Book #5 in the Merchant Princes series, sequel to The Merchants’ War.

The U.S. Government have become really pissed off with the world-walking Clan, and send a small nuke into the Gruinmarkt. It misses the clan but takes care of the new king who was waging war on them. Miriam is pregnant with a royal child and manages to parlay that into being crowned queen-widow. The con­ser­v­a­tive faction in the Clan view the nuke as a deadly insult and want revenge.

This is another heady mixture of feudal intrigue, U.S. spycraft, …continue.

We came up to Vancouver, BC for the weekend. This morning, we visited the Van Dusen Botanical Garden for the first time. In a relatively small area, they’ve put together many spe­cial­ized gardens: rhodo­den­drons, a maze, heathers, redwoods, roses, gingkos, and more. In Seattle terms, it has elements of the Arboretum and the Rhodo­den­dron Garden. Well worth a visit, especially on a beautiful May morning.

This afternoon, we drove down to Ladner to visit my great-uncle Dick and his wife Margaret. They moved into a retirement home in March. Dick has visibly failed since we last saw him in September. Margaret remains remarkably spry and fit, but is nearly blind.

Tonight we are off …continue.

Wyatt is a me­te­o­rol­o­gist working with the U.S. Navy on the small Caribbean island of San Fernandez. He’s convinced that Hurricane Mabel will change course and hit San Fernandez. Trouble is, he can’t convince the local dictator, Serrurier, to evacuate the low-lying capital because the rebels have risen.

This is a fine early modern thriller by Bagley. Aside from the im­prob­a­bil­i­ty of an in­sur­rec­tion and a major hurricane happening si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly, it’s quite believable. The tension mounts as the weather worsens, people act in character, and no one has improbable talents. Wyatt is naive and …continue.

I ported Vim to Win64 but I don’t have a convenient Win64 system to test it on.

I decided to install the Win64 build of the Windows 7 RC on VirtualBox, which has supported 64-bit guest operating systems since version 2.0.

It worked without problems on my MacBook Pro. I used VirtualBox’s Virtual Media Manager to mount the Windows 7 ISO and installed from that. See also the handy guide. (Why does Windows 7 offer a choice of upgrading from a previous version of Windows on a virgin disk?) After completing the in­stal­la­tion of the operating system, I installed the Guest Additions for mouse pointer in­te­gra­tion and other goodies.

As always with VirtualBox VMs on my …continue.

A month ago, Vermont and Iowa passed gay marriage laws. Today, Maine and New Hampshire did the same. The Maine Governor has already signed it into law. The NH leg­is­la­ture passed a law, but it’s possible their governor will veto it.

It’s as if there were a pro-gay marriage backlash after the anti-gay marriage Propo­si­tion 8 passed in California last year. Courts and leg­is­la­tures are realizing the fun­da­men­tal unfairness of denying the benefits of marriage to all committed couples. The sky didn’t fall when Mass­a­chu­setts legalized gay marriage five years ago.

There’s no immediate prospect of a gay marriage law being enacted in Washington State. Last month, the state leg­is­la­ture passed a …continue.

Sequel to Agents of Light and Darkness.

A mysterious chanteuse’s songs are to die for at an exclusive club in the Nightside: her fans are committing suicide. John Taylor in­ves­ti­gates.

En­ter­tain­ing, though the writing style is clumsy.

Book #4 in the Merchant Princes series, sequel to The Clan Corporate.

The Clan share a mutation that allows them to walk between worlds, including theirs and ours. It’s made them fabulously wealthy in their feudal world, though much despised by the old nobility. The crown prince has just seized the throne and is on a witch-hunt. In our world, the US government considers them narco-terrorists and is hunting them too. Miriam, the main pro­tag­o­nist, is trapped in a recently discovered third world, a Victorian police state. And a fourth world is …continue.

I blogged before that I had used Exact Audio Copy to rip most of my CD collection to the lossless FLAC format. I haven’t ripped any more CDs since then, as the old Windows laptop that I was using had severe problems.

We went to the Columbia City Beatwalk on Friday night. I liked the Correo Aereo duo so much that I bought their CD.

It was time to figure out how to rip a CD to FLAC on the Mac. I found some hints that it was possible to run Exact Audio Copy in a virtual machine or under Wine, but neither choice appealed to me.

One guide rec­om­mend­ed xACT over Max …continue.

General Sternwood is old, rich, and crippled, with two wanton daughters. Philip Marlowe is brought in to deal with a black­mail­er. Within hours, he is tripping over dead bodies, live dames, tough guys, and skeletons in closets.

Chandler’s famously convoluted story holds up well seventy years later. His style and his stories are much imitated, but retain their freshness. Marlowe lives by his own code of honor, which keeps him going in his dirty, no-good world. He cracks wise and rarely carries a gun while he does what needs doing.

Rec­om­mend­ed.

Séamus Joyce, a former senior civil servant, returns to Dublin from self-imposed exile in Germany. He has been engaged as a consultant by Finer Small Campuses to evaluate his alma mater, King’s College Dublin, a third-rate, third-level in­sti­tu­tion.

Millar, himself an Irish academic, satirizes both Irish higher-level education and the brave new world wrought by the Celtic Tiger economy. It’s a different world from the depressed, inward-looking Dublin that Joyce moved to as a student. The plot moves ef­fi­cient­ly and some of the characters are, well, characters. Not Joyce though: he’s insecure and in­tro­vert­ed, still recovering …continue.