Despite finishing the previous voyage a while ago, I still haven’t got around to writing about the latest book I have read: Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.
I’m not quite sure what to make of it. The basic premise of the setting isn’t unique; that gods are created by and survive on the worship and sacrifice of their followers. The interesting take on the idea is that as various migrants came to America, they brought their gods with them. In modern times, these gods and other beings of folklore (leprechauns and djinni, for example) are reduced to living in run-down apartments, driving taxis and living on the streets.
It’s a pretty neat idea, but the telling needed some work. There are a number of short interludes that don’t really go anywhere. The main character doesn’t really have any impact on anything throughout the story. Things happen to him and around him, but he doesn’t seem to do anything. The unfolding of the main plot up to the big reveal is decent, but I just think it could have been told better.
Would I suggest you read it? Sure, but probably put it halfway down the stack, below all the things you promised to read but haven’t quite got around to yet.
Well, I suppose this was inevitable. I found a three-story collection of Hornblower novels on a virtual garage sale.
The Hornblower novels remind me of Ender’s Game more than anything else. Hornblower reminds me of Ender Wiggin: both are introspective leaders, isolated by their position. Both are analytical but can understand and manage their underlings extremely well. Both have a habit of pulling surprising victories out of dire situations, as well.
Having constant access to Hornblower’s thoughts means you can see how he constructs the persona of a fearless naval captain, despite fighting his fears, controlling his seasickness and maintaining his crew’s morale. Unfortunately, most of his thoughts are him berating himself for cowardice, stupidity or some other perceived flaw. The contradiction between his outward success as a leader and his internal self-flagellation is fascinating in small doses but becomes tiresome.
Even so, I enjoyed the three stories: Hornblower salvages British gold from the bottom of a Turkish harbour, sails halfway around the world on orders kept secret from his crew, handles the scheduling of Nelson’s funeral and manages to do it all while satisfying his personal morals and his duty to the Royal Navy.
Another programming book. I picked up Clocksin and Mellish’s Programming in Prolog after the former second mate encouraged me to learn more about Prolog. Before this, my only exposure to the language was a single lecture at the end of COMP2600 and that old joke (“How many prolog programmers does it take to change a lightbulb? No.”).
Read more...Randall Hyde’s The Art of Assembly Language is one of the works often recommended to new x86 assembly language programmers. It comes in three flavours: two 32-bit versions, one for Windows, one for GNU/Linux and a 16-bit version for DOS. The 32-bit versions use a custom language that adds high-level constructs to assembly language, but the 16-bit version has to deal with DOS. The high-level assembly language in the 32-bit versions put me off, but I was quite happy to read the 16-bit version, being a fan of that crusty old “operating system”.
Read more...We’ve just come back from another voyage. This one was ten days at sea, training a new voyage crew from another school. Two crews, actually: we sailed one crew to Port Davey so they could hike from Melaleuca back to civilisation, and we took on another crew of walkers who had walked in.
I have a rule about Port Davey: never trust a hot, still, sunny day. I coined this rule after we dragged anchor in Joe Page Bay last November. That rule proved correct again, when a front came in just as we finished weighing anchor one morning. The wind quickly picked up, sending us all scurrying up the rigging to sea-gasket sail. That was a good experience, as even a few months ago I would not have worked well enough aloft to be useful in such a situation.
The most interesting thing that happened on the trip was the adjustment of daylight savings time. When the shift happened, we were in Port Davey and chose to ignore it. Once we returned to Recherche Bay, we had to come back to the real world. To do that, we extended three watches by 20 minutes each and stepped the clock back one hour after that.