It’s funny to think that I was hired on April 1 for my current job. I keep seeing “congrats on X” anniversary emails go out, and I can only imagine what my 1 year anniversary email will look like.
“Congratulations on your 1 year anniversary, April Fools!”
BUG0415 Invalid software trunk state detected. Far-end ONHOOK simulated. TN, TRUNKPM, *(CRPTR). Procedure TRUNKS
A good critic of any book always includes “I couldn’t put the book down” and this was definitely one of those books. Although from pre-reviews of the book, I got the impression that like book 1, we were to see some kind of reference to the days before Safehold, it turns out that no such references were actually included. While not horrible, I think it best if fans of the series know this going in to the book. There was a bit of disappointment on my part with the “missing chapters” flashing back to the fight with the Gbabba. However, in the end, I think the story worked brilliantly.
Unlike in book one of this series, female characters play a more central role in the story, which I think is a good thing. The lack of female characters in even secondary role was noteworthy in the first book, with the exception of one character. What’s even better is that women are portrayed in a variety of ways, but most are strong in both personality and ethics, while some are just background. I felt it brought a bit of balance to the second book that was noticably lacking in the first. (Never mind that the primary character of the story is a PICA, or human looking android, filled with the consciousness of a long dead female soldier.)
The one thing that I’m not really happy with, well… two things: One is that the book ends rather abruptly, as if it was the only place the author could find to break up a far larger story in to two sections. So the second book is not so much stand alone as the first book had been, and you’re left with something of a cliff hanger. The other thing I don’t like is that since the entire book ends after less than a year transpired in the story (half of what took place within the first story) it seems as though the entire story will be limited to only what happens within the lifetime of the co-primary characters in the story.
To me, this leaves a huge burning question of “what happens when humanity returns to the stars and faces the Gbabba again?” And quite frankly, I think that question is going to burn a hole right through me. Don’t get me wrong, I think this story is an immesurably important tale within the history of the larger conflict, but with such a huge story element hanging over the plot, without a proper resolution (and I don’t mean epilogue quickly wrapping up a much larger story by doing a flash forward to the end of the Gbabba-Human conflict, or even somewhere in the middle of that future conflict implying human victory) I’m going to be left wanting more.
Although, that certainly leaves room for a complete story within the current timeframe of the fictional universe and a completely new trilogy for the completion of that future story ark. And that leaves me very hopeful indeed. As much as I’d love another Honor Harrington book, I feel that Weber has successfully created another fictional universe in which I care what happens to the characters that populate his story.
If only the 3rd book was due out soon!
***** (5/5) stars
Thanks to Lester Chan for highlighting the config settings for turning off revisioning and for modifying the autosave feature. It appears that these two are closely linked. Useful for my personal blog since there is only one editor here. Not as useful for the corporate blog I manage for my employer, since there are multiple editors. Still, they may want to reduce the frequency of auto saves at some point in the future, and it’ll be good to have those notes here to look back on.
One of the irritating feature for me in WordPress 2.6 is the post revision. I am the only author of my blog and hence this feature is useless to me.
Just in case you are wondering how post revision works, whenever a post is auto saved or edited, a new row will be created in wp_posts table. Hence if WordPress auto saved 10 times, you will have 10 new rows in wp_posts table.
In no time your wp_posts table will be filled up and the post ID will be huge.
To turn off this feature, add this following code to wp-config.php:
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);
To change the timing (in seconds) WordPress auto saves a post, add this following code to wp-config.php:
define(‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’, 60);
You can also delete all post revisions by running this query in phpMyAdmin:
DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = ‘revision’;
Be sure to backup your database first before performing any queries in phpMyAdmin.
Just discovered that Flagship studious lost all of it’s intellectual property to it’s creditors, no more Flagship, no more Hellgate. ah well.
For those of you who (like me) are interested in following the latest from the upcoming Terminator 4 movie, they have a blog for it over at Warner Bros website. I like RSS feeds, and so should you.
PS, notepads are the original microblog.
I’m not a huge WW fan, but I’ve seen a few humorous and enlightening comments from him from time to time. Every once in a while I’ll run across someone who follows him regularly, after which I’ll catch up on what good ol’ Wesley Crusher is up to these days and then lose interest again.
Wil had this to say in his article entitled ‘the ghosts in the machine‘, which is largely about spammers and reminiscing about how those of us (myself included) who pre-date the Internet and remembered the days of GEnie and Compuserv (and let’s not forget Gopher and Finger, pre-HTML protocols):
Think of this another way: if we don’t help people understand how to protect themselves from spammers and phishers, how can we expect them to understand the importance of network neutrality?
And you have to give it to him, he’s god a point.
Strong female lead. Felt a little unhurried and cavalier through most of the story and then wrapped up with an intense, almost hurried, climactic scene. Thankfully the author handled the topic as sensitively as possible and with the judicious use of deus ex machina explanations we get to the end of the book with our sense of belief still intact.
Iron Kissed by Patricia Briggs
Like another series with a similarly strong female lead, I enjoy the mix of plot and personal relationship exploration. Unlike the other series, I am much happier with the way this author addresses the topic of… let’s say “intimacy.” (The somewhat archaic “fade to black” with some good hints “the next day” about what happened the previous night.)
This is the third book in the Mercy Thompson series of books, a series of paranormal mystery. If you like Jim Butcher’s Dresdel Files, I think you’ll love this.
**** (4/5) stars.
Since I’m migrating content from one wordpress blog to another for the purposes of playing with the wordpress themes (trying to create a theme that I like), I learned a bit about the database along the way. Like the fact that there are values within the database that point to the database table prefix used when you first set up the database. If you change that prefix (to say host two copies of the same blog in two locations so that you can do dev work on the second version), then suddenly you’re “locked out.”
I found a nice article that helped me understand what was going on.
Thank you, kudos are due.
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