Car! Books! Stuff!

27 October 2000

Woohoo! After four, yes, four months of waiting, we’ve finally
got the car we won in July. I went along to Abercromby Toyota last Monday
to pick it up. I think the sales people were a bit confused when the first
thing I asked was, “will you buy it back off us?” They got over it, though,
but the price they offered wasn’t quite the price we were hoping for. So now
it’s on the open market.

Would you buy a used car from this man? Of course you would 🙂

Books!

The long wait is finally over:
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman is finally out in hardback. This is the
third book in the “His Dark Materials” trilogy, which started with
The Northern Lights and carried on in The Subtle Knife.

Last Christmas Abi gave me the first three Harry Potter books. I zipped
through them in a matter of days, and found that I was thirsty for more
young adult fiction. (For the last few years now, I’ve had an idea for a YA
trilogy of my own bubbling about in my head, but it hasn’t emerged onto paper
yet. I was hoping to stir up some more creative juices. Hardly surprisingly,
it still hasn’t happened yet.)

At one of our local Waterstones,
in the YA section, I found a pile of books, all apparently in the same series,
that caught my eye straight away. The name of the author: Philip Pullman.
The book covers were colourful and moody, the lettering of the titles bold and
sublty ornate, like a finely crafted sword. Whoever came up with the design
deserves an award–they are some of the finest and most inviting covers
I’ve ever seen.

As I read the blurbs, I discovered that there were two series: a Victorian
trilogy (The Ruby in the Smoke, The Shadow in the North and The
Tiger in the Well) and the “His Dark Materials” trilogy. At the time
I didn’t realize that only the first two books of this trilogy were available.

Can I just say, “AAARGH”.

The Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife are just stunningly
good books. They may be targeted at a youthful audience, but any adult will
be equally bowled over by them. The characters are engaging, the world Pullman
has envisioned is wide in scope, filled with genuinely innovative fantasy ideas
(like Lyra’s world, where everyone has a personal daemon, a kind of animal familiar
that is almost part of one’s soul), and the adventures portrayed are gripping,
fast-moving, and filled with tension and action. Plus, they introduced us to
Tokaji wine 🙂

So, for the last nine months or so, I’ve been eagerly waiting for The Amber
Spyglass to appear. Fan sites originally said it would be coming out around
April, but the release date was set back to November (although it’s out already).
Some rumours say that this was to avoid conflict with the launch of the fourth
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, others say that Pullman delivered a
larger than expected manuscript to his publishers, and that it required extensive
editing to bring it down even to the eventual 550 pages of the UK hardback edition.
(I suspect the former, myself.)

But now it’s finally here. I picked it up yesterday evening, and I’m looking
forward to some long and pleasurable hours over the weekend. Once we’ve finished
laying a new floor in our loft, that is.

Microsoft Certification update

After having been a “temp” MCSD (two of my qualifying exams expired
three days after I’d achieved got my MCSD), I’ve now upgraded myself to
permanent MCSD status. The dreaded “70-100 Exam” (Analysing Requirements
and Defining Solution Architectures) turned out not to be so hard after all,
and I passed it with a modest 99%. No, really.

B!

Fifteen weeks down, twenty-five more to go. Abi is just starting to show, or
maybe she’s just getting fat. (Ouch–stop hitting me!)

New PC!

Well, more like yet another set of upgrades to the old one. Frankenstein,
which was build from scratch from individual components back in 1995, has now
shed its last original part–the keyboard. And that was only because it had
too large a connector to plug into my brand new
Abit KT7 motherboard. Mmmm….Donuts…

To go with the motherboard is a new AMD
Duron 800 chip, which is a serious eye-opener after my old K6-2 400. I can
now finally run Deus Ex at an acceptable
framerate–even on my old Voodoo Banshee video card. Okay, so it’s only
running at 640 x 480 resolution, but that’s just fine by me. It still looks
great. (And as for Quake 3, can we say 79fps? Sure we can!)

At the same time, I also decided to give up my treasured Linux project.
I like the idea of Linux, and I love puttering around with it, writing little
scripts, hacking around with CGI and perl. I don’t love having to
spend several days trying to figure out how to get my modem working, how
to set up the drivers for our wireless
ethernet cards, how to configure Samba to serve up our MP3 collection,
and how to configure a proxy/firewall to allow both Abi and me to share
our internet connection.

All of the above had been in my original plan for yon wee Linux beastie
in the corner. But when I can reformat the hard drive, install Windows 98
and WinProxy and have the machine
doing all of the above in under two hours with Microsoft software, then
it really isn’t much of a contest.

I figure I’ll probably end up with a Linux machine somewhere inside
the firewall, and maybe I’ll mess around with it occasionally. I hack
around with computers all day for a living; when I get home, I really just want
things to work first time. Unfortunately, Linux just doesn’t cut it
on the ease of use and configuration front yet.

More soon,

-Martin.