Datastreams

Yes still alive. I wanted to do this, so here we go.

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Tally your total at the bottom.
3) Tag others and pass it on. If you want to.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen ( )
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien ( x ) (partial count?)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte ( )
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling ( x )
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ( )
6 The Bible (X)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte ()
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell ( x )
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( )
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ( )

total: 4/10

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott ( )
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ( )
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ()
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ( )
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ( x ) (I was the only kid in my Grade 7 class to have wanted to read it too)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (x)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger ( x )
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger ()
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ( )

total: 7/20

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (x)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald ()
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ( )
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ( X)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams( x )
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ( )
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (X )
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck ( x )
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (x)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame ()

total: 13/30

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ( x )
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (X )
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (x)
34 Emma - Jane Austen ( )
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen ( )
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (x)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini ( )
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ( )
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden ()
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (x )

total: 18/40

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (x)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (x )
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving ( )
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( )
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery ( )
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy ( )
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood ()
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan ( )

total: 21/50

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel ( )
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (x)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ( )
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen ()
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ( )
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (X)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley ()
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon ( )
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )

total: 23/60

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck ( x)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov ( )
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt ( )
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold ( )
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (x)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (x)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ( )
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ()
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( )
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (x)

total: 27/70

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X )
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (x)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (x)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath ( )
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )
78 Germinal - Emile Zola ( )
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ( )
80 Possession - AS Byatt ( )

total: 31/80

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (x)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( )
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker ( )
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( )
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ()
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ( )
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (x)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom ( )
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (x)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ( )

total: 34/90

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ( )
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery ()
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams ( )
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ( )
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( )
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (x)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (x)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (x)

38/100

Damn… been meaning to get to some of these too… At least I can be snotty and tell the BBC to go fuck themselves.

I should put a notice somewhere that reads “Updated when I feel like it”, but anyway.

Linux install is still on the hard drive, although I’ve only looked at it once since to verify something while my xp installation was acting up.

Counting the days until the holidays. Got a solid 2 weeks off and I’m really looking forward to it. 8 business days left, not that I’m counting or anything…

Edit: Spelling corrections I don’t normally care too much about, got the bit about when I update in, and added somethign else I hope to make use of come the holiday season.,,

I’m typing this in Firefox, from my Ubuntu install.

No fuss so far in getting anything to work. Only thing I need to do is figure out how to change the colour scheme and font sizes. I’m too used to the dark blue scheme of the blackcomb theme from windows blinds. I am liking the base font everything is in. Time to kick the tires more.

Sunday night after finishing up Little Brother I downloaded the image for Ubuntu 8.04. I kinda realized after the fact that I had (or at least thought at the time) no blank CDs to burn it to so did it at work yesterday.

This goes to show how long it’s been since I used a CD and not a DVD. I’ve had this problem a couple of times in the past where the thing was made extra shoddy (maybe on purpose, I dunno). In short, If I can put the disc to the ligth and it’s translucent, it’s NOT going to work. Irritating if you’re burnign a music CD, Very very bad if your installing something you know is goign to take a little bit more technical know how and be messing with stuff you only know in theory at this point.

I always wanted to go mucking about in the master boot record of my drive. :/

All’s well that end’s well though. I’ve fixed my main 80gb drive and it boots fine. The 250gb I borrowed from work still has a hosed mbr but that’s inconsequential for now. I can deal with that now that I am not havign to run up and down two flights of stairs looking for answers and downloading utilities anymore. Also have a permanent bootable copy of Acronis Disc Studio now which wasn’t helpful in correcting the problem, but was damn handy for verifying the probelm. It’s also a pretty sweet app on it’s own. I’ve now got the flash drive it’s on stuffed in my support folder of discs for future use. Also found my copy of ERD commander 2002 and shoved that in their as well. Another cool tool that while not handy in resolving this problem, but pointed me to where I ought to be looking. It’s also great for helpign peopel that forget their windows passwords.

Downloading the image again. I found some blank CDs tucked away on my shelf. I’m considering this a minor setback. As annoying as it was, It WAS more productive then what I had planned for the night.

Heh, kinda forgot about this completely. so some quick points before a big entry…

Replayed through Mass Effect again. I don’t think I ever did a review on that one so that’ll be one thing in the works.

Read Little Brother this weekend. I’m still not sure how to express what I felt reading it other than it’s a must read.

Yes, I know The Frozen Throne is on it’s way. No I am not rejoining WoW, so stop asking me.

No, I’m no longer interested in trying Warhammer Online either.

Fixed something to hopefully kill the stupid amounts of spam I’ve been getting. Lesse how it does.

Assassin’s Creed, and I guess I should specify here that I am talking about the PC version, is my game that was almost great for 2008. I feel like every single good point is directly countered by an irritation. Here we go.

This is, by far, the most stunning game to look at visually that I’ve seen to date. The architecture is solid, each town is fairly distinct, the characters are beautiful and the first time you climb a tower to get your lay of the land is one of the warm fuzzy feeling highlights of the year. The counter stroke is that I ran into 3 ugly seams in the world, the general locations in the various cities get quite repetitive, and the gore effects feel incomplete. I’d forgive the seams if it wasn’t for the fact that you have that ever annoying scavenger hunt mechanic in place (see below) so this should have been picked up by QA. The repetitive environment thing is how every little grotto and garden thing is the same. The game feels like they went well out of their way to design some really great and unique landmarks but got trigger happy with the copy paste buttons for the rest of the map. Lastly, the gore factor feels unfinished. The finishing moves are great fun to watch, and your sword stays clean until you impale a fellow, then it’s covered in red. What’s missing is the spatters on the ground (they don’t need to stay, just be there fro the fight, like the bodies really. Also, after a main assassination when you mark a feather with the blood of your victim it just shows up instantly, just another unfinished effect I figure.

No major complaints on the sound effects. People scream when they should and metal clangs when it should. The soundtrack itself is a mixed bag. The music is great, when you can actually hear it, which is not that often unfortunately.

Combat itself is easy to slip into and gets slightly more difficult as the game progresses. The two off points on this is that 1) You get the “Counter-Kill” ability fairly early on and it pretty much becomes your staple move and 2) The second to last combat scene in the game is several magnitudes more challenging then anything else in the game, enough so that I imagine a less hardy soul would abandon the game at that point.

Without spoiling anything the plot is a little flat early on, but does get much more interesting as the game progresses. The problem here is this is yet another of those games that leaves you hanging at the end with way too much open. Sure, it leaves things open for a sequel but this IS Ubisoft and since I’m still waiting for some follow up to Beyond Good and Evil I won’t hold my breath.

Game length was a disappointment. Even doing all the investigation stuff, the main assassinations take maybe 30 minutes a piece. Add in another half hour for saving peasants being picked on and hitting all the high spots for your map. This was about a third of the game for me. The other two thirds was running around all over the place to find all the flags for the scavenger hunt aspect of the game and looking for the stray templars to kill. If I was playing the 360 version of the game I understand this would be worth some achievement points. You get a great big nothing in the PC game.

I’ll finish off with the environmental reactions. Namely how the people around you behave. You take somebody out high profile the crowd goes nuts screaming. You hear comments like “You just killed a man, you can’t go around that! Guards!”. Two of my favorites were the time I ran down a guy with my horse and the fellow next to him says “That looked painful” or the time I shoved a beggar and someone said “I want to see you do that again!”. I kinda wish I had figured out how to toss the beggars or punch them earlier in the game as they get really annoying at times.

My final word, if you want pretty and have $30 to burn then go ahead and pick it up. Just do yourself a favor and leave the flags alone, and only kill the templars if they get in the way. Just don’t cry when you clean house in a solid day of play. Personally I’d wait for it to hit the $20 bargain bin, which is sad because the game feels like it could have had a lot more going for it. Scavenger hunts with no reward does not equal content.

Once again I find myself wanting a laptop. As much as I’m loving the new space downstairs there are some times I just don’t want to trek down, just flop in bed or just anywhere for that matter. I’ve already been floored at computer prices since I built my current rig. I actually would have saved a few hundred had I just bought something premade. The only reason I’d continue to self build is because I have a damn sharp case that I’m quite fond of and barring any major revisions I shouldn’t need to replace everything on the next build.

I’ve been on and off checking the Dell website the last couple of weeks. My laptop doesn’t need to be a monster. Hell it doesn’t even need some the more robust options I normally wouldn’t consider not having as the main purpose of this thing would be a mobile work platform. Graphics intensive games can stay on the desktop. Still, I do have some standards, just in case, and a few of them are premium. I want new, mostly because this would be a second system, and if it goes down I have no qualms sending it in for repairs if it’s not something I can swap out myself in 10 seconds. That’s pretty much the hard drive and ram. Most of the other components are unit specific so unless they want to ship me the part with a return tag for the defect I can settle for warranty service.

It doesn’t necessarily need to be a Dell. It’s just easier to get the options I want from them. I poked around the Den of Evil last week whilst picking up the last of season 3 of Avatar for the wife as well as something for me to play (Assassin’s Creed, review to follow shortly).  Like I mentioned above I’ve already been floored by prefab prices. I haven’t checked out Walmart yet but I’ve heard they started carrying Dell as well. Won’t buy it from them but I want to see just how low they can go. Anyway, Laptops easily outnumber the desktops by three to one if not four to one. I found this a little surprising and my coworker says the mobile mentality has really set in. Couple this with the fact that even if people don’t ever move the thing, the fact that they can just close the top, unplug and go is a big seller. They also take up a lot less space and the the box on the desk is a turn off apparently.

On the small side they have several tiny laptops which is really a big seller in my books. As far as form is concerned the last line of HP laptops prior to the Compaq merger had my favorite. It was small and sleek, and had one of those support cradles (don’t know the actual term for these things) Which contained the optical drive, additional battery and the lesser used I/O ports. The main unit itself felt great, light and not flimsy. That thing is still in my mind as the ideal.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, and in line with the whole desktop replacement mentality are some units nothing short of monstrous. Dell’s original run of XPS laptops had one of these brutes but it made sense as the LAN party gamers dream. The hinge doubled as a handle and the keyboard was full size and detachable. I believe it boasted a 20″ screen. Dell has a new Studio line with 17″ screens and full keyboards. I’m still considering these if only because it would be great for when I decide to flop in bed and want to watch a movie. Several manufactures are boasting monster laptops, although in the more traditional form factor. I checked a few sites and there are several 20″ plus brutes out there. Desktop replacement yes, easily portable no.

So I’m still very undecided. Getting a laptop is a yes for me, but the big hangup for me right now is the size. Small and easily portable, or larger (not the monsters) are more visual friendly? I’ve got plenty of time to think on it. My extra cash is for the TV at this time.

I just saw an ad for that Ponystars crap.

I don’t need this in the morning.

Finally got my office set up in the basement space. I’ve only got my small curio cabinet to bring down as far as furniture is concerned, and my cork board, as soon as I can figure out how I’ll mount it. The wireless signal was crap though. I tried to correct it by moving the modem from my old office in the middle of the apt to the back and it helped a bit but was still lousy. Sunday with HRH’s help we succeeded in getting a hardline dropped down along some of the drain pipes. Now the apt feels really weird. I hope when we get the TV it’ll fix the weird feeling.