devoidofreason

Back on LJ

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:08:23 GMT

First post in years ... Trying the LiveJournal app on my iPhone rather than rolling over and going to sleep...

Of books and pies

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 04:47:40 GMT

Pies are good. (Pie. Pie!) I'm having one now ...

So I'm LJing again for the first time in nearly a year. Why's that? Today I logged in to post a comment, and decided, what the hey, I will write something on my own blog too.

Last night, I finished reading Iain Banks' latest book, The Steep Approach to Garbadale (wikipedia). I really liked it, even though one of my dearest friends has dismissed it as sheer tripe. She is the bookpimp, after all.

For me the book blended the wonderful humanity of The Crow Road with the gut-wrenching shock of A Song of Stone. I look forward to whatever he writes next (we're expecting another Culture novel, yay).

There was an interview with Iain Banks in The Australian last weekend, which is worth reading if you want to know a bit more about the man.

In other book news, of late I have been reading the following:

The Steep Approach to Garbadale, by Iain Banks
The Book of Lost Things, by John Connolly
Bad Faith: a Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland, by Carmen Callil
True Evil, by Greg Iles
The Footprints of God, by Greg Iles
The Modern Library: the two hundred best novels in English since 1950, by Carmen Callil and Colm Tóibín
Sleep No More, by Greg Iles
Turning Angel, by Greg Iles
Lucifer's Shadow, by David Hewson
The Sacred Cut, by David Hewson

Hooray for libraries, I say. =)

Bit of a theme there, I admit, with Greg Iles and David Hewson being lucky finds at the local library. I picked up Iles' "Blood Memory" on a whim in the middle of last year and liked it so much - as much as John Connolly's Charlie Parker novels - that I've been steadily reading my way through everything else he's written. He's convinced me that Mississippi is a wonderful place and I have to go there. =) The two Hewson novels have been good too. I'll read more of him as I find it.

"The Modern Library", unfortunately, didn't list anything by Iain Banks, or Neal Stephenson, or Greg Iles, or Neil Gaiman. It did have Nineteen Eighty-Four and Catch-22, which I do at least own and have read. But as you might know (or can maybe guess) I'm more of a genre fic than lit fic kind of person.

In other news, I have a new job - as of mid-November 2006 anyway - so I'm actually nearly four months in. Having a great time, really loving it. Very busy though, not really leaving myself any time for anything else, which is silly. Family deserves more time.

Sat, 20 May 2006 13:13:58 GMT

LibraryThing | Catalog your books online:

Wow. What can I say?

LibraryThing lets you create a free account and catalogue up to 200 books. Become a paid subscriber and add an unlimited number of books. Cool.

Many of us (myself particularly) have had vague thoughts at one time or another of creating some kind of digital catalogue for all the books scattered around the house.

LT lets you do this easily: you enter in your book's title and author, and it tries to find it on Amazon, US Library of Congress (23 million books), etc. So then if it finds your book, you don't need to type all the details in, and you even get a picture of the front cover.

But wait, there's more - you then can see all the other users with the same books as you, and see which books and authors are the most popular (as in they are owned by the most number of people) and are the most highly rated (get best reviews). You can review your books. You can search for books. You can find places to buy books you've always wanted but never found.

Thanks Pete.

[added later]

Oh and by the way, here are the books I've added so far. Pete's collection is bigger. But the biggest catalogue by a single user at the time of writing is "carminowe (8,467 books)" according to the LT Zeitgeist.

Two things to celebrate

Tue, 16 May 2006 08:38:24 GMT

That's right, not one but two things to celebrate today.

It's my birthday. I'm 29. Hooray!
I've been given a job offer, and I've accepted it. Hooray!

We return you now to your regular programming...

Sometimes you just have to say "wtf?!?!?!" ...

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 06:11:58 GMT

Religion of Comic Book Characters (Religion | Comics):

Yes, all those comic book characters you've been admiring the past 60 years or so. People with too much time on their hands have been combing the archives to work out which religion they are (or were) practising.

Ask A Ninja!

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 02:36:59 GMT

Ask A Ninja | You Got Questions, Ninja Got Answers.:

Ok, it's silly. Ninja looks forward to killing you soon! A videoblog of deep and meaningful answers to listener questions by a very genuine and authentic ninja...

Testing "Deepest Sender"

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 01:24:18 GMT

Hi all.

I've found a blog editor called Deepest Sender that's actually a plug-in for Firefox. Kewl.

While browsing in Firefox I can right-click a page and choose "Send to Deepest Sender" and it puts a link in here. Like this other thingy I wanted to share with you.

Google Safe Browsing for Firefox: a plugin for Firefox that warns you when the site you're looking at might be phishing

So far it's told me that my internet banking site is not phishing me. Phew.

This post is dedicated to Alison (msvyvyan) who rightly pointed out that I haven't updated the blog in ages. Well, now that I've got a more convenient way of doing so, I'll probably update it a whole lot more often. =)

[ Deepest Sender has Normal, Source and Preview views of the thing you're writing. It's well wicked. Go get it ... ]

Hmm. It'd be nice if it recognised my earlier LJ posts that were made with different software. It only seems to keep track of the ones done with DS, and probably only the instance of DS on this computer (so if I use it somewhere else, this copy won't know about the article/s I write elsewhere). Feature-request time ...

Go see the other blog for Mac news.

Cats in Sinks

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 14:16:58 GMT

'nuff said.

http://catsinsinks.com/

Konfabulator is free!

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 13:58:11 GMT

At last, some news worthy of a posting. (Or, I've got 10 seconds free, and this is what I wanted to tell you.)

The rather funky cross-platform desktop widget system, Konfabulator, has been bought by Yahoo! (amid predictable booing from parts of the userbase) and is now free rather than shareware. I was so happy that I reinstalled it, and now I am watching the weather on my desktop again. Whee ...

Download version 2.1.1 for Windows or Mac OS X today ...

A Bebo quiz

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 15:13:08 GMT

Hi

I've written a quiz 'How well do you know Andrew?' on Bebo. Click below to answer the questions and see how well you do:

http://www.bebo.com/inviteq/2212889a225171620b

Andrew

Let's see how LiveJournal likes receiving an entry posted from MacJournal

Sat, 23 Jul 2005 13:06:40 GMT

Hopefully it'll work real good.

MacJournal 2.6.1 is a big step up from the last version that I was using, version 2.1 back in 2002. (Eeek.) I mean, now I can have links in my entries! This is very exciting.

I assume that if I enter my LiveJournal details in, it gets remembered next time, but I dunno. Might need to log into LiveJournal afterwards and tweak the posting ...

fp!

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 15:47:08 GMT

Yup, first post.

*yawn*

Ev'ryone else has got LiveJournals, has had for ages, so why have I got one? So I can have a different blog I guess. And because it's something different. And let's admit it, it's a distraction from the tax return.