2008 closes, leaving economic wreckage in its wake. Personally and professionally, it's been a good year. At the national level, it's been both a very good year and a disastrous one. Obama's historic victory is offset by the imploding economy.

My health remains good, I'm a little fitter than I was a year ago. I've notched up a few personal milestones, such as receiving my Competent Communicator award at Toastmasters and becoming the secretary of Freely Speaking Toastmasters.

My friends and family are, mostly, doing well. My sister is (still!) on the verge of having her first child. Emma's health is never great: she will have surgery to remove abdominal adhesions in a few weeks. And Frank is in slow decline.

I like my job at Cozi. I've learned a lot in the last year and I've seen our products improve enormously since the beginning of the year. I think we're well placed to ride out the downturn.

That downturn worries me. The economy was unsound and badly needs restructuring, but a lot of people are going to get hurt before it can be fixed.

I still have high hopes for Obama. I wonder how much he can achieve in that initial honeymoon. He certainly can't fix everything that's broken.

2009? We live in interesting times.

Title: Sovereign

Author: C.J. Sansom

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Macmillan

Copyright: 2006

ISBN: 1405088575

Pages: 583

Keywords: historical mystery

Reading period: 25–28 December, 2008

Sequel to Dark Fire. The hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake has been sent to York by Archbishop Cranmer to meet the Royal Progress, where Henry VIII is to accept formal surrender from those who had earlier rebelled. Shardlake is to hear petitions on the king's behalf, but really he is there to ensure that a high-ranking conspirator is brought safely back to the Tower of London. He stumbles upon a cache of secret papers, which leads to a series of attempts upon his life.

Shardlake, once an ardent support of the reform of the Church of England, has grown disillusioned and cynical. His exposure to the king and the Court only increase his disillusionment. The king has become an unabashed tyrant and Shardlake grows sympathetic to the rebels.

Michelle and her husband David B† came over for dinner. Her baby is now nine days overdue and she's more than ready to give birth.

† Not to be confused with the other David, our brother, who is currently living at my parents' house in Dublin.

We had lunch with Alan and Sheena in Dundrum and met their new baby.

It's been very hard to hook up with my old friends here. We landed seven days ago and the only other meet up was a couple of pints with Jimmy on Monday. They're (almost) all middle-aged, mortgaged, married, and bechilded, and otherwise busy with their own lives. We are to have lunch with Hilary tomorrow and to get together with Austin on Tuesday, but the rest of the remaining week looks socially arid.

I have completely lost count of how many hats and mittens, mostly for babies, that Emma has knitted since she got here. Prodigious quantities, to be sure.

When I was a boy, anytime we said ‘Dundrum’ (a suburb of Dublin), it was with a snigger, because it was synonymous in our minds with the mental asylum located there. Nowadays, Dundrum is much better known as the home of a large shopping centre. I'm so out of touch with Dublin that I hadn't realized that there was a major new shopping centre there. I assumed that people were talking about the unimpressive little centre that I remembered there from my childhood. Until today, when we went there to return the mobile phone that we had given my mother for Christmas.

Dundrum was, indeed, a madhouse. There's much talk of a recession in Ireland, as in the United States, but there was little evidence of it in Dundrum today. The Centre was oppressively full: heat, noise, jostling crowds.

My mother wanted a new mobile phone for Christmas. Her only requirements were that it have a camera, that it be easy to use, and the buttons easy to read. The Samsung Tocco has a nice-looking touch screen and David and I thought it would be just the thing, based on our brief experiment with one the other day.

Not so. My mother was totally flummoxed by it. David and I found it confusing and irritating too. The scroll works opposite to the way I expected from the iPhone. Texting was horrible: instead of an alphabetic keypad on the touchscreen, it showed the ten digits with three letters on each digit—just like a traditional mobile phone. And the UI locked you into a nasty series of modal dialogs that were not easy to work with. I probably would have returned it had I bought it for myself, and it was insupportable for my mother.

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/>

In a footnote to the post about Proposition 8 on November 7th, I said that it was the first in a series of daily posts for NaBloPoMo, the National Blog Posting Month, which I had just found out about.

Here I am a month later, having posted something every single evening. I covered humor; movie and book reviews; being the #1 tech blog (now #2); politics; Thanksgiving; food; personal stuff; and even some technical posts. Whew!

Why bother? As with the two-year-old exercise in book reviews, it was a personal challenge to come up with a post every single evening for a month. Sometimes, the events of the day made for an obvious choice; a few days, I struggled to find a topic.

I have not been batching up posts, though I have a few ideas in the queue. When I was at Microsoft, I was startled to see Raymond Chen's blog post queue. He had at least two months worth of daily posts queued up on his personal, internal webserver—http://abject, I think it was called.

I've attempted NaNoWriMo three times, where the goal is to write a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. In 2001, Emma wrote about 23K words of Stargate SG-1 fanfic, while I churned out 41K words on a medieval fantasy. Neither of us has been willing to do anything more with those manuscripts. In 2002 and 2005, I abandoned my attempts in the first chapter.

NaBloPoMo was a sustainable exercise for me. I'm going to continue trying to post something every day. It's said that it takes 3-4 weeks of repetition to form a habit. We'll see if this one has taken hold.

We saw a production of David Sedaris's Santaland Diaries at the Bathhouse Theater tonight. Funny stuff.

Afterwards, we walked over to the Greenlake Bluwater Restaurant to get a spot of dinner. We both ordered Tuscan White Bean soup for a starter, Emma had the Turkey Pot Pie, and mine was the Fettucine.

The soup was fine and my fettucine was okay. Emma's pot pie had problems. The potatoes were raw and it had a funny lemony aftertaste. She pushed the plate away and waited for the waitress to come by. The waitress apologized and brought Emma the menu. Emma opted for the meatloaf, since that would come quickly. The manager apologized and offered us a free dessert.

The meatloaf arrived promptly and Emma was happy with it for a while. Then she got into the center and it was all but raw. At this point, she gave up on the grounds that it wasn't her night. The manager came over to apologize again and told us there would be no charge for the meal.

We left a tip—the service was attentive—but I don't think we'll be back. We've never had a really good meal at any of their restaurants, and none of them are particularly convenient for us.

Title: Dead to Me

Author: Anton Strout

Rating: 3 stars out of 5

Publisher: Ace

Copyright: 2008

ISBN: 0441015786

Pages: 356

Keywords: urban fantasy, comedy

Reading period: 1–4 December, 2008

Simon Canderous, dorky newbie at the underfunded, secretive Department of Extraordinary Affairs in New York City, investigates the death of a beautiful ghost and the apparently respectable cultists at the Sectarian Defense League. He has the gift (or curse) of psychometry: when he touches something, he can divine its history.

This book wobbles between not very black comedy and straight urban fantasy, and doesn't really succeed as either.

I don't, as a rule, pay a great deal of attention to Canadian politics. I was vaguely aware that something unusual is going on there this week. Then Emma pointed me to the Yarn Harlot's explanation of what's happened.

In brief, for the last two years, Stephen Harper's minority government has been playing a high-stakes game, repeatedly forcing the opposition parties to either vote with him or force an election, which they would likely lose.

Last week, as soon as Parliament resumed after October's general election, Harper put forth an "economic strategy", which included removing federal election subsidies to all parties—effectively hobbling the opposition. The opposition were deeply unhappy about that, and also about the lack of response to the worldwide economic crisis.

They told Harper that he had "lost the confidence of the house", and that they were ready to form an alternative government.

The matter went to the Governer-General, who today announced that Parliament would be prorogued (suspended) for 53 days.

Wikipedia has more. Surprisingly, this morning's New York Times had no coverage of the expected meeting with the Governer-General.

Yesterday, I said that it seemed like the economy was one giant Ponzi scheme.

Via Eric, Michael Lewis's The End of Wall Street's Boom

[Whitney’s] message was clear. If you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a hard look at the crappy assets they bought with huge sums of borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale. The vast assemblages of highly paid people inside the firms were essentially worth nothing. For better than a year now, Whitney has responded to the claims by bankers and brokers that they had put their problems behind them with this write-down or that capital raise with a claim of her own: You’re wrong. You’re still not facing up to how badly you have mismanaged your business.

…

By the spring of 2005, FrontPoint was fairly convinced that something was very screwed up not merely in a handful of companies but in the financial underpinnings of the entire U.S. mortgage market. In 2000, there had been $130 billion in subprime mortgage lending, with $55 billion of that repackaged as mortgage bonds. But in 2005, there was $625 billion in subprime mortgage loans, $507 billion of which found its way into mortgage bonds.

…

The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then trying to figure out what they had done. Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.

But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.

…

“You have to understand this,” he says. “This was the engine of doom.” Then he draws a picture of several towers of debt. The first tower is made of the original subprime loans that had been piled together. At the top of this tower is the AAA tranche, just below it the AA tranche, and so on down to the riskiest, the BBB tranche—the bonds Eisman had shorted. But Wall Street had used these BBB tranches—the worst of the worst—to build yet another tower of bonds: a “particularly egregious” C.D.O. The reason they did this was that the rating agencies, presented with the pile of bonds backed by dubious loans, would pronounce most of them AAA. These bonds could then be sold to investors—pension funds, insurance companies—who were allowed to invest only in highly rated securities. “I cannot fucking believe this is allowed—I must have said that a thousand times in the past two years,” Eisman says.

A sordid tale of moral bankruptcy. Read it and weep.

Today's paper said that 3,400 out of 4,300 WaMu jobs in Seattle will be cut.

Emma worked at WaMu as a software tester for three years. I'm sure that if she were still there, she'd be one of them. Most of her friends from that time have moved on; just as well.

A few years ago, WaMu seemed too big to fail. Now? Circling the toilet bowl.

Our whole economy seems like it was one giant Ponzi scheme, with everyone selling worthless paper to everyone else. It's hard to tell how much was wilful ignorance, and how much was making a buck while the good times lasted and damn the consequences.

Deregulation clearly allowed matters to spiral far out of control. I don't know that better regulation would necessarily have prevented this, since the regulators invariably play catchup, but regulation with teeth might have dissuaded many of the perpetrators.

Feh.

I look out the window. Drizzling—not too heavy—I'll ride to work. Pack my clothes into the panier bag. Spandex tights, coat, yellow jacket, helmet, gloves: on they go. Bike's in the garage, seems okay, slap on the bag. Pull it out, reset the odometer. 17 minutes today?

Ignite the blinky lights, pull away. Down the side roads, until I'm compelled to take the arterial. Press the crosswalk button, wait for a break in the traffic. Two minutes, three, does this fucking light ever change? Off like a shot, past Jefferson Park. Maybe they'll finish by next summer. Hit the next light at 2:30. A long, gentle uphill for the next 8 minutes. Next left, zig and zag back to 14th. The prettiest block on the whole ride: gardens, a much-tended traffic circle, craftsman bungalows.

Keep going past the apartment blocks. Wait my turn at Beacon Ave, go through. Busier now, buses on 14th here. Past Mira's, past the school, road zigs. Pass the highest point, buses go left, I don't. Road narrows, start descending gently. It's all downhill from here.

Brake hard at PacMed when 14th runs out. Wait to get onto 15th. A break in the traffic. Off again. Hurtling down to the Rizal Bridge. Amazon's overflow parking on either side. If I don't have to stop at the light, I'll hit 30 without breaking a sweat. Fly across the bridge, hope to fuck it's not icy.

Watch my mirror. Can I get into the left lane? Yes, then turn left at Weller. Down the hill, hard right at 10th. I'm in the International District now, unmissable when I take a left at King. Downhill again, slower this time. Too many intersections, oblivious pedestrians, parkers heedlessly opening doors.

Right at Sixth, around the Post Office. Jackson, wait to make the left. Only two blocks, dodge the buses. Fourth and Jackson, nasty, nasty. Make the right, get into the left lane. Two more blocks. Prefontaine's diagonal gets me to Third and Yesler. Half a block to Smith Tower. Eighteen minutes. Slipping. Do better next time.

Up the steps, through the corridor. Into the bike cage. Not too crowded today–the rain's good for something. Wiggle the bike down the ramp. Grunt, hoist bike into the air, impale the wheel on a hook. A bicycle abattoir it is. Climb the stairs to Seven. Read email, cool down, shower soon.

Title: Cryptonomicon

Author: Neal Stephenson

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Publisher: Avon

Copyright: 1999

ISBN: 0060512806

Pages: 1168

Keywords: science fiction

Reading period: 22–30 November, 2008

The Baroque Cycle books were a prequel, of sorts, to Cryptonomicon. In World War II, Lawrence Waterhouse is an American cryptographer, a peer of Alan Turing, and someone who will be the father of the digital computer; while Bobby Shaftoe is a US Marine who works on black ops. Now, Randy Waterhouse, computer nerd and Lawrence's grandson, is setting up a data haven in the Pacific. Amy Shaftoe, Bobby's granddaughter, and her father, Doug, are marine salvage experts working for Randy, who find a gold-filled Nazi submarine off the Philippines. Somehow, the events of the past and the present will come together, as the narrative bounces back and forth.

Randy, Lawrence, and Bobby all hold our interest as the viewpoint moves between them. Lawrence and his peers break the secret codes of the Germans and the Japanese; Randy's data haven uses cryptography to safeguard data from modern governments. Bobby ultimately just wants to rejoin his girlfriend and son in Manila.

Cryptonomicon is an effective combination of nerdiness and thriller, and a definitive portrayal of geeks in fiction.