Do you like 1930s detective stories? Do you like the Dresden Files? What about a little action like Sky Captain or Kill Bill? Then get over to Amazon and pick up Hard Magic, the first book in the Grimnoir Chronicles series by Larry Correia. Have fun reading about magic using ninjas, gangsters, pirates, and soldiers. Blimps? Got ‘em. John Moses Browning? Yep, he’s there too! This is a seriously fun book!
Diverging from the sci-fi/fantasy fare a little, and because I picked up a signed copy from Uncle Hugo’s, I just finished reading Dead Six. It’s a collaboration between Larry Correia and Mike Kupari, and is more along the lines of an action thriller than his previous offerings. If you liked John Ringo’s Ghost series, you’ll like this one.
It tells a single story from two different points of view, and kept me guessing until the end. The action is well written, with lots of firearms references throughout. You can read the dust jacket notes on Amazon for a better plot teaser than I could write. But like I said, if you like military thrillers, you’ll probably enjoy this one.
Thanks to our record breaking summer heatwave, the thermostat on the Jeep had failed in the permanently open position. While we were experiencing 100+ degree days, week after week, it wasn’t noticed because the engine would still come up to temperature. But now that the heat has backed off, my check engine light has been on, throwing a P1281 code (engine too cold for too long). I picked up a new thermostat and gasket a couple weeks ago and finally got time to do the replacement today. As I suspected, once I pulled the housing, the thermostat was locked open. After cleaning up the gasket residue and lining up the new gasket, I bolted everything back together and fired it up. There was one small leak, but a re-torque of the bolts solved it. The engine’s coming up to normal operating temperatures and hopefully the light will go out soon. I don’t have an OBD-II scanner yet, so I’ve got to wait until it goes through enough cycles.
The Demon and the City is the second book in Liz Williams’s Detective Inspector Chen series. It follows the demon Zhu Irzh’s investigation of the killing of the child of a rich family and the plot to really screw the world up that she had gotten involved with. I really like these books because they’re a quick read, with well written characters and plots that aren’t transparent. It’s also nice to see a different (read non-western) theme, instead of always drawing from european legends and mythos.
I’m still getting caught up on the ginormous to be read pile, though much slower due to school work taking priority. I just finished Kim Harrison’s Black Magic Sanction, one of the books in the Rachel Morgan series. I’m not caught up on this series yet, but getting closer. I’m really liking the way this series is going, there’s a lot more complexity, some more history and exposition, and a good bit of action. Rachel’s still in a really bad situation and trying to dig her way out, though not everything goes according to plan. She does get a chance to clean things up, but still has some hoops to jump through, and knowing how the author likes to throw in twists, they’ll be flaming hoops. But in the process of that she’s made some more enemies and found out some things that might actually put her in more danger. Too bad I’ve got over 40 books left to read before I buy any more. It’s going to be a while before I get back to this series…
The conclusion to John Birmingham’s Axis of Time alternative history trilogy, Final Impact, feels a little more fast paced than the previous two installments. Activity is spread between the European and Pacific theaters, the Zone, Moscow, and D.C. but without the transitions being jarring. While this book does wrap up the major plot points, it’s left enough open to hopefully hint at another series. There are plenty of loose ends left that could make for another great set of books.
As part of the laptop to desktop transition, I wanted more storage for the Mac Mini, but I wanted some redundancy, so I picked up a Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition II. It came in yesterday after a bobble with FedEx on Friday. Seriously, FedEx, if the package is shipped to a residential address and requires a signature, 10:30 AM on a work day pretty much guarantees that you’re going to be coming back out. That being said, I am very impressed with the fit and finish of the actual device. It looks good, is very quiet, and was easy to set up.
And that’s where the wheels came off. I couldn’t keep the finder stable with the raid manager running, so I uninstalled it. It then started playing nice, or at least I thought so. Until I checked the overnight SuperDuper! backup. It failed because the MyBook nuked the entire FireWire bus. So at that point I yanked it, installed it on the HTPC via eSATA, changed it to RAID 0, and started a backup of my DVD library (all 4 terabytes of it). It did all of that without a hitch, so it’s going to stay attached there so that I’ve got a backup copy of months of DVD and BluRay ripping.
Oh, and I’ve got a Newer Tech Guardian Maximus on order for more storage for the Mini. It should be in on Wednesday.
Neil Gaiman’s Stardust was a really, really good book. I picked it up after seeing the movie, and I’m glad I did. The further in to the book I got the more it diverged from the movie (or actually the more the movie diverged from the book). But that’s ok because both were entertaining in their own ways. I have to say that I liked the book’s ending a lot, it was definitely poetic. While the book is technically classified as young adult, some salty language is used and there are some sexual situations, so use your best judgement if you’re giving it to someone’s kid.
I put my MacBook Pro up for sale and got a taker pretty quickly, so I ordered a new MacBook Air. It’s the 11″, 4 gig RAM, 128 gig SSD model. I decided on the Air, even though it’s a little lower powered compared to the Pros, because it’s small enough to travel with on the motorcycle. My current travel computer has been a Acer Aspire One netbook, and while it’s been ok in that role, having a full featured Mac would be a lot better.
It came in this evening, and once I finished my homework I got started unboxing it and getting it set up. It really is small, but it feels a lot more solid than the netbook. I got the basics done this evening, OS configured, browser and mail clients set up, and MS Office installed. One thing I can say is that even though it’s got relatively low clock speed processor, it does not feel sluggish. I’m attributing a lot of that to the SSD, but even at that low of a clock rate the Core i5 processor is still plenty powerful enough for everything I’ve thrown at it so far.
Heather and I hopped on the bike and braved the winds to enjoy the first decent weather all summer and check out a restaurant we found out about over in Decatur. Sweetie Pie’s Ribeyes is brought to you by the same folks that are responsible for Babe’s Chicken Dinner House, only this time they’re concentrating on beef. The food was really good, and we even saved room for dessert. She had red velvet cake, which passed muster, while I enjoyed a really good slice of pecan pie. After stuffing ourselves, we walked around the square and then got back on the bike for the ride home. Other than the wind the entire afternoon was a heck of a lot of fun!
