Title: Resurrection Men

Author: Ian Rankin

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Little, Brown

Copyright: 2002

ISBN: 0316608491

Pages: 510

Keywords: crime, fiction

Reading period: 22–24 December, 2008

Troublemaking cops–the Resurrection Men–from all over Scotland have been sent to the Police Training College to make them into team players. DI John Rebus is one of them, though his real job is to get the dirt on three bent cops. The senior officers who sent Rebus in seem to mistrust him too, since the Resurrection Men have reopened an old case where Rebus's behavior was questionable.

Back in Edinburgh, DS Siobhan Clarke is investigating the murder of an art dealer, where Rebus's old nemesis, the crime boss Big Ger Cafferty figures prominently. This seems to be the first book where Clarke comes in to her own as a character. Rebus and Clarke traffic in gray areas and moral ambiguity. The world they must work in is neither clean nor simple, and their actions cannot always bear close scrutiny.

As in other Rebus books, the two investigations end up being linked far too neatly for my liking.

Title: Captain's Fury

Author: Jim Butcher

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Ace

Copyright: 2007

ISBN: 0441016553

Pages: 508

Keywords: fantasy

Reading period: 20–21 December, 2008

Captain's Fury is the fourth book in Jim Butcher's fantasy series, Codex Alera, and the sequel to Cursor's Fury.

Tavi is still undercover as the captain of a legion fighting the Canim invaders; an ambitious senator arrives from the capital to take over. Tavi finally comes into his own, learning that he is Gaius Octavian, the hitherto unsuspected son of the First Lord's long-dead heir. Far to the south, Amara and Bernard accompany the First Lord, Gaius Sixtus, on a secret mission, walking into the rebellious Kalare. Their journey bears not a little resemblance to Frodo and Sam's epic walk into Mordor.

The intrigue and the action come thick and fast, holding our attention to the end.

Normally, we have Shuttle Express take us to Sea-Tac airport, but they were completely booked up when I tried to make a reservation earlier in the week. Lyndol very kindly came over at 6am and drove us down to the airport.

Our plane left an hour late from Seattle, as it came in late the night before and the crew had to wait for the statutory FTC minimum stopover. The late departure from Seatac was no problem, since we had a scheduled 5-hour layover in Philadelpia. After being shoehorned into the plane, we needed to stretch and wandered through several of the terminals. The only excitement was when I realized an hour before leaving that I had mislaid a credit card in another terminal. Luckily the restaurant was still open and had found the card.

Our second flight was also delayed, so we got to Dublin an hour late. We were very tired and spent the afternoon sleeping. Back to bed soon.

It's approximately 50F here at the moment—unseasonably warm.

If Baby Bowles has not yet put in an appearance, we're going over to Michelle's tomorrow afternoon, to see her and her new house.

I tried to take the bus into work today, but no bus showed. I later learned that the #39 had been “temporarily suspended”. Emma drove into downtown Seattle, getting off at the James St. exit. James is steep and it was closed to traffic. She let me out at 7th and James and I walked down to the Smith Tower.

Other people were not so lucky on the steeper streets, as you can see in the photo of a bus hanging over the interstate.

This is the worst snow we've had in several years, and Seattle is not equipped to handle it. Most years, we only get a day or two of snow, leaving at most a couple of inches. It's not economic for the city to have a lot of snow-clearing infrastructure, though I did see two big trucks with plows attached this morning. Most drivers have little experience in driving in the snow or on ice, and do about as well as you'd expect. All of this is compounded by Seattle's hills: it's hard to go any great distance in this region without having to traverse a hill.

And there's a big weekend storm coming in Saturday evening. I'm glad that I'm flying out in the morning and will miss it.

And so to bed.

When we went to bed on Wednesday night, most of the weekend's snow had melted. We were woken around 5:30am by two large thunder claps, attributed to thundersnow. The snow was falling again and fell for most of the day.

We were sensible and stayed home. So, it seems, did almost everyone else at Cozi. I worked remotely for part of the day. Otherwise, we watched movies. I felt no desire to go outside and make snowmen, though we certainly could have.

We fly to Ireland on Saturday morning. I'm a little worried about getting to the airport.

I'm Irish. I was raised on butter. Not margarine. Butter. Good Irish butter. Yellow, creamy, with a little salt.

Melted onto toast. A soft yellow layer on bread. A pat of butter on your potatoes. Fry your eggs in butter. Let butter melt on your chips.

I knew butter was important in baking, but I didn't realize until today how carefully it should be treated:

The most common mistakes made by home bakers, professionals say, have to do with the care and handling of one ingredient: butter. Creaming butter correctly, keeping butter doughs cold, and starting with fresh, good-tasting butter are vital details that professionals take for granted, and home bakers often miss.

Butter is basically an emulsion of water in fat, with some dairy solids that help hold them together. But food scientists, chefs and dairy professionals stress butter’s unique and sensitive nature the way helicopter parents dote on a gifted child.

“Butter has that razor melting point,” said Shirley O. Corriher, a food scientist and author of the recently published “BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking” (Scribner).

For mixing and creaming, butter should be about 65 degrees: cold to the touch but warm enough to spread. Just three degrees warmer, at 68 degrees, it begins to melt.

“Once butter is melted, it’s gone,” said Jennifer McLagan, author of the new book “Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, With Recipes” (Ten Speed Press).

Warm butter can be rechilled and refrozen,but once the butterfat gets warm, the emulsion breaks, never to return.

More, with cookie recipes, at the NYT Dining section.

My friends Frank and Lyndol met 32 years ago today, the day they celebrate as their anniversary. For several years, Emma and I have brought them out for dinner on this date. We also celebrate Lyn's birthday, which falls next week.

Frank's health has been poor for some years, but it's grown worse this year. He spent six weeks in hospital in September and October. He's home now, but he's in hospice care.

Naturally, we try to see him often, since he rarely feels strong enough to leave the house, even in a wheelchair. We almost always find him in good form, glad to see us and ready with his stories.

He's somewhat stronger than when he left hospital. They've been provided with a hospital bed as part of the hospice care, but he's still sleeping in his own bed while he can.

We had hoped to take them to Szmania's in Magnolia for dinner tonight. It didn't work out as planned, alas. Lyndol showed up alone: Frank had felt too weak to come. In truth, he was also worried about the icy roads and getting about.

The three of us ate dinner together. The pheasant was particularly good. It was a fine meal, but not the same without Frank.

We brought the dessert back to their house, surprising Frank who was very happy to see us.

I would wish them many more years together, but it's not to be.

Title: The Vivero Letter

Author: Desmond Bagley

Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: Fontana

Copyright: 1968

ISBN: 184232019X

Pages: 253

Keywords: thriller

Reading period: 13–14 December, 2008

Jeremy Wheale is ‘a grey little man in a grey little job’ who doesn't fit in well in swinging London. His brother is murdered and he finds himself embroiled in the search for a lost Mayan city in the Yucutan peninsula. His companions are a rich old archaeologist, a paranoid young archaeologist, and his attractive wife. Somewhere out in the jungle is a Mafia don who's convinced that there's a hoard of gold in Uaxuanoc.

Wheale is an ordinary man who rises to the occasion. As the tension grows, he finds unsuspected reserves within himself, leading to a daring standoff with the don.

This is a classic adventure story, well told, written by one of the great British thriller writers of the Sixties and Seventies. More modern books would have strung the action out over five hundred pages; Bagley told his story in 250.

It snowed in Seattle yesterday. We drove over to Sammamish last night to my CEO's house for the Holiday Party. The snow wasn't sticking to the roads, so although visibility wasn't great, getting there and back was not difficult.

It was cold today and colder tonight. I saw only a light dusting of snow fall today, but the snow that was melting earlier has refrozen.

We had to go out this evening, over to Burien to see Frank. The main roads were fine, but we had a slightly alarming descent on a hill near us as we headed over there. Coming home, we had a couple of unpleasant minutes trying to get up a hill near Frank's. The wheels spun and spun, but the car wouldn't go forward. Several times, I deliberately let it slide backwards a few feet, hoping to find some traction further down. In the end, that worked.

I don't much like snow, but I hate ice. I hate walking on ice. I hate the lack of control. I'm always fearful that I'll slip and fall, that my feet will fly from under me and that I'll crack my head. Or that I'll break an arm when I try to break my fall.

I hate driving on icy roads. The skidding. The uncontrolled drift. The wheels spinning.

That's why I live in a climate where we don't get a lot of snow or ice.

Lots of new babies around.

Dilip in North Carolina emailed me the other day and mentioned the recent birth of his daughter, Anuragini. And Alan in Dublin emailed me this morning, to tell me of the birth of his daughter, Beth.

My sister, Michelle Bowles, is due to give birth on the 19th to the first Reilly grandchild. We arrive in Dublin on the 21st. First babies tend to be born late, so we may get there before the baby does. She and David have elected not to learn the gender of the baby, so I addressed their Christmas card to "Michelle, David, and TBD".

It seems like all of my mother's friends have had grandchildren over the last twenty years. It's certain that she has had a bad case of grandchild envy and that she's very excited to become a grandmother.

Title: Accelerando

Author: Charles Stross

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Ace

Copyright: 2005

ISBN: 0441014151

Pages: 432

Keywords: science fiction

Reading period: September–12 December, 2008

(As I mentioned last night, I read Accelerando (Wikipedia) in Stanza on my iPhone on the bus.)

Accelerando is a set of connected short stories following three generations of the Macx family around the Singularity. The ideas fly thick and fast (and somewhat confusingly): minds uploaded into virtual machines, nanotechnology, posthumans, lobsters brainscans uplifted into space, an independent-minded AI in a cat's body, economics, …

Thought-provoking and entertaining.

Emma had a chance to play with Jacob's Kindle (Amazon, Wikipedia) today, while I looked on.

The electronic paper screen is one of the big selling points. We found the text to be very readable, albeit black-and-white. It works very well for its primary use case—displaying book pages with minimal battery drain—but it's sluggish when updating menus.

I'm not impressed by the design of the case. The buttons on the side are far too big; the keyboard at the bottom is ridiculous. It would be interesting to see what Apple could do.

I've been using Stanza on my iPhone for the last couple of months, mostly to read Accelerando on the bus. I like it, though the screen is so small that I'm flipping pages every few seconds.

The thought of holding several months' worth of reading on one device is very tempting, especially as we're off to Dublin for two weeks. Physical books are heavy and they're bulky. We'll bring a number of books with us and come back with even more.

I read a lot online, but I prefer to read printed books. I am more likely to get lost in a book. Online, I am more likely to drift. Books have heft and tactile feedback. Good books are physically beautiful. The typography and layout contribute to a pleasurable reading experience.

Flipping through a book is not the same as scrolling through an e-book. There are subconscious cues that allow spatial navigation to be very fast in printed material. Orienting myself in an ebook is harder. Annotating and highlighting online material is difficult. I like to have a highlighter marker in hand when reading technical books. On the other hand, you can't grep dead trees.

I'm deeply skeptical of DRMed content and reluctant to buy content that I can't transfer to other devices of my choosing. I know that if I take reasonable care of a book, I will still be able to read it in thirty years' time. I am less confident of e-books in proprietary formats.

It's ridiculous that e-books cost as much as printed books. There are real costs associated with printing and distributing printed books. Publishers can make higher margins off e-books than they do from printed books and still sell them for less.

Emma is more enthusiastic about e-book readers than I am. It seems inevitable that we'll buy one, but not just yet.

Since the summer, I've been working on and off on a mobile site for Cozi. Chris, one of our interns, did a lot of the initial work. Getting it to a deployable state has been my primary focus over the last few weeks.

I'm happy to say that as of today m.cozi.com is in public beta. Will wrote a little about it at the Cozi Blog; take a look at the promo.

Currently, the mobile site supports shopping lists and the calendar. In the calendar, you can view, create, and edit your appointments. On the shopping page, you can update your shopping lists and cross off items as you move through the store.

Enjoy!

We've gone high-def over the last month. First, Emma bought a 42" 1080p plasma Panasonic HDTV to replace the 32" CRT TV in our living room. Although it's wider, it's not overwhelming, as the slender box sits further back. The picture's pretty good—at least when you give it a good signal.

To take advantage of it required a cascade of upgrades. Our old TiVo served us well for eight years; appointment TV has long been alien to us. It's disconnected now, replaced the other day by a DirecTV Plus DVR and a new satellite dish. I had heard bad things about the older DirecTV DVRs, but I have no complaints about this one yet.

I spent a year at Atlas working on advertising for Video on Demand, but until we got the new DVR, I had never seen VOD in anyone's home. VOD gives us an additional, changing catalog of programs and films that we can download when we choose, rather than having to record them when they're broadcast. I drilled a hole in the floor and ran a 50 foot Ethernet cable into Emma's basement office to get an Internet connection.

After the DVR arrived, I felt compelled to hook the TV up to the stereo, which required me to run new speaker wire. I'm quite sensitive to visual images, I have a fairly good eye for photographic composition, and a well-developed typographic sense. I am however an aural clod and probably tone deaf. Even so, I can tell that the stereo sounds better than the TV.

I also bought an HDMI-HDMI cable for the DVD Recorder to replace the initial analog connection through a video switchbox. And I have a DVI-HDMI cable so that I can hook my MacBook up to this enormous external monitor. Only this last is disappointing. Everything else looks marvelous.

Be careful what you say: you might trigger a Google Alert.

Eric had the temerity last week to gripe on his blog about a certain open source business intelligence product, and got swarmed by irate defenders. Apparently he showed up in their Google Alerts. Some of the posters were helpful, but the ad hominem attackers were more entertaining:

Your blog has had 22 posts in the past year, and your blogroll includes absolutely no one of note in the open source world. So I think it’s safe to say that while you are pointing out a perception that they should address in some way, that your opinion isn’t worth much.

I'm in his blogroll, but I'll stipulate that I'm not of note, despite my reach. On the other hand, Ben Collins-Sussman and Karl Fogel are two of the primary Subversion developers and Subversion is the VCS for thousands of open source projects.

I mentioned Raymond C's enormous blog post queue in yesterday's post. I triggered a Google Alert: he emailed me this morning to say that the queue was up to 16 months! <boggle/>