what I can tell (I haven’t see it) it leaves out the parts of the story that I found the most interesting.

Mother Jane

This evening was simply amazing.

Mother Jane

We went to dinner at the pub, which is always lovely. When we got home, I was going to get in the pool for a while, so headed out to the back yard …

where I found one of my favorite bands, Mother Jane, set up on the deck, ready to play.

Really.

And when I say that they’re one of my favorite bands, it’s not just because they happen to live down the street from us. My wife can attest to the fact that I listen to them all day, a couple days a week, and have all their CDs.

And there they were, sitting there ready to get started, as I was heading out for a dip in the pool.

They just left. I guess they played for over two hours, playing all of my favorites.

My neighbors are amazing, and my wife is even more amazing.

If you haven’t heard Mother Jane, you should listen to their stuff. I’d love for them to sell a million albums and be able to just retire and sit around and enjoy the grass, which is always greener in their yard.

Write A Better Talk

I just got done giving my Write A Better FM talk at Tek11, and I’m really pleased with how it was received. On the one hand, I feel like I was, at least a little, preaching to the choir, but I think I also got through to some people who had some of the same questions that I’ve thought about over the last 15 years.

I feel like my thoughts on the topic are still a little scattered, but putting together this talk solidified them quite a bit for me, and I think I might go back to working on the book just as soon as I finish the Apache book project I’m working.

If you’re interested in the topic of open source documentation, technical documentation in general, technical customer support, or any of those related topics, I’d very much like to hear from you, particularly if you 1) have a significant amount of experience in technical support and 2) are interested in collaborating with the book.

I realized, several times, mid-sentence, that I was being very harsh to one particular person or project, and backed off, but I think for the most part I am very pleased with how the talk went. I only regret that I wasn’t able to find my Flip before I left home. I would really like to have recorded it.

Lights out!

I posted this earlier, but it was lost in the ether … somewhere.

Before lunch I gave my “N Things You Didn’t Know About Apache HTTPD” talk at Tek11. This is a talk that I’ve done before but which gets large parts of it rewritten every time I give it, based on what new features are most in my mind lately. N is currently 29, which is actually quite a bit more than I can reasonably cover in an hour.

About three items into the talk, the power went out. The Chicago area has had terrible weather this week, as has the rest of the country, and this was a pretty wide-spread outage. I just kept going. I’ve tried to design my presentations so that my slide deck is really just prompt cards for me, and a few useful examples or funny pictures. The audience was very kind, and some of them followed along with my slides that they had already downloaded.

I don’t know how long Twitpics keeps images, but here’s a picture of folks following along in the glow of their laptops.

My favorite tweets about this are: 1, 2, 3.

I was very impressed with how the hotel and conference planners handled the outage. By early in the next hour, they had run extension cords from generators to the projectors, and did this with very little disruption. Kudos to Cal, Marco, and Ardi, and whoever else was involved in this. I’m always impressed with the professionalism of this conference, but today more than ever before.

Tragedies

It’s been a long time since I’ve written something for the Three Word Wednesday site. I’m sitting in Bluegrass Airport, STILL waiting for my flight to Tek11.

Tragedies

May 24, 2011

Out in the waiting area,
my flight delayed yet another two hours,
the television tells us,
unrelentingly,
of a mother accused of killing her
angelic daughter.

She stands under the barrage of accusations,
evidence,
and the hateful stares of a hundred million watchers,
as her stupidity is framed as malice,
and her malice framed as tragic mistakes.

Too much tragedy.

A beautiful girl,
the same age as the long-gone victim,
cavorts among the chairs
shrieking gleefully.

Three boys,
just boys,
can’t be more than 15 – although I suppose
they must be, since they carry
camo bags with their name on them
and combat boots and official-looking envelopes –
sit hunched quietly in their seats,
stoically staring into their
all-too-certain future.

In the bar,
the only drama is the unexpected
upset of John Isner
and, more immediately,
what flavor I’ll choose for my chicken wings.

Back at the gate,
the trial continues.
The young former mother stands,
silent,
endures the caustic words,
her attorney sacrifices her dignity
in exchange for her freedom,
saying, yes, she’s a terrible mother
but not a
killer.

The tears roll
down her cheeks.

The press calls her a crocodile
and practically glows with excitement
at her tragedy.

The Margin Is Too Narrow