I initially learned to drive on the left in Ireland, but have spent the last 20 years driving on the right in the States. I personally never had any difficulty switching from one side to the oth­er—ex­cept when extremely jet­lagged—but I know several people who find it enormously stressful. I find it easy enough to orient myself so that the lane divider is at the correct position.

When I was a kid, my father often brought his Irish car over to mainland Europe on the car ferries. A right-hand drive car driving on the right is doubly tricky. It didn’t seem to bother him too much, but I …continue.

For many years, I ignored the freeway sign for the Rhodo­den­dron Garden at exit 143 on I-5. Five or six years ago, I visited the Rhody Garden and I’ve gone back every spring since.

It’s worth visiting at any time of year, but from March to May or June, it’s in bloom. Twenty-two acres of rhodo­den­drons, azaleas, ferns, and other flowers, near the Wey­er­hauser head­quar­ters in Federal Way, Washington. There’s a bonsai garden next door—un­for­tu­nate­ly now closed to the public. As you stroll along the shaded hilly paths, you can almost make believe that the constant traffic noise from the nearby freeway is running water.

Rhodies come in all shapes, colors, and sizes, from low …continue.

A conman publisher visits a writing circle in Chichester and gets their hopes up. Soon, he is burned to death in his cottage. Other arson-murders follow.

In the first half of the book, the story is primarily told from the viewpoint of the newest member of the writers’ circle, Bob Naylor, who starts in­ves­ti­gat­ing, egged on by some of the others. In the second half, it becomes a police procedural, as seen by Detective Chief Inspector Henrietta Mallin, who takes over the case.

The Circle is a whodunnit in the classic vein, with in­ter­fer­ing amateur …continue.

I mentioned CrossLoop before, as a tool for remotely helping someone out. It uses VNC to share desktops.

The last time I looked, it was Windows only. Now there’s a Mac client too.

I had to use it to help my father out in Dublin. Somehow he had managed to delete both Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash—I haven’t figured out how.

It was painful, painful, painful. The connection was dropped repeatedly and the link couldn’t begin to keep up with the amount of graphical data being trans­ferred. Even though CrossLoop reduces the color depth, actions like switching tabs in Firefox cause huge amounts of data to be sent. I couldn’t tell why the connection …continue.

The district nurse is murdered in a Danish seaside resort. The police arrest the local peeping tom, a dimwitted young man. Detective-Inspector Jonas Morck has his doubts. Morck and his partner, Einarsen, are locked in a permanent good cop–bad cop routine. Eventually, Morck in his quiet, methodical, yet insightful way, will find the real killer.

I tried Safari 4 on my MacBook back in February when it first came out in beta. It crashed im­me­di­ate­ly, every time, so I unin­stalled it.

I upgraded to OS X 10.5.7 earlier in the week and new Safari bits were available, so it seemed like a good time to retry it. After all, it had been faster than any other browser on my Vista box at work.

Again, it crashed im­me­di­ate­ly. This time, however, I took a closer look at the details of the error report that was being sent to Apple. A little Googling suggested that the Glims plugin was at fault. Indeed it was. I replaced beta 8 from September …continue.

As promised yesterday, I’m posting the poster for the Circe reading. It’s a fine painting by Ellen Coyle. The shrunken image here doesn’t do it justice. You can download an 11"x14" PDF (6MB) to see it in its full glory.

We’re rehearsing most Wednesdays for our reading of the first half of the Circe chapter of Ulysses next month. It’s going well. We need some more rehearsal, but it now sounds like we know what we’re doing. Tonight we read the entire piece through from beginning to end, for the first time. Now we know that it takes two-and-a-quarter hours.

We also got the poster tonight. It looks great! I’d post it, but I need to get the painting scanned first.

I serve as tech support to my parents, Frank and Lyndol, and a handful of others. I was at Lyn’s tonight to find out why he no longer had an Internet connection. I told him when I arrived, "This will take a minute or an hour." Either it was going to be something that I’d spot in a moment or I’d be fighting with it for a while.

I im­me­di­ate­ly noticed that the network hub was un­plugged—and dared to hope that it might be just that simple. It wasn’t, of course: the hub had been unplugged during Lyn’s own fruitless trou­bleshoot­ing. I quickly pinpointed that the DSL modem was not connecting and …continue.

Alban McGill has a strained re­la­tion­ship with his extended family, the Wopulds, maker of Empire, one of the world’s best­selling games for more than a century. They are being drawn together at their remote Scottish estate, Garbadale, to decide whether to sell the company to a large American company. His cousin Sophie will be there, the one he’s loved from afar for twenty years, since their affair was forcibly broken up.

Banks weaves together multiple strands of Alban’s life, the torrid adolescent love affair, his mother’s early death, the …continue.