Le Weekend

Out of deference to those that haven't seen them yet...

( RUGBY )

Flying at 6.30pm, I suspect on the plane which Charlie Stross arrives on.  It's a small world.

Repeat after me...

I do not have a cold, I do not have a cold...

The post nasal drip is in your mind, there is no sore throat...

M has been fighting a cold all week and I'm starting to follow suit.  Bugger and bumholes.

I don't want to do 10 days on the road with a virus thank you, especially given I've not had any kind of sickness since I got back from China and I actually think that was industrial pollution and not an actual bug.

I've had 1 cold this year and 1 the year before which is actually pretty good.  I've this feeling I'm over due for something nasty.

Away MDM and all your evil works...

We have new management at the building and they've said that I can have DirectTV on my little balcony which can see the Southern Sky.  About time!

Most of Seattle is in the grip of MDM (now Broadstripe) who beat even Telewest for their bad service and poor equipment.  For the last year we've been stuck with a PVR from the ark and paying for a HD service which gives us 20, yes, count them, 20 HD channels.  In comparison, DirectTV have over 70 now and will have over 100 by the end of the year.  If I'm going to have a 42" HD TV, then I'm damn well going to have HD content to watch on it.

Not to mention they have modern PVRs with a non-Motorola (i.e. usable) User Interface.  DirectTV use Tivo which, based on what I've seen, is much much more logical and much easier to use.

Anyway, I've placed the order which will arrive on Maryse's birthday, and I've also switched to DSL from Qwest, our phone provider, who are offering 7MBs (twice the MDM advertised amount, which itself is about twice what I actually get.)  Finally, I can get proper Setanta Sport with this package, so the experiment with the ITVN unit can end.  It was interesting, but it's not really worked very well - at least we saw some Rugby, but now I can have HD rugby, in time for the 6 nations!  YAY!

All this and I'll be saving around $30 a month (if not a little more).  Now I can pack and feel good about it.

Halting State - Charles Stross

Finished this on the flight back from San Diego, which some how seemed appropriate.

Halting State is a near future police procedural set in the recently independant Republic of Scotland, Edinburgh in fact.   A robbery happens inside a online world akin to WoW or similar.  The police are called in and the investigation ensues.  So far, so predictable.  The first interesting point is that this is written in the 2nd person, not badly either.  I wasn't sure about this going into the book but it worked reasonably well, allowing a variety of viewpoints on the developing story to come together.

The technology is well extrapolated and therefore, probably already wrong.  10 years isn't that far into the future and if I had some quibbles it would be about some of the extrapolation of technology and economics that have been done.  I'll put some more thoughts on that under a Spoiler Cut.

Generally, this is Charlie's best book so far.  I'd actually say a strong contender for the Hugo.  The plotting is reasonably solid, maybe a little flabby in the last 40 pages, but nothing like Glasshouse which I felt lost it towards the end.  There's a lot more to the story than the original robbery, although I did feel a little let down by the denoument, I wasn't really convinced by some of the motivation, never-the-less, it was a good book.

( Spoilers )