Books - Lois McMaster Bujold - The Curse of Chalion

A spoiler-free review of Lois McMaster Bujold's first good Fantasy novel!

So, as everyone who reads my blog knows already, it's so totally awesome. Thank you very much R. for making me read it.

• A world where prayer is actually answered, and every lay man is entitled to at least one miracle, is either really cool or just as the same as ours, depending on one's POV, I guess.
• I liked how theologians are the wizards of this world, though for the men who are not god-touched, it could be plain medieval Europe. A very light use of fantastic elements, all considered.
• I loved the language, and how it served its purpose instead of being the purpose.
• Umegat trying to debauch a dedicat by making her read Boccaccio aloud was funny.
• The hero appears to be designed to be fallen in love with by the reader, but I can't bring myself to dislike him none-the-less. Bujold is good like that.
• The book does start slow, but it picks up its pace and gets to the point where you can't put it down midway through. The ending was a surprise for me.

If you were a dedicat of one of the Chalion gods, which god would you choose? There's no shame in choosing by color, mind, but a theological reason is preferred.

Life - A day and a year older

Another house point (pray tell, which house?) to the first person to correctly identify which book I'm reading for my birthday:

[snip] did smile at him—that was true, he did not delude himself. And she was kind. But she smiled at and was kind to her horse, too. Her honest friendly courtesy was hardly ground enough to build a dream mansion upon, let alone bring bed and linens and try to move in. Still… she did smile at him.

Is it a bad sign, that I find a love-struck protagonist… charming?

Life - Cameraphone

Procrastination is when it takes one two months since getting a new mobile phone to buy it a data transfer cable.
My excuse: the Motorola C650 has a USB "Mini-B" receptacle, which should match a USB "Mini-B" plug at the end of a USB cable (on the other end of which is a USB "A" plug that goes to the host system, usually a computer). I say, what's the use of the USB standard when a bleeping Engineering Change Notice invents a new bleeping connector and forces me to go and buy a new bleeping cable? I dare you to shop for a "Mini-A to A" USB cable! No retailer carries those. Motorola's own accessories shop is currently out-of-stock!* They're supposed to come with the device, because they're as rare as a proprietary connector! Just as costly too. I guess with the service providers giving away the phones for next to nothing, the aftermarket business is where the money's at.

So, after checking online and in two photo-accessories and one cellphone-accessories shops, I've finally found it, all nicely packaged in a little black bag, in a computer-enthusiasts shop in downtown. Between case-modding and watercooling equipment and a GeForce 7800 SLI kit. 27 New Israeli Shekels (under $6 US).

You may wish to check my fotki page for new stuff, or I might just move over to flickr.

* - Never you mind that actually using the cable requires one to buy proprietary third party software which Motorola doesn't support. Moto4Lin is free, simple, takes 58k, is available in portage, and works. Thank you, Dima from Ukraine.

Found on The Web - Visions of Science Photographic Awards

via /.; a bunch of beautiful (and educational!) shots can be found on this site.

Movie - Serenity

Tickets to the only screening in Israel were sold out three days in advance. Lucky I had the sense to get the tickets in time, though unfortunately I didn't manage to arrange for more than one friend to come along. Screening it at 23:45 wasn't very smart of the ICon management.

Great movie, and the Firefly marathon afterwards was fun. Getting back home at 05:45 wasn't, but that's what holidays are for.

The audience was full of Firefly fans. Lots of cheers and clapping, lots of laughter at all the right places, even the jokes from the beginning that were spoiled by the trailers. The whole film was very funny, not just Kaylee's "batteries" and "I'm gonna live" lines (which were great). I think in the dialogue between Mal and Book ( - Mal: "You'll have to tell me about that someday." [meaning Book's history] - Book: "No, I don't.") Mal represents the fans.

It being a Whedon production, lot's of chicks: Zoë, Inara, Kaylee and River are all hot (and dangerous). If Kaylee discovers she's a lesbian in a later episode/movie, I won't be surprised at all. And those "this one time at band camp…" lines? Please, once in five years is enough.

I've met only two people I know at ICon, besides <lj user="grayswander"/> who went with me. Where were all the geeks I know, huh?

People, if you haven't seen Serenity, you owe it to yourselves to go see it.

Life - "School" Trip

My entire outfit went on a trip to improve intra-departmental integration and boost morale. More than six months after the merger (a hostile takeover, more like) the logistics and personnel people are still not really integrated, since they still mostly don't actually work with each other (yet).

It was two days in the north including:

1. Playing treasure hunt in Ramat Hanadiv Memorial Gardens
2. Kayaking in Kfar Blum
3. Partying in some club in Qiryat Shemona
4. Wading through the balls-freezing waters of Nahal Snir (Hatzbani) trying not to break our necks on the dangerous rocks.
   Highly recommended, provided you have sturdy shoes that won't come off in water and medics at the ready.
5. More partying on the Gai Beach in Tiberias

Fun was had by all, considering the twenty-ish average age and high number of females (for an IT outfit, anyway), even the unlucky female developer who (while inebriated) had landed badly on the dance floor and fractured something in her foot.

I've met a youngish Buffy-fan chick who sang songs from "Once More, with Feeling" and can't wait for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (both at ICon*).

Is it just me, or did anyone else notice a similarity between Willow Rosenberg and Luna Lovegood?

*—House points to the first person to find me in the pictures and post a comment.

Humor - Secretaries

Today's Dilbert shows Carol the Secretary telling Dilbert she'd date him for four trillion dollars, despite being happily married. My department's secretary is single, but somehow I think it would be about the same, if only she knew about numbers that big. I'd rather go for one of the female developers, them being as a rule smarter and hotter, but currently the point is moot. I think it's time to update my geek code.

TV - Lost, Season 2, Episode 3

Just watched the episode.

I understand the main metaphor about believeing whether pressing the button means saving the world as the same rift as described by Pirsig between the classic and romantic understanding. And it all sounds like psychobable, unless someone like RJA would like to explain what they mean.

TV - Alias Season 05 - Episode 01: Prophet 5

Like RJA said, the episode was surprisingly good. I'll keep watching.

Work - New Year's

For the third time in my department, the smart, dependable, funny, pretty girl is too good for us and leaves for officer's training. It is very sad to lose E.C, and I hope she'll get a decent assignment.

I got First Sergeant two weeks early, for the Jewish new year. Considering the 16 hours long work days and working on the weekend, it really is the least they could've done.

Hurt my finger on the Uzi's magazine holding thingy. Still scored 100% day/night and 12 dead (simulated) Arabshostiles. Yeah, in the IDF, even the software developers are tough! ;-)

Work/Life - Down again

It's true that it's the little things that affect one's mood.

During my night shift I've left a poor impression on an interesting female colleague. I feel like I have no influence on my room. My boss and I disagree about schedules and the exact nature of my job. A friend whom I've met in training is getting discharged because his outfit can't afford him and for the next two years he'll be earning roughly three times more than I'll be earning comes December.

Is aimlessly reading about Prosody a waste of my time?

Life - Moving

Tomorrow I'll be moving about a kilometer north-west, and consequently won't have internet access for a few days. Here's hoping the move will be as painless as possible!

Edit: Well, I had internet the next morning, hurray for the national telco provider. Everything is more or less alright.

Oh, and now that the money is back in the bank where it belongs, I can say I've seen close to a hundred thousand US dollars in cash. Looked like a drug deal right out of a Hollywood movie. Wacko Russians!

Hardware Shopping - Dual Core!

Dual core is all the rage now, and with AMD's entry-level dual core processor killing the competition, one can buy one heck of a machine for quite a reasonable price, when you think about it.

part	make & model	US price	US price in ILS	IL price in ILS	markup
cpu	AMD Athlon 64 X2 (939) 3800+ 2x512KB	365	1678.21	2250	34.07%
mobo	MSI nForce4 Ultra (939) K8N Neo4 Platinum	125	574.73	840	46.16%
ram	OCZ/Corsair/Kingston 2x512MB PC3200 CL2.5	90	413.81	780	88.49%
video	XFX GeForce 6600GT 128MB	150	689.68	1050	52.25%
hdd	Western Digital SATA 160GB 7200RPM 8MB Caviar SE	85	390.82	470	20.26%
total		815	3747.24	5390	43.84%
exchange rate	USD to ILS	1	4.59784

Prices in US are rounded up and include shipping & handling, and don't use rebates (20$ and 25$ mail-in rebates are available). Prices in Israel include 17% VAT.

I chose AMD over Intel because of price/performance, but if Intel's hardware virtualization technology lives up to its hype (together with the rest of the cool new stuff that comes in the designed-in-Israel due-in 2006 next-gen Intel chips), I might reconsider.

Personally, I'd want to get a motherboard with integrated graphics (a GeForce 6150 + nForce 430 based solution sounds promising) because those 1000NIS on a a video card I'm not going to use are bugging me.

Compared to last time I did this, I've upgraded to CL2.5 RAM and swapped a WD for the Seagate hard drive because of availability issues.

We are still being ripped off on RAM.

Work - @#$%^&!

I don't want to name names, but yesterday I've had a surreal experience that exemplifies how badly IT projects are run and why I think it's a disgrace and a waste of money and why a project my outfit working on is going to fail. Again.

As part of my training I've interviewed a development team from a neighboring project. The team lead was a female coder promoted to officer to hide the fact she's a bad developer. Naturally, she became an even worse team lead. The team members themselves are all very inexperienced and have very naive notions about how stuff works in real life, especially concerning QA (especially unit, integration, system and acceptance testing), SCM, performance benchmarking, verifying scalability, deployment, user training, support, debugging in a production environment, maintenance, etc (basically everything other than churning out bad code). They all live in this dream where they release a version 1 in December, when what they had to show me looks nowhere near anything I'd show a client as "ready for release". To find out how bad it really is, I've turned to the systems people: I've managed to interview G.B., who is a team lead of a dedicated group of DBAs who support the project. We've shared war stories like one DBA to another, and man, she has revived my faith in females in IT. The place is full of great people, if only the fucked up institution could inspire them all to work!

Every time I think I'm too much of a "Rosh Gadol" for my job description and how big the gap between what I'm supposed to be responsible for and what I feel responsible for, I get the feeling I was wrong to decline officer training and yet I still believe I'm not the right person to be a great officer (INTJs are simply not leaders. I'd want to strangle people who are slacking, and that's not allowed). Problem is, it might've been better for me and my outfit if I were one. I'll see, maybe I'll change, maybe the environment will change.

God, how I hate "Rosh Katan" people who don't care about their craft!

On a completely unrelated note: E.P. has invited me to his birthday, day after tomorrow. I can't believe how excited I am! Don't have a clue about a present, though.

Books - Mark Haddon - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

So, I've read it a while ago and never reviewed. But first of all, let's establish my bias: Not only am I a depressed overly talkative introvert, I'm a fascist as well. I've known it for a while, I get it from me mom. I don't like people who like to avoid work (and especially people who boast about it, a very trendy thing to do in modern day Israel) and I don't like stupid people. I'm working on the latter, as I realize why I'm wrong to do that.

Personally, I have zero experience with autistic kids. Any modern book about the subject must stress they are no worse than any other kid: they can grow to become productive members of society, all they need is love and patience, like any other child. That's all great, and the lesson "if you try hard enough, you can be anything" is important in encouraging children to apply themselves in school etc., but I disagree with the conclusion about the kid himself, as I understand it from the book.

The kid fantasizes about all normal people dying and he having the world to himself, never again being forced to interact with human beings. He carries a knife and pulls it on people seemingly at any available opportunity. He has no respect for police officers or authority of any kind, if he feels he is in the right. He has no compassion for human beings, as creatures who possess a soul and the right to live, but rather treats them like computers that walk. He taught himself A-level math.

I don't know how his arrested social development is connected to normal hormonal changes during puberty (if any), but he's supposed to be fifteen and has shown no interest in girls (or boys, for that matter). I don't know if he'll grasp the intricacies of courting, but I foresee problems on that front, as no one can explain for him in detail what constitutes "sexual harassment" these days - it can be anything, depending on the other person's feelings, a concept he doesn't quite grasp.

I guess that years of kind and firm treatment with a psychologist can help him improve his social skills, and he probably can do well in some scientific endeavor (though mathematicians working alone is a rare thing indeed these days, Andrew Wiles being the exception that proves the norm), but I think he's a disaster just waiting to happen. I can't help but feel sorry for his parents, adulterous as they may be, for at least they qualify for "human". Am I heartless?

Another thing is that I noticed I share some of my nerdier qualities with the main character. For example, he disaproves of euphemisms for the same reason I do. I think it is a warning to us nerds: behave, or people will treat you like they treat autists. And no, simulating asperger-syndrome is not cool, and does not make you a hacker.

Work - More ranting

So, free training. Two years after initial training all coders get an upgrade where they learn about architecture. Actually, the idea is to try and make the coders think outside their projects, technologies and environments and learn broadly about modern IT. Among other activities there are introductory lectures on topics like n-tier, UML, interpersonal communication, database tuning, datawarehousing, design patterns, networks, QA, SOA, dotNET vs. Java, ERP, storage with backup & recovery, security and lots of others. Three weeks total, by the best consultants available. A bloody dream come true for anyone wishing to get any sort of clue about the industry.

The first lecture was given by Eyal Rubin (I think that's the name; anyway, he's a big boss there or something) from 2Train4. Right at the start he got so many blank stares the level very quickly dropped to kindergarten. He had to review OOP, TCP/IP, RDBMS… very, very basic stuff. Someone asked what's a proxy. People didn't know about the existence of stored procedures. He used euphemisms for HTTP, XML, SOAP, SOA to avoid using the terminology after he had to explain "port 80". It took him a while to explain "application server" and how come scalability is not always linear. I was so ashamed I took off my pin.

I know about the five different worlds, and I realize that hadn't I been a huge computer geek, I wouldn't have known about EJB's either, but some of that stuff was covered in the initial training! A bloody TCP socket, for crying out loud, and SELECT statements! Gah.

Work - Need to vent

Our new resource turned out to be a big fat "no hire" with no skill set, a big head and an attitude problem. The guy has never seen any OOD in his life, has no respect for coding standards, no experience in team work, no understanding of PC hardware, doesn't know what "K&R" or "Stroustrup" are. Basically, he lacks all skills the company paid for.

But my main problem is that his motivation for getting the job was completely different from the rest of us: You see, he is fit for combat duty. So, nearing the end of his senior year of high school (when he was already a full year older than his peers, for reason unknown), he had several choices:

1. Enlist, serve three years in infantry, armor or artillery.
2. Go to college, get a degree, serve six years as an engineer (three years paid).
3. Stay in school for an extra year, get an associate degree, serve four to five years (a year or two paid).

He probably decided real military service is for suckers and college is hard, so what kind of associate degree to get? Mechanics, electronics, software. "Computers" sounds like "money", so a year later here he is.

Now, his goal successfully met, he has no motivation to work hard or learn anything.

And his fucking Israeli attitude! @#$%^&*!

Personal - Being late

I have noticed that every time I meet R.Y. while commuting I am… shall we say "not at my best"? I wondered why is that. So I figure: we only meet on a bus at a time that means I'm very late, so it usually means I've tumbled out of bed and into my uniform in under ten minutes.
It's interesting though that my poor state doesn't bother me otherwise. Maybe I should readjust my answers on that meme to get "dork" instead of "geek".

Books - Edward E. "Doc" Smith - Galactic Patrol (Lensman Series Book #3)

So, I've read somewhere that it was among the first, defining works of the Space Opera genre. I got curious. All I've go to say after reading it is thank God it's not 1937. I have never read a fanfic, not on FFN, not even intentionally bad fanfic, that was this horrible. I can hardly call it a proper novel. The very outdated technology and nomenclature was bad enough ("ray guns", "ether"? WTF!), but the over-the-top depiction of absolutely everything, the non-existent characterization, and Gary Stu hero, a notable lack of morals and disregard for human life really made it hard to believe it was a published work (a bestseller?), not something scribbled in a bored 4th grader's note book. The worst parts were the blatant racism and sexism: worship of classical idealized Arian God-like build and features (a seven foot tall blue-eyed blonde male whose body is described by a male narrator, in a male leading character's words, speaking to an obviously intended male reader, as "beautiful") and the stated as truism belief of the narrator that women are inherently feeble minded and are only good for treating the wounded, recreation and procreation. I've wanted to stop reading so many times, but I've kept on to try and see if it got any worse. I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that it had, indeed, got worse.

Of purely historical interest nowadays. Avoid if possible, read with caution.

Books - Terry Pratchett - Wyrd Sisters (Discworld, Book 6)

So, the promised review. I've read the Hebrew translation (that's what I had with me), without reading the original before or after (I might yet). I've managed to reverse translate some of the jokes, but still I didn't laugh nearly as much as I remember laughing while reading The Colour of Magic. Partly it's because a peculiarity of mine: while reading or especially watching comedic situations, I often feel embarrassed for the "fool" instead of laughing at him. Thus I didn't laugh too much at Magrat's naïvete or Granny Weatherwax's imposing personality. Reading the reviews I've noticed I've missed some (most?) of the Shakespearian jokes. Gytha Ogg is brilliant ("Three marriages and an adventurous girlhood had left Nanny Ogg with thigh muscles that could crack coconuts"). That's it.