I believe that if I had grown up in Edinburgh, or Europe in general, I would have resonated much more with Ken Macleod’s The Star Fraction. As it is, the book clicked at about the 2/3 mark and turned out to be quite thought provoking.

The need for a European sensibility comes from Macleod’s approach to politics. As much as The Star Fraction is about hacking computing systems, it’s about hacking political systems. Here in the US we really don’t have a wide diversity of political thought. As our most recent election demonstrated, just an off-hand mention of spreading the wealth can reveal you as a godless, tyrannical, socialist. This makes it a bit tricky to build up empathy with many of the characters as I didn’t have that common ground of political encounters.

The Star Fraction’s protagonist is Moh Kohn, a Trotskyist mercenary who contracts to provide deadly force in the very precisely legislated resolution of conflict. Kohn plies his trade in an ultra-fragmented Europe and specifically the Isle of Britannia. Every stripe of political leaning seems to (un)peacefully coexist in little slivers of the former Kingdom. The good old UN and US are the international bully boys. Meanwhile, man has progressed somewhat into space, where Space Defense can laser fry any serious unrest and workers out of this world are plotting revolutions.

Kohn gets hooked up with Janis Taine, an idealistic scientist on the lam from both ecoradicals and secretive Men-In-Black. The pair is joined by Jordan Brown, an atheist refugee from a fundamentalist Christian enclave. Between the viral AI legacy of Kohn’s father, Taine’s photographic memory inducing drug experiment, and Brown’s encounter with an emergent consciousness an extended chase leads to a phase change for the climax of The Star Fraction.

Despite the lack of political touchpoints, I still managed to connect with Kohn, Taine, Brown, and an assortment of other interesting characters. Macleod also does a fine job of developing the interactions between humanity and emergent AI. I can’t do it justice, but his writing is complex, touching, and evocative in this regard. Once the characters are introduced and the chase really gets going, the plot moves quickly.

If a big helping of overt political thinking on top of your singularity fix sounds intriguing, then The Star Fraction is for you. Recommended.

The UK’s Guardian is running a series on 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. Recently they’ve been listing fantasy, horror, and science fiction that fit in this vein. There’s lots of good suggestions in there. The British angle also broadens the horizon.

Obviously, given the breadth of the categories, and the difficulty of clean definitions, there’s a lot of room for argument. I’d definitely add John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider. If Vernor Vinge’s True Names wasn’t a short story, I’d add that as well. Especially if they’re going to include something like Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which I always felt was overrated a bit due to a reliance on ethnic stereotyping and too much cleverness by half. Hiro Protagonist? Yeesh.

After reading Chris Moriarty’s Spin State, I had low expectations for Spin Control. Truth to tell, if I hadn’t already bought Spin Control with Spin State, I wouldn’t have purchased the former.

I was pleasantly surprised by Spin Control though. I’ll get into my dislike for Spin State in a later review, but I can recommend Spin Control.

Spin Control revolves around the defection of Arkady, a Syndicate-born member of a gene line, into the hands of Earth-bound Israeli forces. The Spin series is set well in the future and the Syndicates are essentially post-humans that promulgate through gene splicing and cloning. Particular gene lines are of one sex, with individual deviance hard to discern and indeed proactively stamped out. Moriarty goes to some length to build an analogy with ant species. The Syndicates are generally banned from the UN sphere of influence, including Earth, that comprises the reach of old humanity. Advanced communication and computing technologies, based on quantum computing concepts developed in Spin State, make an appearance as well.

Arkady claims to have a game changing weapon that could swing the outcome of the still ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In return, he demands the safety of his gene line lover, Arkasha, who has turned out to be a little too distinctive for his line’s tastes. After landing on Earth, Arkady becomes caught up in a complex web of intrigue. Treachery and double crosses abound, across political, cultural, ethnic, and even racial lines. From Spin State, the characters of Catherine Li, herself a genetically amplified human, and Cohen, an advanced, embodied AI, become central players in the game.

A flashback thread spread throughout the book tells the backstory of a colonization voyage that Arkady was a member of as an ant biology scientist. Having being pushed to the periphery of space, the Syndicates are always on the hunt for livable planets. This arc elegantly develops a deeper understanding of Syndicate life and how it is radically different from our existence. The evolution of Arkady and Arkasha’s romance is also captured here.

Setting the tale in The Middle East is a big gambit, and something that could easily fall flat or be in bad taste. Heck, for all I know it could be in bad taste, given that I’m not from the region or invested in the politics. Still, it was an interesting twist. Otherwise, Spin Control reads mostly like a high tech spy novel. Sometimes you need a scorecard to keep track of the players, or more importantly their motivations, but not stupefyingly so.

Emergent systems, individual autonomy, and the definition of human intelligence are the key scientific themes percolating within Spin Control. This was a welcome change from the quantum computing driven Spin State. The fact that I actually have a working introduction to all of those concepts, and didn’t know a jack about quantum computing when I read Spin State, probably had something to do with it. But not needing a physics background to understand the speculative aspect of the story makes Spin Control more accessible.

All in all, Spin Control is a good read, putting questions of individuality and autonomy into the context of a familiar centuries old conflict, played out as a techno thriller.

Amazon gave me $8 of promotional credit in the Amazon MP3 Store thanks to some other Christmas gift purchases. I needed to use it before January 31st so started casting about for things of interest.

DJ mix house music is still a tough get. Not to mention that Amazon often sells dj mixes as one big mp3, not separating the tracks. However, the other two major services, iTunes Music Store and eMusic, have this bad habit as well, so I can’t ding them too hard for this.

Going back to my hip-hop roots, I finally settled on Boogie Down Productions Criminal Minded. But heresy of heresy, you can’t buy Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. A quick peek in the iTMS reveals they have it “in stock”.

iTMS 1, AzMP3 0

Playing Hearts cut into my blog writing time. Now that I’ve slaked my thirst a bit, let’s see if I can get back on track.

Idoru is the classic second of a trilogy book. The individual story is fairly fulfilling on its own, the overall plot is advanced, but since there’s a third chapter coming the second can’t give you ultimate satisfaction.

That said, Idoru may be the most coherent of Gibson’s Bridge Series. Virtual Light, which didn’t fall into the 2008 books read list, involves a lot of introductions, which gives it a slow start. All Tomorrow’s Parties layers on new characters and plot creating a frantic rush at the end. Idoru may be just right.

Idoru’s tale is typical Gibson interweaving multi-arcs, jaunting across the Pacific Rim, from Seattle to Japan. One protagonist, Colin Laney has a specific talent for data sifting. He sees “nodal points”, sort of intuitive connections of data flows and cultural happenings. The other main character, Chia, is a fangirl of the band Lo/Rez. The threads of Laney and Chia barrel towards each other as Laney is hired into Lo/Rez’s service and Chia journeys to Tokyo to find out the truth about recent band rumors. Meanwhile, Rez is bent on marrying Rei Toei, a Japanese pop-idol who just happens to be completely virtual.

A decade later, Idoru seems somewhat prescient. I read the novel as speaking on a forthcoming intersection of technology, celebrity, and fandom. Gibson was clearly extrapolating from trends in Japan, but I think we’ve seen some of the themes play out here in the United States. A young teen American girl whimsically picking up, making a trans-Pacific journey, and finding succor through pop culture fan clubs is not out of the realm of possibility. Bands who are more self-sustaining corporate entities then artistic endeavors are here. Plus they’re popularity is increasingly intermeshed with the tides of The Web. And we seem to be slouching towards purely virtual entertainers.

But to make it short and sweet, it had been a long time since I’d read Idoru. It was much better than I remembered.

It’s official. Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States of America.

Being an optimistic 40ish, I thought this would happen in my lifetime. Didn’t think it would come this soon or this way. I’m finding as I get grayer though, that greatness, and great moments, often arrive earlier than one expects.

I sprung for a copy of Freeverse’s game 3D Hearts.

That might have been a mistake. Talk about a big time sink.

I can’t say I’m particularly blown away, but it’s a nicely polished product. You can play against a handful of odd characters each with uniquely humorous dialog. Then again there’s not a whole lot you can do with the game of Hearts.

It’s about the best version of Hearts I found for the Mac, given a limited web search. There’s probably a comparable free version, but for $20 I didn’t have to think too hard.

I’ve always admired John Watson’s ever growing menagerie of Flickr hacks. Having recently revisited the site, I enjoyed his overview of what happens over time to one day page of Flickr’s Explore. A given day page is not frozen in time for Explore’s purposes. The only thing that’s fixed is the population that can appear on that day page: photos shot on that day. Otherwise, only the Flickr boffins know what determines which photos are displayed at any given moment.

Once upon a time I used to be really interested in Flickr’s interestingness algorithm. I was also curious about the statistics and properties of the photos that did have high interestingness. The Flickr API has to be one of the nicer web service api’s out there and there was a nice Python library to access the service. I implemented some code for decent sized longitudinal studies similar to Watson’s captures.

Looking at the video Watson created, the thought came to me that there’s actually a lot more potential for using those interesting photos as a gateway into Flickr. As his automatically built movie demonstrates, one can easily build new media artifacts with those photos as a seed. Attached to each of those photos is a Flickr user, an entry point into the Flickr social network. I’m going to start Flickr hacking again to see what I can come up with.

Meanwhile, also on the open data front, CiteULike makes data dumps available. CiteULike is a social bibliography service aimed at academic researchers. The service provides tagging ala del.icio.us, but is more vertical in that it understands URL references into many journal publishing services. CiteULike also provides hooks to upload common bibliography formats or download your bookmarks into common bibliography tools.

The CiteULike data dumps capture posting activity, linkouts (resolution of internal ids to actual articles), and group membership. This might be an interesting “starter” dataset for folks looking to practice application of network analysis algorithms, information retrieval techniques, or information visualization.

Discogs.com has an API. The interface is small, lightweight, and RESTful. There are 4 methods: get release, get artist, get label, and search. They rate limit requests to 5000 in 24 hours, which is generous. Even better, each response tells you how many requests you’ve used.

Best of all, data retrieved is in the Public Domain. Do with it what you will.

Charlie Stross that is.

One of the nice things about getting back into reading books is that many authors now blog. I’m monitoring a rather arbitrarily compiled “4 Horsemen of the Scifiblogalypse”: Charles Stross, John Scalzi, Neil Gaiman, and Cory Doctorow.

In The Atrocity Archives, Stross had a lengthy addendum describing how the book was a combination of spy thriller and Lovecraftian horror. Apparently he’s working on some follow up novels and the process is … nibbling at the dark corners of his mind. He coins the term Strangelovecraftian to cover the style of horror he’ll be further exploring in the Laundry series. Looks like it’ll be a blend of the absurdity of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Lovecraft’s apocalyptic shuffling things from a cold, dark, alien time. It’ll probably be quite funny, in a sick sort of way.

Anyway, it’s an interesting look at how an author thinks about shaping an upcoming work. Now I have to go and place an order for the trade paperback of The Jennifer Morgue.

I work smack in the middle of the DC Metro area, typically ensconced in a lovely office building in the Ballston section of Arlington, VA. I live at the margins of “DC”, way out in Loudoun County, VA, not too far from the West “By God” Virginia border. Don’t ask.

Despite growing up 20 years ago in Frederick County, MD, and moving back to DC about 2 years ago, I’m still not into the tempo of the city.

DC Blogs is helping to fix that. I’m enjoying the DC Blogs Noted feed, which serves reasonable tapas-style portions of DC themed blogs on a daily basis. The editors have a fine sensibility and the blurb writing that goes along with each linked post is exquisite. They also have an aggregator, DC Blogs Live, which looks like it might be a bit of a firehose. Not quite ready to jump into that yet.

In any event, good on ya DC Blogs.

Okay I know it’s a beta, but Google Blog Search has some serious wackness. Here’s their post history for Mass Programming Resistance. There’s a whole week of January missing.

What’s wack is that the main Google search engine actually has said missing posts indexed. Not to mention Google Reader. Frankly both of the sibling properties of Google Blog Search are scary in how fast they visit after I post.

WTF?! Sibling rivalry?

My suspicion is that there might have been some ping wonkiness, as I remember a couple of entries leading to duplicate posts that may have made me look like a spammer. But I’m not going to put a lot of effort into figuring this one out. Got better things to do.

I was probably at my physically fittest in September 2001. Someday I may tell a long 9/11 story that will explain how I know this. Don’t worry it’s low drama with a happy ending. In the meantime, it has been a long slow decline to sitting on my ass all day and being a good 20 - 30 lbs over my ideal BMI. I’m putting it in pixels here just so the goal can stare me coldly, laughingly in the face.

In the first quarter of the year I’d just be happy to have the exercise ball rolling in a consistent fashion. 3 times a week of 30 - 60 minutes of serious workout and I’ll declare victory on that front. I figure after that the habit will have stuck.

By the end of the year, down 20 lbs, although I have higher hopes than that. I’ve already started tweaking the diet and seeing some small gains. Got to make them stick though.

Charlie Jane Anders may have to post a bunch of insipid crap at io9 to pay the bills, but she can write some damn fine and worthwhile reviews in addition to meaty interviews.

LaunchBar is another MacOS application which I pay for. In fact, I bought a Titanium G4 MacBook just after the turn of the century and I had purchased LaunchBar for that machine.

Despite shelling out the dollars, I’ve never actually exploited LaunchBar to its fullest. Oh sure, Command-Space is committed to muscle memory, but I basically use the tool like a smart application launcher.

Last night I tried using it to play an album I had ripped to iTunes so I didn’t have to switch to iTunes. It sort of worked, adding the album tracks to a new “Launcbar” playlist, improperly ordered, and hitting play on iTunes. Then I figured out I needed to pick the playlist I wanted in LaunchBar and It Just Worked!

Brilliant! I figure it’s only really good for favorite playlists and not digging through to find one’s you haven’t listened to recently. Then again that’s the whole point, to save you effort on the stuff you do (listen to) frequently.

Today I was trying to LaunchBar into the URL for Google Image Search. Turns out LaunchBar already has a little widget you can hot key to, enter your query, and pull up the page with your search results. Suhweet!

Might be time to check out that manual. And I will definitely be forking over the dough to upgrade once LaunchBar 5 goes final.

As predicted, Mushroom Jazz 6 is growing on me. My current thought is that the first 2/3 to 3/4 is bumpin’ but the tail end still doesn’t grab me. It’ll probably take a few more weeks of listening to converge though.

However the three track run of:

• Colossus - Dopebeatz
• Brawdcast - Calm Down (Instrumental)
• J-Boogie’s Dubtronic Science* feat. Crown City Rockers - Alive (Instrumental)

is definitely sicktastic!

Film at 11. Image cribbed from the in depth analysis from Wired Epicenter by Elliot Van Buskirk. And just when I was about to seriously start considering Amazon’s MP3 Downloads.

Looks like there might be some blog mileage in digging into each service’s dj mix catalog and seeing what I find.

For whatever reason, I don’t see much link love for Discogs.com in the circles I travel. It’s a great open source effort to capture artist discographies and album listings in obsessive, gory detail.

Discogs.com actually solved a decade old mystery for me. Living in the SF Bay Area in ‘94, and partaking heavily of the underground house music scene, I moved into the modern era and started buying dj mix cds. One of the earliest, maybe even the first, was Little Louie Vega’s United DJs of America, V2: New York City. I wore that thing out and still enjoy listening to it 14 years after its release. The build and release at the end is to die for.

However, Track 16, listed as In The Dark We Live by Aphrohead, always puzzled me. I was familiar with all of the vinyl releases of that cut and knew that on Vega’s mix there was something else blended in that carried really distinctive vocals. “I dance … and I sweat … and I let myself… Go!” I searched high and low. I even got someone on Usenet to promise to unearth the secret. They never came through, go figure. I gave up the chase until I found Discogs.com

Digging around under Vega’s discography I checked the DMC UK version of United DJs V2. Sure enough, “Notes: Sleeve mistakenly shows track 16 as Aphrohead - In The Dark We Live.” Instead it was Head Rush’s Underground and apparently the only track they ever released. Talk about obscure!

Technically the track listing is correct, but it would have also been fair to credit Head Rush in the liner notes as well. In a similar fashion, Vega cribs from himself and The Bomb (These Sounds Fall Into My Mind) makes an uncredited appearance early in the mix. Maybe it had something to do with licensing.

The Web provides.

Scott Rosenberg beat me to it but I meant to point to an interesting New Yorker article drawing parallels between The Village Voice and The Blogosphere. I’m in agreement with Rosenberg that the spirit of the early Voice was akin to blogging’s ethos, but that The Voice was nowhere near what the blogosphere is now. As a fan of early hip-hop, I hear echoes of the whole “Lou Reed rapped, so he was the father of hip-hop” line of argument. Yeah, right.

The correct phrasing is that The Village Voice presaged the blogosphere.

I used to have a somewhat curmudgeonly view of gift cards. A gift card was saying, “I don’t care enough to bother shopping for you, but care just enough to tell you where to spend my money!” I took a slightly less dim view of cash. At least you can spend that anywhere on anything or even stash it and earn compound interest. My overarching principle though is that if you really want to give a gift, put in the freaking time to consider and select one.

Of course my mother-in-law had to go and wreck that philosophy.

Now I should mention that the fact that these cards were quite generous was a factor. My mother-in-law was definitely not into the $10 Starbucks drive-by. I’ll just say that while you couldn’t get a laptop or netbook, much of the iPod line was in range. Still, if one was truly being a humbug, the above sentiment would apply no matter the denomination.

But the key was that the past few gift cards (8 or so between Christmas and birthdays) were from Borders. Big deal you say? Well up until this year, Borders.com was essentially a private label Amazon.com for books and music. Win!! At least until Borders decided to strike out on their own. One highly inconvenient Borders shopping trip with a gift card later (Whaddya mean my Amazon Prime doesn’t apply? How the hell do you find the House music in this mess?) and I’m dropping hints with my wife that it would be great if she could find a way for her Internet challenged mom to generate Amazon gift cards.

This Christmas we made a step forward to the BestBuy gift card, as generous as ever. Granted it’s not as convenient as Amazon or price competitive as NewEgg, but I look at it this way. A decent sized gift card is a pretty good head start on a significant electronic purchase. That’s how the MacBook purchase came about. I had a store credit and didn’t really know what to do with it. That plus saving some pennies over time got me a new laptop. Same concept will apply with my mother-in-law’s present. I’m thinking of targeting a digital SLR camera.

My mother-in-law will never shop for the geek stuff I like. But she never wants to be told what to get for a gift. A stance I agree with. Gift demands are for children. Judiciously chosen gift cards allow us to meet halfway.

Subsequently, I’ve revised my thinking about gift cards. Obviously, I’m going to graciously receive them. But now I’ll consider giving them, although I try to team them up with something inexpensive that I’ve picked out, just to show I’ve put in the effort.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Furious downloading shall commence as soon as this is posted.

Also: A nice overview of the Picasa Mac Beta from Michael Calore at Wired’s Epicenter blog.

Wish me luck. I’m going to try and upgrade to Movable Type 4.23 in-place. Breakage may ensue.

Update: Looks like we have success.

One of the side benefits of the book reading effort of 2008 was the discovery of the Arlington County Public Library, which is a few blocks away from where I work. Besides a nice collection of books they have reliable, no registration, WI-FI, and plenty of computer friendly tables. They’ll even send you e-mail notices about upcoming due dates. I’ve taken to dropping in over lunch or when there’s some slack time between knocking off work and catching my bus home.

Browsing the graphic novel section, I came across the collected versions of Frank Miller’s Sin City comics. Although I didn’t think the movie was great (the intense ultraviolence can be offputting) I thought The Hard Goodbye was excellent and in hindsight portends Mickey Rourke’s star turn in The Wrestler. The voiceovers in The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard were overly intrusive. However, the movie worked for me visually as an audacious attempt to bring a comic book to life on the big screen.

I didn’t realize the extent the movie was an almost literal interpretation of the comics. I had repeatedly watched Sin City on cable in 2007 long before I got my hands the graphic novels. I would say 90 percent of the plot survived directly from the books. Probably 75 to 80 percent of the dialog was retained, which I find pretty remarkable. Having gone back to the original source material, I have to commend Robert Rodriguez et. al. for creating a pretty compelling experience that’s true to the original vision and style. Obviously having Frank Miller on the team helped, but it’s still a pretty far leap from the comic form to cinema. That’s why they’re different media.

While Old Man’s War was a revelation, The Ghost Brigades is a worthy successor. Originally I thought The Ghost Brigades fell a little short of Old Man’s War, but upon some reflection I think it might be just as good if not better.

The Ghost Brigades continues in John Scalzi’s world of the Colonial Defense Forces protecting spacefaring colonists from an exceedingly hostile galaxy. The sequel moves into a deeper exploration of the CDF’s Special Forces, a.ka. The Ghost Brigades, radically augmented humans bred from the womb to take on the really dirty tasks of space warfare. Members of the Ghost Brigades are synthesized from gene lines harvested from CDF volunteers who die before getting their new bodies. They’re old, it happens. Because of this, and the augmented capabilities they receive, Special Forces are considered to be a bit freakish.

The protagonist, Jared Dirac, is an odd case even amongst this band of post-humans. Through a confluence of highly damaging treason against the Colonial Union and “consciousness transfer” technology, Jared is technically a clone of a high profile traitor, Charles Boutin. However, failing to initially reveal any knowledge that could lead to the capture Boutin, Jared is simply entered into the Special Forces. This gives Scalzi, in homage to Heinlein, room to explore how troops train, adapt to their technology, and ultimately bond. Eventually Jared enters into his tour of duty, sees a couple of harrowing missions and ultimately becomes key in a high risk plot to eliminate Boutin.

Where The Ghost Brigades diverges somewhat from Old Man’s War is a clearer emphasis on some of the ethical, political, and philosophical conundrums hinted at in Old Man’s War. For example, the odd status of the Special Forces as post-humans definitely comes to the fore. While Old Man’s War was a good end-to-end tale, the originality of its fundamental premise, the wisdom of old age fused into engineered warfaring youth, is the critical hook. That trick can’t be relied on in The Ghost Brigades, but the reward is deeper exploration of what it says about humanity to take old people and recycle them into soldiers, to create post-human super soldiers who haven’t experienced adolescence before seeing battle, and to willy-nilly record and transfer consciousness between physical bodies. Not to mention various devious tactics employed by a number of the main characters.

So while I’m sure there are plenty of folks who think The Ghost Brigades, by virtue of being a sequel, can’t stand up to Old Man’s War, I actually think it does quite well.

Memo to self: posting once a day through January will get you back in the habit.

Memo to self: While the break with the past life should be clean, it shouldn’t be totally erased. Figure out a way to give it a proper resting place.

Memo to self: spend some time learning about Clojure, a Lisp dialect focused on functional programming and concurrency. Bill Clementson makes a pretty compelling case for Clojure.

I’m in the tank for Mark Farina. I bought in at Seasons One and have been hooked ever since. Farina has been a consistent mix-cd generator over the past decade, and has two broad styles: groovy San Francisco style house, and downtempo blends of hip hop and jazzy beats.

I’m typically on top of new Farina releases like a hawk, but Mushroom Jazz 6 snuck in during the middle of the 2008 US Presidential campaign. Suffice to say I was somewhat distracted.

In any event, I downloaded the new CD off of iTunes (sans DRM) and have listened twice. Number Six is definitely trying to be much more jazzy than the previous five Mushroom Jazzes. I’m not sure it quite works, but then again each of the previous editions has taken a few repeat listens to grow on me in their unique ways. I’ll wait a little bit to pass final judgement. Somewhat disturbing though is that Mushroom Jazz Six has some subtle djing/blending errors to my bedroom dj level ears. Anything else Farina has done was flawless in this regard.

However, this prompts me to latch on to an opportunity for 2009, review all of the Mushroom Jazz series in depth, and write a wrapup overview. There seem to be a decent amount of web feedback on the newer CDs, but not much on earlier ones. I’ve seen a number of short highly positive sentiments, but it will be fun to do some research and put together an overarching view of this unique ouevre.

Yeah, I know. Nobody cares about my fantasy football team!! But with the end of the NFL regular season, I need to vent just for closure.

Sad to say but Green Lantern Corps finished out of the playoffs. Still I enjoyed the experience overall (my second season), and it definitely made me much more knowledgeable about the league.

For any fantasy geeks who stumble upon this, here are some pertinent details. 16 team league (yikes!!) with a standard roster + flex. Touchdowns and yardage + points-per-reception (PPR) scoring. Top six made the playoffs, with ties broken by season total points. I got the 12th pick in the draft, so you know the deck was stacked against me.

Positives. Foresight to draft Kurt Warner as a backup to Tony Romo. Picking up Houston’s Steve Slaton and New Orleans Lance Moore off the waiver wires. Squeezing points out of Oakland’s Justin Fargas, along with Denver’s Ryan Torain and Peyton Hillis. Tying, based on record, with four other teams for that last playoff spot.

Negatives. Missing that last playoff spot by about 30 fantasy points. The league was so big that the waiver wire was pretty close to empty all season. A six team playoff, meaning two teams get byes, is sort of stupid. I had a crappy set of running backs all season, including Fred Taylor, who managed a negative game. Giving up on Steve Slaton way too early in week three. Tony Romo getting hurt right before Kurt Warner’s bye week. Romo not getting back on the field until after our trade deadline.

The GM of Green Lantern Corps (me!) blew two games with bad roster decisions driven by matchups. Fred Taylor bit me in the ass posting 0.5 points against Denver’s run defense. Alternatively, I could have played Earnest Graham against Carolina for 12 fantasy points and the win. Also, I sat Lance Moore against the Green Bay secondary (I thought Al Harris and Charles Woodson were shutdown corners) and Lance went for a couple of long touchdowns. Meanwhile, for some godforsaken reason, I thought St. Louis’ Antonio Pittman, as a starter, would actually put up some fantasy points against the Bears. There’s your season right there.

Despite all the negatives it was still pretty rewarding being a challenger with such a crappy draft position. Bottom line is that I’m a pretty decent talent evaluator, but overthought the matchup angle a bit. Next year I’ll have the confidence to put my best lineup out there and run with them.

Wow! I knew Watchmen was great, but I had forgotten how great. The upcoming movie has a heck of a high standard against which it will be measured. I almost didn’t include it in my books completed list since Watchmen is technically a “graphic novel”, but after re-reading it I realized that it is so richly complex, the term novel is definitely applicable.

The surface story is the murder mystery of The Comedian, a costumed crusader. Layers are added by putting masked heroes into a realistic context, complete with clear literary statements on political and cultural themes. These aren’t superheroes but mere humans with all their strengths and frailties, modulo Dr. Manhattan who injects an element of the metaphysical. A classic mid-50’s style horror comic is deftly woven throughout the book. Each chapter concludes with a more text driven segment, that provides a lot of backstory. The mystery folds in multiple tragic twists and eventually turns into a deeper and more horrific conspiracy, with a disturbing ending. Amazingly efficient, every last word, last frame, and every last image of Watchmen contributes to the power of the story. As in every great work, Watchmen rewards repeated close reading. Hit the Wikipedia article for Watchmen to get a sense of how closely the novel can be read. Beware spoilers!!

But Watchmen’s unique strength is in the depth of of its character development. Obviously the time and attention given to the major characters, The Comedian, Rorschach, NiteOwl (elder and junior), Dr. Manhattan, Silk Spectre, Ozymandias, etc. pays off. But Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons make even minor characters have a big impact. The whole thread built around Marooned, a Tale of the Black Freighter is truly brilliant and many an author can learn something about how to put a minor arc to great use. Marooned stands on its own as a story, gives weight to a number of minor characters, foreshadows the larger drama, and questions the final resolution.

Finally, the ultimate evidence of the power of the characters is the emotions that Rorschach, arguably the protagonist of the story, engenders. He’s a reactionary nutball, certifiably psychotic, and almost completely unsympathetic. Somehow, in revealing his backstory Watchmen makes him more vile, more pathetic, and more human. To the very end, he bitterly holds to his ideals, which in American culture is always enobling. Yet given the final outcome, and Rorschach’s eventual end, can he be viewed as anything but a fool despite possibly having the last laugh?

Anyone who thinks of comics as only about “underwear perverts” will have their world shattered by Watchmen.

Encouraged by the gifts I got from MacHeist, I decided to ante up for some MacOS application licenses I’ve had my eye on for a while: MarsEdit 2 and Witch.

I’ve been a MarsEdit license holder since it first launched. I’m planning to blog more regularly in 2009 so the upgrade fee of $9.95 is money well spent on a nice desktop blog post editor.

Witch is a window switcher, as opposed to most of the application switchers available for the Mac. I like to have lots of applications open and typically multiple windows in each application. But I also like to minimize some windows, which apparently is not idiomatic on MacOS. The key distinction to me is that it’s somewhat difficult to switch to minimized (not hidden) windows from the keyboard. Worse, I’m working on a 13.3” MacBook, so there isn’t a lot of screen real estate. Witch is a nice compromise.

Next up, I’ll be looking to upgrade my dusty old OmniGraffle 3 to version 5, get an image processing application (not Photoshop, overkill for my needs), and determine if I really need a virtualization solution. A photo managing tool is on the horizon but not pressing. Obviously I’ve got iPhoto, but I’ve found it really irritating in the past. And I’m hoping Google finally delivers Picasa for the Macintosh.

One neat thing about being on the Macintosh was the MacHeist Giving Tree. MacHeist is an annual promotion that bundles up a bunch of good Mac apps into one low price. There’s some controversy as to whether or not the bundle is a good thing or a bad thing for app vendors, but it’s definitely a win for consumers, modulo the potential for driving independent Mac developers out of business. The Giving Tree was an inducement for new registrations with the promise of free applications, some to be made available on Christmas.

I’m a little wary of promotions like this. Usually there’s too much chaff relative to the wheat. Not so in this case. I automatically received Synergy and Enigmo. Synergy is a lightweight, but really professional, iTunes controller. I found Synergy immediately useful. Enigmo is a 3D puzzle game. Not my style so I probably won’t play it much though.

On Christmas, MacHeist revealed it’s other gift applications, Headline, iConquer, SantaSnaps, and 1Password. I’ve been using a promotional version of 1Password and was planning on purchasing a license, so the gift license was a big win. I will definitely purchase an upgrade when the next version comes out. Consider that a successful customer acquisition. On first blush, iConquer is essentially the old board game Risk. Not real compelling from where I sit. SantaSnaps dresses up photos with festive decorations but won’t be useful until next year. Headline is a compact RSS reader. I’m a NetNewsWire and Google Reader junkie, so I doubt I’ll find it handy.

Two out of six clear hits, two middling games, and two clear apps destined for the attic. Don’t know how they evaluate these things, but I’d call it a win. Plus, they can promote the heck out of MacHeist to me and I will seriously consider a purchase.

Not to mention they gave away some iPhone apps, but I don’t have an iPhone.

FeedBurner was a small company that provided proxying and analytics for webfeeds. They became pretty popular. Then they got bought by Google. Nothing changed … for a while.

Now I’m seeing crappy image based ads in my aggregators. Yuck! Text based ads have been around for a while, but they were pretty unobtrusive. Worst of all is that the image ads are usually insanely ugly and frequently mistargeted.

This sucks!!

That is all.

(Actually I’m making these assertions without doing proper legwork. If it’s not FeedBurner’s fault, my apologies. Often wrong, never in doubt.)

I’m an inveterate William Gibson fan. Neuromancer is one of my favorite books of all time and Burning Chrome is an incredible short story. Yeah there were a couple of slipups (I’m looking at you Difference Engine), but the body of work as a whole resonates with me.

What grabs me the most is the “techno-cultural ether” he manages to generate. A Gibson book never stops to explain a technology. The characters all treat the fancy stuff as if it was air, the way we do laptops, and cell phones, and WI-FI, and X-Boxes, etc., etc. The focus on the cultural milieu, as opposed to hard science, often makes Gibson’s works seem light and airy to some folks. That in my book is just the residue of elegance.

I’ve heard, the “Virtual Light” series receive this criticism, but upon rereading the books, some distance gives the trilogy some more heft.

All Tomorrow’s Parties, the culmination of the trilogy, was definitely better than I remembered. In typical Gibson fashion, a number of parallel threads interweave and interlock their way to a dramatic conclusion. Bobby Rydell, ace rent-a-cop from Virtual Light, reenters the scene as well as Chevette, his bicycling love interest. The echoes of Idoru ripple around the Pacific Rim, through to cyberspace and back.

Parties works best as an ode to the organic life of unplanned urban environments. One of the major dramatic tensions is the survival of the autonomous community that has enveloped the remnants of the Bay Bridge. More than once this odd confluence of people, cultures, and scraps of technology conspire to save Rydell and Chevette.

The book is not without its flaws though. A few too many new characters are added to the mix, some with stage time disproportionate to their dramatic impact. The infosphere conflict between Colin Laney and Harwood is muddled and confusing. Parsing through Laney’s past and his final battle left me cold.

But as I said I have a soft spot for Gibson so I can’t really discourage anyone from reading All Tomorrow’s Parties.

Asimov’s Foundation and Empire continues the underlying theme this year of meat and potatoes science fiction. The tale, or tales, still hold up surprisingly well. The first major one, detailing The Foundation’s encounter with an upwardly mobile general of the Empire, now reads like a short story developed after Asimov had an introduction to game theory. The Hand of Seldon reaches out and saves The Foundation, completely independent of the actions of the main players.

The heart of the book though, is the extensive tale of The Mule’s potential to absolutely disrupt Seldon’s plans for The Foundation. The Mule is a completely random wildcard. An unknown mutant of unknown powers who is rapidly conquering large portions of the galaxy’s fringe. His emergence coincides with a slow stagnation and corruption of The Foundation and the development of an opposing underground resistance.

Even knowing the rough eventual outcome of the story (I’ve read Foundation and Empire before, over a decade ago) the battle to defeat The Mule was deeply engrossing. Surprisingly so since the book crescendoes in a classic surprise ending built on a “hide in plain sight” gambit. This is an example of good storytelling being compelling even if you know the ending.

In retrospect, the two stories of Foundation and Empire are nice counterweights. The first story buttresses the concept of Seldon’s macro scale psychohistory being some sort of sufficiently advanced technology unto itself that it can transcend mere mortals. The Mule, and his eventual nemesis, points out that random events on the micro scale can have huge impacts, and that the irrationalities of humans (emotion, loyalty, intuition) still have something to say about our future.

As miserable as American Gods was, Anansi Boys is completely delightful. Easily the best Neil Gaiman book I’ve read so far.

Somewhat of a sequel to American Gods, Anansi Boys features Mr. Nancy, essentially Anansi The Spider of African myth, and his estranged son Fat Charlie Nancy. Anansi is one of the classic trickster gods, continuously spinning wondrous tales, and conniving the other primal gods of the African plains. Mr. Nancy is always the life of the party. Fat Charlie is the antithesis of his father, being a bit of an English schlub, destined for a henpecked marriage courtesy of an overbearing mother-in-law. In fact Fat Charlie hates Mr. Nancy for the myriad ways his father found to embarrass him over the years.

Mr. Nancy nominally dies, Charlie attends the funeral, and with a bit of folk wisdom from Mr. Nancy’s old-time neighbors, accidentally conjures up his long lost brother, Spider. Spider got the entertaining side of his father’s personality, not to mention the magical abilities of the gods. A night of drunken revelry with Spider ensues, and then an entertaining caper breaks out. Caught up in an embezzlement scheme that devolves into a comedy of errors, Charlie eventually comes to terms with his father’s world and finds his true mate.

Sighs!

Actually it’s not as treacly as I’ve written and the key for me was the light humorous touch Gaiman brought, befitting a trickster god’s tale. Anansi Boys is really funny in spots and never overbearingly dark, despite quite a bit of evildoing and violence.

One other thing that struck me was that some of the characters were, get this, black and this was just matter of fact. Racial differences weren’t leveraged as a literary device, or used as a crutch for urban “street cred” as in many science fiction books. Or I was just too dense to notice. In any event, I found it refreshing.

So much for that Rendezvous with Rama film. Looks like the production is not going forward.

Sorry Camino, it just didn’t work out. When I moved into the new digs, our fling was pretty hot. As time went on, memories of the old Foxy mama kept creeping back in.

She always was colorful, memorable, and really, really flexible. While we were taking time off, she got faster, and more user friendly, not to mention better at safe surfing. She moved back in today.

Sorry it didn’t work Camino, but hey, every guy likes a freak in the bedroom.

“He’s still alive. They hit him with five shots and he’s still alive!”
—Virgil “The Turk” Sollozzo

The White Sox managed to avoid elimination by beating the Rays, 5-3, last night. The Sox outlasted The Lovable Losers from the Northside of town at least. If we can get it back to Tampa, the heat’ll be on the newbies.