Useful / cute googling

Inspired by a Coding Horror post. Things that I would demo to an “Intro to IT” class if I teach one again.

I don’t think you can get directly to NZE listings (i.e. “NZE:AIR” doesn’t work like “GOOG”) – you have to go via google.com/finance. I don’t think UPC codes are used here, either. Looking up a VIN number would be great, but I’m guessing that doesn’t work, and can’t be bothered going and reading my VIN at the moment).

“Santiago” (Mike Resnick)

This was in the collection of second-hand books that I bought a few years back, and which form the bulk of my unread stack. To be honest, I wasn’t really expecting much, judging by the age and the cover (yes, I know the cliché, but without the cover, what’s left to judge by?).

However, I really enjoyed this novel, and thoroughly recommend it. It’s a fairly typical setting, but there are interesting characters, especially the central character and the title character. I quite enjoyed the way that the focus changes from section to section. I also felt that it ended reasonably well – it wasn’t a super obvious ending, although it wasn’t a surprise either.

“The Healer’s War” (Elizabeth Ann Scarborough)

I wonder if stories about Vietnam are only of interest to Americans. I certainly can’t recall any that have been interesting to me. This started out reasonably promising, but trailed off into a rather dull story that didn’t go anywhere. Characters come and go, and none are particularly captivating. Can’t really recommend this one.

“The Return of Santiago” (Mike Resnick)

I really enjoyed “Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future”, so I was quite hopeful about this sequel. However, while this was a good story, this wasn’t great. It was pretty obvious how it would turn out all along, and the characters weren’t as interesting as in the original Santiago story.

I would still recommend reading it, but definitely check out the previous Santiago book first (especially since the sequel has spoilers for the first book).

Back to the short reviews/comments: that’s it!

“The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch” (Pratchett, Stewart & Cohen)

I really liked the first Science of Discworld, and enjoyed the second as well. I’ve always liked the idea of mashing up educational material and fiction – here it’s loosely interspersed (odd chapters are lightly educational, even chapters are a related Discworld story), and I thought these were fairly well done.

This one, however, wasn’t that interesting. I chose to read it now because of the Darwin anniversary stuff that was hot recently, so it seemed somewhat relevant. The history was interesting, but the science wasn’t really. The Discworld story was ok, but that part of the Science books has never been stellar (certainly not as good as a regular Discworld novel).

It was good enough that I’d still check out a Science of Discworld IV, but I’m not hanging out for it or anything.

ta-meyer@ihug.co.nz, t-meyer@ihug.co.nz, tameyer@ihug.co.nz

I was ihug customer #377024, and signed up 20 Aug 1997. However, as of a couple of years ago, I wasn’t actively using my account (they finally made me angry enough to switch to someone else). I kept the account alive to keep these email addresses – in particular ta-meyer@ihug.co.nz had been active since 1997, which was when I really started using the wider Internet (access from Mum and Dad’s in Whangarei previously was extremely expensive, so I didn’t really do that much). It wasn’t my first email address, but it was the one I had for the longest time, and so was spread about all over the place.

I occasionally used the Ihug (now Vodafone) account as an emergency backup, but the cost didn’t really justify that. I’ve monitored the email coming in for a while, and have moved/unsubscribed most of it. Some of the rest I can’t unsubscribe to (or can’t easily), so will just have to bounce, because as of today, I’m killing these accounts.

As an aside: I would happily pay something less than $5 a month to keep these accounts indefinitely, with some sort of low bandwidth cap (e.g. 50MB/month), which would easily cover the negligible expenses that Vodafone incurs for hosting them. I just don’t want a full account. However, they don’t offer that, so I’ll never use an ISP’s email account again (I haven’t since these).

For now, if you need me and found this page, please use tony.meyer@gmail.com (using an ESP address is only a bit better than an ISP’s, but gmail is likely to be around for a while IMO). You could use tony@tangomu.com or tony@badtomatoes.org if you’d prefer something that was wholly mine (but I don’t get a lot of mail there, so check them less often).

Goodbye ihug.

Graceling (Kristin Cashore)

Olyvia purchased this on my behalf – I had been given a voucher for Dymocks, which is a terrible choice, because there are so few Dymocks stores, and they are so far away from anywhere I go. Time passed, and eventually reached the point where I one day to spend the voucher or lose it – losing it seemed a terrible waste, so Olyvia offered to go to Dymocks and purchase a book – basically she read out names over the phone until finding something I didn’t own. I had never heard of Kristin Cashore before, and I like finding new authors, so it sounded fine to me.

I was more skeptical when Olyvia arrived home with the book. For a start, it was a softcover edition, which I particularly dislike (I like paperback, because it’s comfortable to read, and I like hardback, because it looks nice and ages well, but softcover has none of the advantages and many of the disadvantages). In addition, the cover is terrible – it has a moderately attractive women in light armour holding a sword – it looks like a bad book trying to attract teen readers.

However, once I got around to reading it, I was pleasantly surprised. The ‘magic’ of the world is that some people have extreme talents – rather than just being really good at something, they are ‘magically’ good at it. In a really nice touch, the talent might be anything, even the mediocre (it reminded me of the heroes with mediocre talents in Lafferty‘s Playing for Keeps). Although the central characters have talents that are far more impressive, the general way that ‘graces’ were developed was very enjoyable.

The central characters, Katsa and Po, were both well developed, and enjoyable to read. The antagonist was a little weak – we never really get to know him, so there’s less at stake than with a more developed villain. However, his ability was suitably impressive, and his lack didn’t detract from the story’s other strengths too much.

(Minor spoiler alert). I did feel that the book ended rather suddenly – although it was obvious that it was getting close to the end (there weren’t many pages to turn), the story only seemed part-way through. I was really expecting a partial conclusion with a sequel (or two) to finish the story off – although this is probably partly due to the ubiquity of trilogies within the genre). However, with only a small number of pages to go, the story is completely resolved. Although it ended cleanly and it did create a real echo of surprise to match the character’s surprise, it still felt quite rushed.

In general, this felt like a really good story by a slightly inexperienced writer. I think someone with more experience would have been able to flesh out the antagonist more and create a less rushed ending – although these would probably both have meant a longer book. The story changes a little abruptly about a third of the way through, and I think a more experienced writer would have tied the parts together a little better as well.

Overall, it was a very enjoyable read (it’s unfortunate that the publisher didn’t find a better cover artist), and I highly recommend reading it. I hope to read more from Cashore in the future, and expect that later novels will have more polish than this one, while hopefully retaining the originality and great character development found here.

Foxmask (Juliet Marillier)

This is the sequel to Wolfskin – to understand the relationships that underlay the characters, it would certainly be best to have read Wolfskin first, although this is a standalone story, not part two of two (or three), which is certainly refreshing. I purchased this at the same time as Wolfskin, so I wasn’t then aware that I’d love that book so much. By the time I got to reading Foxmask, though, I had reasonably high hopes for anything from Marillier.

Although I enjoyed Foxmask, it wasn’t quite as fantastic as Wolfskin. The basic story has a lot of promise, mostly as a result of the earlier book – Somerled, the antagonist from Wolfskin, was so clearly the villain of the piece, but also clearly had the potential for redemption. Here, we can find out whether he did manage to redeem himself – but Marillier made the sensible decision to place the story a little later in time, so that although the story answers that question, it’s not actually the central focus of the story. That means that Foxmask is more of a standalone story than a direct sequel, which is a benefit, in my opinion.

Although Thorvald, Sam, and Creidhe are interesting characters, I was never as drawn to them as the Wolfskin characters – and the antagonist of Foxmask is far more on the black side of grey than Somerled ever was, which makes him a lot less interesting. You can see how he might have made the decisions that he did, but they are still more evil.

The weakest part of the book was the character Keeper. For some reason, I was never interested or attracted to this character, and that made it harder to understand the relationships that he formed with the other characters. The strongest part was the development of Thorvald’s character, particularly the leadership development with the other men of the island.

The magic in Foxmask is a little more overt than that of Wolfskin, which also detracts slightly from the story. It’s also a little darker in some ways (although there’s probably less death, the reader knows the characters that die or suffer better, so they are more intense).

Overall, however, this is still an excellent novel. If this was the first Marillier novel I read, I’m not sure I would be so eager to seek out more of her work – probably I would just hope to remember to buy one next time I see it, rather than actively looking for it, but I absolutely recommend reading it, especially since it wraps up the Wolfskin story a little more.

Wolfskin (Juliet Marillier)

The main reason that I bought Wolfskin was because I noticed that Marillier was a New Zealander (or at least was born here, although she lives in Australia now), and there’s not really very many NZ sci-fi/fantasy authors or books, and I’d like to support the locals as much as possible. (As an aside, my favourite NZ book is Beak of the Moon, by Philip Temple, also of Dunedin).

So I wasn’t really expecting that much – it wasn’t quite charity, but I would have been happy with a pretty mediocre story. However, I really loved this book. I’m not sure why so many fantasy authors feel the need to set their stories in/around the UK, but it’s so common that it didn’t really bother me here.

The characters in Wolfskin were excellently developed, and a pleasure to get to know. The antagonist was nicely grey – although you really could despise what he did, you could also understand his motivation for the most part. The magic was pleasingly subtle, and the battles sufficiently short.

One minor note that bothered me (minor spoiler alert): early in the book, a girl is attacked, and the attacker isn’t identified. The implication is that it’s the antagonist, Somerled. The way the scenes were written, it seemed likely to me that it would turn out to not have been (directly) Somerled at all, but rather the girl’s friend, led to a bad decision by listening to Somerled (so he was at fault, but only indirectly). Even later in the story, when the friend is re-encountered, nothing in the events seemed to contradict this theory. However, the book ends without coming back to it, so I suppose that we’re meant to just believe that it was Somerled who did the attack. I think it would have suited Somerled’s character, and improved the story, if we had discovered that it wasn’t directly his fault.

The story ends well, with the story nicely resolved, and although there’s clearly a hook left for a sequel, it’s subtle enough that the ending is satisfying and yet the hook doesn’t seem like the only purpose for that element is the sequel.

Overall I highly recommend reading Wolfskin, and intend to keep an eye out for anything else that Marillier produces.

Fallout (Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Deason)

I quite enjoyed this (a lot more than I enjoyed Resurrection Inc.). This is really a pretty straight-forward action/adventure style story (the same sort of story as, e.g., 24). I read a few stories along these general lines (e.g. the Dan Brown books) over the second half of 2008, and they were a nice break (I read more in this genre a long time back), although nothing was mind-blowingly great.

I gathered that Fallout continues the story of characters from an earlier story (Virtual Destruction), but not having read that didn’t effect my enjoyment of this at all – as far as I can tell, the story is completely standalone.

The plot was a little predictable – it wasn’t hard to guess who the villains would turn out to be, but the mystery wasn’t really the appeal of the book, and the characters were likable enough.

Overall, well worth a read.