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 Monday 31 December 2007

Monday - New Years Eve. My resolution - more sailing!


Over the Christmas holiday I finished two more books.

Book #63 was David Weber's Off Armageddon Reef. Pretty typical Weber characterization and plot. Fun but forgettable. His good guys are hero's, his bad guys are villains. Every once in a while a little non-space-opera characterization creeps in, but not much.

Book #64 was Robin Knox-Johnston's A World Of My Own. R K-J was the first person to sail around the world, non-stop, alone, in a small boat. And by small we mean a full-keel 35 foot wooden ketch. The book is a bit bloodless, but interesting. It was his first effort at writing and while not a literary gem gets the story told. He won by - surprise, surprise - perseverance. There were people with bigger boats, people with better boats, people who started earlier and who were better yachtsmen (though R K-J was himself a professional merchant officer). Despite a shoe-string budget, limited equipment and a plethora of breakages in the Great Southern Sea he stuck to it - and won the 1968 Golden Globe race.

The comments in the link at Amazon are interesting. Some are just wrong - he had a suit of new sails, for instance, but wore them out. Some don't understand how often and how common mistakes are at sea, and fault him for that. I would suggest these people sail a few thousand miles exhausted and alone in the Great Southern Ocean before judging quite so harshly. Some would have preferred that the romantic and sensitive Frenchman, Moiteissor, won - but M would have had to had the gumption to finish, first. Perseverance, perseverance, perseverance.

And some just don't understand that Englishmen - and Englishwoman - drink like fish. Especially at sea.

Finishing up then, we have:

The Year In Books, 2007
#1 The Island at the Center of the World*
#2 Enders Game*
#3 Constructional Steelwork Simply Explained
#4 Riding the Bullet*
#5 Sea Change* 		#6 Dykstra's War,
#7 Six Frigates*
#8 The Green and the Gray
#9 The Hills is Lonely*
#10 Hell's Gate
#11 The Voyage of Kristina
#12 Wyrms
#13 The Worthing Saga
#14 Expiration Date
#15 John Paul Jones* 		#16 Dinner at Deviant's Palace
#17 By the Wind
#18 Skeletons on the Zahara*
#19 Blue Gold*
#20 The Androids Dream
#21 Some Golden Harbor
#22 Beautiful Just
#23 Godforsaken Sea
#24, The Professor and the Madman*
#25, Thomas Jefferson		 #26 Earthquake Weather
#27 Killers Wake
#28 Desolation Island*
#29 Academia Nuts
#30 Sorcery and Cecelia
#31 Rainbows End
#32 The End,A Series of Unfortunate Events, Volume 13
#33: Building Harlequin's Moon
#34, Undaunted Courage*
#35 The Presidents House*		 #36, Rocket Boys*
#37 The Ghost Brigades
#38 The Fortune of War*,
#39 The Wallet of Kai Lung
#40 Xena and the Magic Arrow of Myx
#41 The Map That Changed the World*
#42 The Machine's Child
#43 Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War*
#44 Dark Chant in a Crimson Key
#45 In the House of Secret Enemies		 #46 Airship: The Story of the R.34 
#47 The Death-Bringers*
#48 Outerbridge Reach*
#49 Nightlife
#50 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
#51 Lindbergh*,
#52 A Crack In the Edge of the World*
#53 The Elysium Commission
#54 In The Company of Soldiers*
#55 Dzur		 #56 John Adams*
#57 Sandworms of Dune
#58 Mr. Monday (TK2K, Book 1)
#59 Grim Tuesday (TK2K, Book 2)
#60 Drowned Wednesday (TK2K, Book 3)
#61 Lady Friday (TK2K, Book 5)
#62 Cyclops*
#63 Off Armageddon Reef.
#64  A World Of My Own.


Statistically:
x
Books read this year, by category


Fiction comes out at about 50%, but this is a bit deceiving. I read a lot more non-fiction than this tabulation suggests, but in general I didn't read things like The ACCESS 2000 SuperBible or VBScript Unleashed! all the way through, so they aren't listed here. Papers about Aeroelasticity and CFD and SBIR proposals - not here. Online pamphlets about sheet pile dam design and drainage structure design didn't make the cut as well. White papers on dynamic IP addressing are and chapters on Linux Server setup are absent. Blogs don't count. So it goes.

The categories were fairly arbitrary...
History-General (8/64)=12.5% :
#1 The Island at the Center of the World*
#18 Skeletons on the Zahara*
#34, Undaunted Courage*
#35 The Presidents House*
#43 Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War*
#46 Airship: The Story of the R.34
#52 A Crack In the Edge of the World*
#54 In The Company of Soldiers*

History-Naval (1/64=1.5%)
#7 Six Frigates*

Biography-General (8/64)=12.5% :
#9 The Hills is Lonely*
#24, The Professor and the Madman*
#25, Thomas Jefferson
#22 Beautiful Just
#36, Rocket Boys*
#41 The Map That Changed the World*
#56 John Adams*
#51 Lindbergh*

Biography-Naval (6/64)=9.4% :
#5 Sea Change*
#11 The Voyage of Kristina
#15 John Paul Jones*
#17 By the Wind
#23 Godforsaken Sea
#64  A World Of My Own.

Science-Fiction (24/64)=25% :
#6 Dykstra's War,
#8 The Green and the Gray
#10 Hell's Gate
#2 Enders Game*
#12 Wyrms
#13 The Worthing Saga
#14 Expiration Date
#20 The Androids Dream
#16 Dinner at Deviant's Palace
#26 Earthquake Weather
#30 Sorcery and Cecelia
#31 Rainbows End
#33: Building Harlequin's Moon
#40 Xena and the Magic Arrow of Myx
#37 The Ghost Brigades
#42 The Machine's Child
#57 Sandworms of Dune
#58 Mr. Monday (TK2K, Book 1)
#59 Grim Tuesday (TK2K, Book 2)
#60 Drowned Wednesday (TK2K, Book 3)
#61 Lady Friday (TK2K, Book 5)
#63 Off Armageddon Reef.
#55 Dzur
#21 Some Golden Harbor

Fiction-General (12/64)=18.8% :
#4 Riding the Bullet*
#19 Blue Gold*
#32 The End,A Series of Unfortunate Events, Volume 13
#29 Academia Nuts
#39 The Wallet of Kai Lung
#44 Dark Chant in a Crimson Key
#45 In the House of Secret Enemies
#49 Nightlife
#50 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
#62 Cyclops*
#53 The Elysium Commission
#47 The Death-Bringers*

Fiction-Naval (4/64)=6.25% :
#27 Killers Wake
#28 Desolation Island*
#38 The Fortune of War*,
#48 Outerbridge Reach*

Non-fiction (1/64)=1.5% :
#3 Constructional Steelwork Simply Explained


Previously, and no, I don't feel like tabulating them right now:

The Year in Books, 2006 (53)
The Year in Books, 2005 (50)

Sunday 30 December 2007

Sunday - on the road, back to Lancaster.

There was a fair amount of traffic, but not quite to the mysterious-slowdown level. Typical traffic for a holiday weekend and a lot better than I had expected.

I listened to the 49ers'-Browns game on AM radio down the valley. Dad took the 'Niners so I had the Browns. And won back a quarter. So I called him, gloated a bit and put another quarter on the Raiders opponents, and the Chargers' came through for me!

Even for the weekend, heh.

I came the back way down to Lancaster, down the I-5 and then across to Bakersfield and through Mojave, because I wanted to visit some friends in Tehachapi. Sadly they were out when I passed through - visiting in Lancaster. But their shopping took longer than they expected so we were able to meet up for a couple of hours at my house in the evening. Their boy J is now two - and all boy. The new baby A is cute, and, to her parent's delight only needs to be fed once a night :-)

Saturday 29 December 2007
Saturday - those NY Giants. So close, so close. What a great game, played well by both sides. But I ended up forking over fifty cents to my Dad. Bah.

The conversation afterwards:

Dad: The loser should dish out some of that pumpkin pie.
Me: I think that as a gesture of good sportsmanship the winner should dish it out.
Dad: How come the loser at half-time had to make the hamburger sandwiches?
Me: That's different.

Nonetheless, being naturally big-hearted I dished out the pie. With Cool Whip. And ignored the peevish and unfounded complaints about the relative sizes of the pie slices...


So, I was  looking at the blog this morning and noted that something wasn't right. It took me a while to figure it out - I had the year ending with December 30, but the calendar said December 31. On careful inspection I discovered Saturday was missing. This is because I fouled up at the beginning of the week when using cut-and-paste to make this current week's page a bit longer, nine days rather than seven.

It's remarkable how often cut-and-paste can cause mistakes. I've done stupid things in Word, Excel, VI, and now HTML. So it goes. It's the price for speeding up things a bit.

It is fixed now, but all week it looked like this:

x

Friday 28 December 2007

Friday -  my sister and brother-in-law made it down from Reno for a belated gift exchange. It was cold and snowing they said, through the mountains. Oddly they didn't take the Subaru 4wd, perhaps they are accustomed to driving in icy conditions now?


Update: My Christmas present, from my sister, was a pair of active noise cancellation headphones, the Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7. Very nice - they work great. Indeed, I laughed aloud when I first turned them on, suddenly the sound from the dishwashing machine in the next room vanished.

They work great on Youtube, music videos online, MP3's from audio books, I haven't yet tried them on an audio CD, because I have none with me.

Thursday 27 December  2007

Thursday - ah, rain again. Well, the state needs it and it came late in the day, so it's all to the good.


The end of the year should be a time for taking stock of a life and circumstances: we are out of pumpkin pie, again.


My brother received a Slingbox for Christmas. We managed to get it installed and working, that's good. I didn't have to go so far as to install thttpd, but some of the stuff I recalled from working with the IP address re-direction for a server, earlier this year, came in handy when the online manual failed to work for us.


So, a friend asked for suggestions on what sort of computer programming their kid should learn. Oh boy, that's a question. He likes games, so Darkbasic came to mind immediately. But is it right to teach a non object oriented language to a kid? Personally I use FORTRAN, but that's not going to do anything for him. Then I saw a link to LOGO, which is pretty cool too. JAVA is pretty neat. And what about things like Conways Game of Life or the Mandlebort Set - it's not really programming, but it's using computers as tools to explore the world of math and logic?

I have the urge to try to teach everything I've learned, from Ohms law and  transistors to flip flops to counters to cpus to interpreters to compilers to assembly and the VGA graphics palette programming and OpenGL  - and that's just silly. It's a mish mash of partially digested and mostly forgotten stuff that I found interesting once upon a time.

What's best for the student?

Wednesday 26 December 2007

Wednesday -  Merry Day after Christmas.

Tuesday 25 December 2007

Tuesday - Merry Christmas to all.

We had a nice Christmas here. Some of the family were unable to make it, but those of us that did had a nice day. Indeed my sister and brother went down to the marina and walked about, enjoying the sunshine.

I cooked the ham - it took longer to warm up than I thought, and we had a nice Christmas dinner.

 Monday 24 December 2007

Monday - Christmas Eve.

Sunday 23 December 2007

Sunday - there is always more to do than you expect. None the less, it has to be done. That said, yes, I started late for NorCal, but arrived safe and sound despite somewhat heavier traffic that I had thought would be present.

My assumption had been that given Friday and Saturday to commute north it would lessen the load on the roads Sunday. Possibly so, but it was still busy.  Nice and clear, no fog to speak of.

Picture of the Week
hawk on gauntlet
Photo Notes: Hawk of some kind.

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