Last of the Wilds

Last of the Wilds is book 2 in Trudi Canavan’s Age of the Five trilogy. You might recall that although I enjoyed Book I, Priestess of the White, I was somewhat hesitant in recommending it, based on the fact that it was more event driven than character driven.

I’m glad to say that Wilds is a very different kind of book, and something I’m much more at ease recommending. This time out we have characters that do step out of the pages of the book and become real. Events are on a much smaller, more intimate scale: in Priestess there was essentially a world war; in Wilds very little happens that would impact ‘the common man.’ Thanks to the smaller scale, the camera is focused much more tightly on a handful of characters, and several disparate plot lines that weave in and out of each other. To me, this almost defines great fantasy.

Once again there is very little that is black or white, good or evil. Lots of shades of gray. In fact, now that I think about it, there really is no “bad guy” in this book, which makes it even more interesting because there is definitely strife. Everyone seems to be doing what they think is best for the world, and the set up for the third book is quite compelling.

With the change in ton and focus in Wilds I am much more confident in giving the trilogy a thumbs up. I’m looking forward to sinking my teeth into book 3: Voice of the Gods.

Another internet relationship horror story

These pop up every so often, and we’ve all heard them before, to the point it’s become something of a cliche: that hot blooded young thing you fell for online turns out to be an 50-something overweight person of the same sex as you that still lives in his/her mom’s basement.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded, and honestly the stories are always fascinating in a train-wreck sort of way, so here you go, from LA Weekly:
The Life and Death of Jesse James: An internet love mystery

Re-entry

So I’ve been at a new job — a full time gig — for a week now. I have to say, after a year of freelance and making my own hours, the adjustment has been pretty taxing.

There’s a ton of work to be done at the new gig and the org chart is fairly flat, which means lots of people coming at the team with lots of projects. So one of my first challenges is to build, quickly, an organizational system that’ll scale well and be easy to maintain. The company maintains a Basecamp account, but I don’t find that a good tool for an individual to track their tasks in, unless that individual is the only one using the account. It’s just too messy for me.

Right now I’m playing around with Backpack and Vitalist, and I hope to have a post about them not too far in the future, as I decide which one I prefer.

I’ve also picked up Getting Things Done again for a re-read. There’s some delicious irony in the fact that I’ve managed to lose my copy so I had to pop into B&N for a new one. While there I saw that David Allen has a second book out, Ready For Anything, and I picked that up too.

One of the first projects at the new gig has been to build an interstitial ad system, which at first blush seems pretty trivial, but the ‘edge cases’ make it more complex than you might think. By ‘edge cases’ I mean people who refuse first party cookies, who mask referrers, and so forth. I actually built 3 systems, eventually scrapping the first two. I might do a post on how I finally did it.

I’ve been unable to keep up with all my blogs since going full-time, and I really miss being on top of what’s going on in the world of tech. I’m hoping to winnow down my list so I can get back on top of things.

Anyway, haven’t had time to post a thing, and I’ve got some ideas I wanted to capture, so this is both a ‘keep-alive’ post and a note to myself.

Still not sure about NaNoWriMo this year….but I’m leaning towards skipping it.

Vudu

I was reading Paul Stamatiou’s site for TechDispenser yesterday and he posted a review of the Vudu online movie rental service. Something about this gadget has gotten under my skin and I’m on a quest to slay it…enough so that I went back today and posted comments with my concerns.

This isn’t the first time I’ve commented about the unit. I posted this at Jaded’s Pub earlier this month:

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Following up on the discussion we were having in the hi-def movie thread, there’s a new product called Vudu hitting the market soon. It’s a $400 box that has 5000 ‘movie stubs’ pre-loaded onto it. You hook it to the net and and pay per movie to watch. The ‘stub’ will start playing immediately with the rest of the movie downloading in the background, hopefully faster than you’re watching.

The movies aren’t high def, but the unit is supposed to upscale if you have an HDTV. It is capable of high def movies but they’re still negotiating the rights. You need a cable modem or better to use it. DSL isn’t fast enough, they say.

NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/technology/circuits/06pogue.html

You *can* buy the movie for “$15-$20” or rent it from $2-$4 (after which you have 24 hours to watch it).

The rig uses peer-to-peer with other Vudu users. NY Times seems to consider this to be a “cool feature” but to me it’s a drawback. I don’t need my ISP barking at me because I’m uploading huge files to random strangers. And I know when I use bittorrent (at least) it sucks down every byte of bandwidth. Heaven forbid the (internet) phone should ring because I can’t use Vonage and do a P2P bittorrent transfer at the same time.

NY Times seems really bullish on this product. Me, I’m not seeing it. $400 to pay full price for movies that I could play on any of my existing DVD players?
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[source]

I still don’t get it. People think shelling out $400 to buy a piece of hardware that lets you buy more things from the people you bought the hardware from is a good deal? I mean, I get the whole ‘razors and razorblades’ thing, but $400 doesn’t feel like a bargain price for this piece of hardware. They aren’t subsidizing the cost of the thing to get it into your living room. And they’re using the bandwidth you pay for in order to service their other customers!

I really hope this gadget/service flames out, because it sets all sorts of bad precedents.