This is a very strange novel, which I abandoned half way through. The last book that I abandoned was simply wretched in every way, but this one is beau­ti­ful­ly written.

Giraffe is also utterly, mad­den­ing­ly pointless. It tells the (apparently) true story of the slaughter of a large herd of captive giraffes at a Czecho­slo­va­kian zoo in 1973. The main narrator is a he­mo­dy­nam­i­cist escorting a newly captured herd of giraffes as they are trans­port­ed by barge from Hamburg to the Czech zoo. He is a depressed-sounding young man with little liking for the Communist regime, mired …continue.

I’m traveling in Europe at present (Ireland last week, Italy this week and next), so I have little op­por­tu­ni­ty to keep up with U.S. news, but the Larry Craig case leapt out at me. Craig is the second U.S. Senator to be exposed in the last few months as a major sexual hypocrite who espouses ‘family values’ but can’t keep his pecker in his pants. Schaden­freude is just the right term for the pleasure I take in seeing these dickwads hoist on their own petards.

David Vitter (brother of one of my professors at Brown, Jeff Vitter) repeatedly consorted with pros­ti­tutes. Larry Craig has pled guilty to soliciting sex in a men’s restroom, joining the …continue.

Lola Somerville, Brooklyn author, recently married to geek-hottie Doug (now there’s a de­mo­graph­ic I can relate to), and best friend of hipster Annabel, starts tripping over bodies of chick lit writers. Someone is winnowing the chick lit best­sellers list and Lola feels compelled to find the killer.

This gentle parody is a cross between chick lit and Nancy Drew. Although happily married, Lola is as insecure and neurotic as ever. No longer worried about getting Mr. Perfect, she’s more concerned about whether she’s ready for a baby and whether her book …continue.

Charlie Asher is the pluperfect Beta Male: nerdy, neurotic, and possessed of too much imag­i­na­tion. But he is not imagining things when people start dropping dead around him, after his wife Rachel dies giving birth to Sophie. Gradually, he comes to realize that he has somehow been appointed a Death Merchant, a sort of Santa’s Helper to Death. His role is to facilitate the ascendance of souls.

Over the years, he tries to get on with his life, raising Sophie, running his second-hand store, grieving for Rachel, and collecting soul …continue.

Miles Roby is the manager of the Empire Grill on the main street of Empire Falls, a small Maine factory town whose time has passed. A quin­tes­sen­tial nice guy (i.e., con­gen­i­tal­ly unable to say ‘no’), his life is about to undergo huge changes as his wife, Janine, is divorcing him. Janine has already taken up with an obnoxious gym owner, known as the Silver Fox. The diner is owned by Mrs. Francine Whiting, whose husband’s family owned the mills that once brought prosperity to Empire Falls. Most of the town still dances …continue.

Blown Away is the latest in Ford’s series about Frank Corso, in­ves­tiga­tive reporter, best­selling author, and abrasive jerk. Corso is pressed by his publisher to look into a year-old case in Penn­syl­va­nia where a victim was sent into a bank with a bomb chained around his neck, then blown up in the parking lot when he was pinned down by the police. Corso’s questions provoke a couple of assaults upon himself, and then the FBI drag him to Los Angeles, where a series of identical bank robberies is taking place.

This …continue.

Laurie R. King is best known for two series of detective novels. One stars Kate Martinelli, an SFPD inspector living in present-day San Francisco with her lesbian partner, Lee, and their young daughter, Nora. The other is set in the 1920s and is written in the voice of Mary Russell, the young wife of the still-active sex­a­ge­nar­i­an, Sherlock Holmes.

Here, King ties both series together. Martinelli in­ves­ti­gates the murder of Philip Gilbert, the doyen of the local Sher­lock­ians, who recently came across a manuscript that seems to have been written …continue.

Dune is Frank Herbert’s classic SF novel, dealing with such themes as a galactic messiah, ecology, politics, treachery, and space opera.

The teenaged Paul Atreides, the product of thousands of years of selective breeding by the Bene Gesserit sisters, arrives on the desert planet Dune, home of the drug melange (or ‘spice’). Spice is fun­da­men­tal to the galactic economy: the Guild navigators use it to ‘fold’ space and transport huge ships between star systems, and it confers longevity and health upon those who can afford it. Spice is a byproduct of the …continue.

Rumpole of the Bailey is familiar to us from his later years as an old warhorse, a Fal­staffi­an character living a life of crime (defending criminals), drinking Chateau Thames Embankment at Pommeroy’s wine bar, and sparring with re­cal­ci­trant judges, fellow members of his Chambers, and She Who Must Be Obeyed: his long-suffering wife, Hilda. He has often alluded to his first great case, the Penge Bungalow Murders, when alone and without a leader, he suc­cess­ful­ly saved a young man from hanging for a double murder.

At last, Rumpole has …continue.

My first project at Cozi is to build a simple REST-style Web Service. Nobody here has done that before.

The first thing that I’m trying to get going is a simple URL rewriter, using an ASP.NET HttpModule.

I’m running Vista as my de­vel­op­ment desktop for the first time. So far, not bad, but there are lots of new quirks to get used to. I’ve been a good boy so far and I’ve left the User Access Control stuff enabled, so that I’m not running with ad­min­is­tra­tive privileges by default.

It’s my first exposure to IIS 7. I must say that the IIS UI is much improved (a low bar to surmount).

My first problem was …continue.