Kaz's Rants and Reviews

3:34pm: Out of E-Books...
I just finished The Course of Empire, which means I'm totally out of Baen E-books now. I stopped buying them because I had a huge backlog of secondaries that came with sets that I wanted. Now I need to go find some more to toss on my phone.

I'm thinking I should pick up the Storm from the Shadows book from David Weber, plus some of the early Liaden books. The first 8 chapters of the Agent of Change book seemed pretty good. I still need to get the last book in that whole Esmay Suiza series as well...

I do still have 3 issues of Baen's Universe to read, plus 2 more years after that I need to buy...

2:57pm: Multimedia completion October
Books:

#23: Baen's universe 2-3. I'll just hit the ones I enjoyed here. "A better sense of direction" is interesting, I wonder how possible it is. About a kid growing up in space seeing the universe differently from the adults. "From the badlands" is a trigun-esque tale of humans surviving on a remote colony after aliens pound civilization to the ground. "Necromancer in Love" is an interesting thing about someone trying to bring one they love back to life, and different means to which it could be done... "Countdown to Armageddon" is a story of someone trying to take nuclear weaponry back to the past to allow the muslims to overrun the christians in that time period. "The Quiet Man" has an alien space ship land on the washington mall, asking for their children who crashed some time before and were given the Area 51 treatment.

I must take exception with at least one part of the non-fiction and columns. Mike Resnick just doesn't get the line "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." He says it's false, but the truth of it is, if he would bother to look, that there isn't a free lunch, it's always subsidized by someone else's work. Just because it's free to you doesn't mean it's free. If they are doing it out of the kindness of their heart, or for some ulterior purpose, is for you to determine. Many of the others he trots out are just abbreviated versions of more specific ideas. The "whatever does not kill us makes us stronger" thing for example would need to include permanent crippling or maiming in its definition of kill.

#24: Through the Breach. David Drake tells the story of Francis Drake's journey around the world, except in space...

#25: Fireships. The whole Francis Drake thing again, in breaking the back of the Spanish North american federation domination of the galaxy.

I read through a bit of the Liaden universe stuff, and I think that's one of the next places I'm going to go for books...

Games:

#3: Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time. Excellent game. Finished it in 12 hours... Will probably put another 28 into it before I'm done.

Videos:

#36: Startrek Voyager, Season 7. Interesting way to end it. I'm not sure about its place in the whole Startrek Chart of What Is Good, but it was fun to watch.

#37: Space Above and Beyond. Interesting marine themed space story. Twists and turns and the like, but oddly abbreviated by being only 26 episodes long. The ending was strange, with minor cliffhangers that will never quite be resolved.

#38: Coraline. Very good, but any adult can see the plot coming from a mile away. Should be good for kids as long as they're not scared by Tim Burton style movies.

1:23pm: Emusic keeps getting worse.
Emusic has been dropping their service down for awhile. Initially they were a subscription service where for about $15 per month, you could download an unlimited number of songs, and you could use them as long as your subscription was valid. It was a great setup for the customers and for the artists. It helped unknown artists find an audience, and helped customers find indie bands that they didn't know about. In general, the idea is that it was for trying them out and that you would ultimately buy a CD. I bought a number of discs based on downloads on Emusic. They also had a setup where various third parties had made download managers for their service.

Then they decided to limit the number of downloads. 50 downloads for $10 per month. That was reasonable, but it also meant that it wasn't as much of a place to try new artists as it was a place to buy music. Then it dropped to 40 downloads per month. Then the price went up to $12 per month. That was OK though, it was still an OK deal, and they let you download the songs more than once if you wanted or if you lost your copy, even though the third party download managers had stopped working and you were stuck using their lousy download manager. Shortly thereafter, it dropped to 30 downloads per month. If you ever changed your plan, you got even less, 24 downloads for $12 per month. And now they limit you to about 3 downloads, and because of their lousy download manager, it always expends 1 of those without actually downloading anything! It still seems like an OK deal at around $0.50 per song, except that if you don't use your downloads you lose them, so if you miss a month, that next month is more expensive than iTunes.

A few years back they also had a fairly nice policy for inviting friends over. You invite them over, you get 50 downloads, they get 50 downloads, everyone is happy. You could keep your 50 downloads for as long as you want. I just received an email from them...

Invite five friends to try eMusic and you'll get 10 free downloads* as our thanks. We'll also give each of your friends 50 free downloads to check out eMusic**
* Get 10 Free credits when you invite 5 of your friends through the eMusic referral page linked in this email by November 15, 2009. Your credits will be awarded 7-10 days after you have completed the form, whether or not your friends decide to sign up for eMusic. Visit eMusic by December 1st to claim your credits. Your 10 free credits will be good for 30 days from the date you claim them. You must enter valid email addresses. This offer is only redeemable once per customer.

10 downloads... For inviting 5 friends... That's 1/25th of what their old deal was. Not only that, but the 10 songs expire! I still have 10 credits from my last 50 pack a year ago. Not only that, but 10 downloads that are of unlimited time cost $6 to buy. That's about $1.20 per friend you push into the service. I wonder how much that is in pieces of silver. Given that silver is around $15 an ounce, I would suspect it's far fewer than 30.

12:09pm: UMD
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2009/10/psp-go-review-sony-is-charging-you-much-more-for-much-less.ars

A fairly fair and balanced review of the PSP go.

They're whining about the UMD disc going missing though.

The one constant in the last 4 years or so has been all of the people whining about how bad the UMD drive is. Constant, annoying whining about how much they hate the UMD drive and how UMD is a dead format, and so on and so forth.

And now they're whining about the opposite. It just goes to show that you really should stick to your guns on ideas. You'll never please all of your detractors, and when you try you just end up annoying even more people and giving others an I Told You So moment against you. I still think they should have stuck to their guns on the Boomerang controller, and they should stick to it with the Cell processor and Bluray drive as well. I will be very disappointed with them if they drop the cell in their next system and go with Intel instead.

11:16am: Coin-sized nuclear isotope batteries
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/08/nuclear_coin_battery/

I can't wait for them to be commercialized. Now lets see if the PTB and other pointy haired politicians permit these to come to market...

12:29am: Multimedia Completion
September edition... Not very full because I've been utterly hammered at work this month. In fact, all but 3 of the items on the list are from the first week of the month...

And I just heard the news about Baen's Universe ending. I feel really bad now for canceling when I stopped having time to keep up with them. :( I'll definitely buy the back issues for the magazine though...

Books:

#21: Igniting the Reaches. Retelling Drake's story in space. It's quite a stretch, but I see where he's going with it.

#22: Baen's Universe, Year 2 issue 2. Man, this is something like the Green issue of Baen's universe aside from the first story. The first story is a post-scarcity thing where people have the freedom to pretty much do whatever they're interested in, this one has two documentary writers competing to write a documentary about mars being terraformed. At the watering hole is murphy's law first contact with aliens. Concentration of Dogs is a thought experiment in collective intelligence. Free space is about an arms dealer trying to dodge the export taxes and exposing people to radiation while doing it.

Murphy's War is one I find mildly naive and a bit absurd. A president that's obviously trying to be a stand in for Bush takes an extreme religious view and absurd levels of cowboy attitude and starts nuclear war with China. The series alludes to hackers rigging the votes for this guy. They go on about absurd stereotypes only believed by the most naive of bloggers on both the American and Chinese side, then spin a web where peace is created by a bunch of hackers wrecking the computer systems for launching missiles for both sides.

Lord-Protectors Daughter was a lot of fun. Experimenting with high end powers, and accounting all in the same story. :) Creation: The Launch! I think the story by James P Hogan did this better. Basically, God as an insane hollywood director type. Hogan's story was more fun with telling creation from the standpoint of an engineering firm dealing with all of the insane agencies and the like. Dark corners was a mildly bland nazi vs. faerie story... Squish was fun, intelligent ants... Didn't find Mrs. Schrodinger's cat all that interesting.

Games:
#2 Front Mission 1: Definitely not the best in the series, and has a number of flaws, but it's still a lot of fun for the character strategy RPG loving segments of the population. Took me about 25-30 hours to complete both storylines once.

DVD Series

#30: Read or Die TV: Excellent series, a lot of fun. Mostly new characters for the first half, and some of the characters you would only know if you read the Manga, rather than from the movie.

#31: Flight of the Conchords Season 1: A bit disappointing. I like a fair subset of their songs, but their TV series is just a little daft and uninteresting.

#32: Scrapped Princess. At first this seemed like a silly fantasy show, but it drifted off towards a very Gurren Lagann style storyline. It's not bad, but I wouldn't recommend it for non-anime fans.

#33: Mezzo: I chewed through this one on netflix watch instantly in about 2 nights. It's not really a great show or anything, but it was fairly good for what it was. It feels like the characters are scrambled up remixes of all the Cowboy Bebop character's traits. The thing doesn't go solidly to detective/mercenary stuff however, there's a fair bit of supernatural and alien junk in it. There were a few of good episodes and a handful of not-so-good episodes.

#34: Kite Liberator: Like Mezzo, this one isn't all that great, but it's OK. It's a little too coincidental how it turns out though.

#35: Divergence Eve: Absolutely awful. Terrible. Dreadful CGI, terrible acting, lots of graphical glitches, absurd storyline, etc. The only redeeming quality was the first few episodes had an interesting history where it explains how humans found FTL travel, with the original transmissions from earth bouncing back through FTL conduits from other stars. Interesting idea, but it's not worth sitting through the series for that 3-4 minutes of interesting stuff. I only watched the first and last DVD, I doubt the middle one could have done anything to save the series.

12:48am: PSP go
The PSP Go comes out soon, and Sony has released a mountain of new downloadable content for the system. I myself have a mountain of purchased UMD content for it, so I figured I would look into how much it would cost me to upgrade to that system, and how many games are getting left out.
( List of games )
I'm sure I'm missing a few of them. Some of my game cases went missing after my last trip.


If I upgrade to the PSP Go now, I would need to pay $249.99+119.92
Or $369.91 total. And I would only get 12/26 of my games...
If I just cherry pick the ones that are inexpensive and that I would like to carry around digitally on my existing PSP, it's just short of $90. That won't get me Ratchet or Patapon, but I'm done with one and the other really didn't draw me in much.

I really appreciate NIS working so hard to get that many of their games up. That makes life easier even without the Go... Only one they missed out of my collection is Spectral Souls.

1:26pm: Overregulation.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/28/motorised_crate/

They confiscated someone's home built transportation because they have excessively restrictive laws towards what people can drive. Is there any wonder that corporations are getting so huge? There's no way for smaller things to break through and start out if the regulations are so onerous and odious that only the large corporations can afford to follow them all. Who knows? That experiment could be the first step someone made to founding a new car company a decade or two down the road, but the legal establishment has cut it down at its very root.

2:09pm: Naive solar enthusiasts.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/18/ja-solar-and-innovalight-team-up-to-commercialize-silicon-ink/

In the comments, one person comments that he can't wait to see when the printable solar cell technology can be used for cars.

He really doesn't understand the energy involved in cars. At work we have 80-watt panels that are just huge. I think you could probably squeeze 8-10 of them on my car, for a total of about 800 watts power generation on a good, sunny day. Assuming that they are 9% efficient and the new solar cells are 18% efficient, that gives you 1.6 kilowatts.

Car engines are generally measured in Horsepower in the US. My car outputs 131 horsepower, which equals around 97 kilowatts (Rounding down to give solar the benefit of the doubt. 1HP is about 745 watts.)

That's over 50x as much power.

The engine on the ultra-efficient VW car that they've been showing off recently http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/18/vw-l1-hybrid-most-efficie_n_291257.html , has an engine that outputs 39 horsepower. Its backup hybrid electric motor is 14 horsepower. That's 29 and 10 kw respectively. ( http://www.product-reviews.net/2009/09/18/volkswagen-l1-concept-frankfurt-auto-show-2009/ ) Even with the larger surface area of a big car, you couldn't run the electric motors of a tiny cigar shaped coffin car off solar yet.

About all you could do with it is let it sit for 8 hours in the parking lot at work in the sun and charge up your batteries for your 30 minute drive home... Which in itself could be a workable thing, but even 100% efficient solar cells are probably never going to drive a car directly and maintain anything near the performance of an underpowered econobox.

A house is a different matter. You probably never exceed 6kw in the average house, and you have a much higher surface area to work with.

11:00am: Muse website, and right wing libertarians
I was searching the website about a band called Muse and what their political persuasions were. An interesting task given that they are foreign and US and European political terms don't exactly match up. Their recent songs though seem very libertarian to me. On their forum, they used the term Liberal which is generally the european way of saying Libertarian, and to them is tied closely to anarchists.

One of the posters on their forum though expressed disbelief at the american concept of Right wing Libertarians. They said that Right Wing generally means trying to uphold a social order from the past.

I would argue that it's actually easier to convince people on the right about libertarianism than it is to convince left wing people about libertarianism. Libertarians are really the true big tent ideology, because pretty much everyone can join it by merely believing one simple thing. It is not the place of anyone, or any government, to force anyone to do anything. For a right wing person to be libertarian, they can still hold all of their religious beliefs and all of their stances on how society should be, and just advocate it themselves, in their organizations in a non-violent, non-forceful manner. Basically, preaching the word to others. That's a familiar concept to most church goers, for example. With a government generally cutting against them in most of these issues for decades, they're familiar with trying to convince people to see it their way rather than using the government to take guns out to force people to see it their way. It's only recently that they re-lost their way and started using government to do this anyway.

The left wing people say they are all about freedom, and they back it up with certain things like abortion and sexual preference, but their other goals go significantly away from freedom. Social Justice, redistribution of wealth, "Fair" distribution of wages, the green movement. All of these goals are impossible to achieve without forcing people to do it. You can ask people nicely to give their money to charity, but it doesn't manage an overarching redistribution of the kind they desire. The green movement is possible without it, but they have this false sense of urgency around it and believe that they can't wait for green technology to catch up, they have to force people to stop using the old technologies and go to the green technologies right now.

All in all, it's much harder to get left wing people to abandon or delay their core principles than to convince right wing people to use persuasion instead of force.

I also found this, a nice justification of the philosophy of liberty.

4:16pm: Templar AZ
Reading a new comic called Templar, Arizona. It's mildly political, but in a way that keeps me guessing about what the author's own views are. But one thing in particular made me think.

One of the characters espouses the idea that all prisons should be Vegan. I have no problem with people who themselves want to be vegan as long as they're not trying to use the government to force me to do the same, but in this case I don't have such a clearcut view on it. As long as the people in prison are there because they did something truly bad that damages other people, and not just because of some political law that is there just so they can arrest whoever they want, then I really don't have a problem with prisons serving only a certain kind of food.

Prison is not there to be a resort playground. It's there as both a consequence and deterrent to bad acting in a society, and as a way to keep them from doing it again. Our current prison system is a lousy deterrent, and a poor consequence for many actions. It would probably be better to go to a purely economic penalty system than our current system as a deterrent.

Don't give me anything about cruel punishment with that diet. Back in the feudal days that's all anyone but the nobility had.

I wouldn't agree with spending money on special vegan meals though. Just get a contract with the various grocery stores to get whatever they throw out for the day cheap, and hand the mess off to the kitchen workers to try and do something with.

11:56pm: Multimedia Completion
Darth Paradox just posted another, so I figured I'd post my own update even though it's not the end of the month yet.

#17: Baens Universe: Volume 2 Issue 1. Big Guy: Story about giving a thirsty man water, and him gorging on it, or rather, an emotion starved android emotions. Running Water: Fun little adventure tale about a world where the coastal towns in california will do anything for water, and the future tech submarines they use to get it. Thin Ice is a thin story about aliens and an ice skater on the moon. *shrug* Weredragons of Mars starts as a wierd story of generational colonization ships, but turns into something even weirder. Swing time is the story of very odd time travelers who don't need machines...

Cryptic coloration, students falling in love with the professor story with a twist. Littlest Wyrmmaid. I'm sure you see the pun already. Child, girl, woman, crone... This one is actually very interesting with navajo mythologies and other native south-western gods and the like. Realm of Words is just a groan-worthy excuse to try and make a obtuse point about DRM.

Giant killer was quite fun, though I pretty much guessed what was going on before the story tells you.

Touching the dead is excellent, a psychic detective sort of story. Chicken Soup was another shaggy dog-ish story. Chirus Fever was a good little adventure story too.

And Fish Tales continues to not be my thing at all.

#18: Spheres of Heaven. Trapped in the solar system by aliens that think humans are too violent, 3 races of absurdly pacifist aliens, and a mystery gateway that could be the key to humans getting out into the universe... Fun, though I don't agree with some of its views...

#19: The Dance of Time. The last Belisarius book. If you haven't read this series, you really should. It's lots of fun. This is the first paper book I've read since the First Meetings Orson Scott Card book.

Currently reading the Reaches series from David Drake...

#1: Dragon Quest 4. I'm not sure if this is the first game I've finished this year, but with my limited time it might be. -_- Might be the second or third. I did finish Flower and Braid, but those hardly count.

DVDs

#25: Mahoromatic Summer Special. I must be a masochist because I already knew how painful this series was, but I went back and watched another dvd of it anyway.

#26: Appleseed. The first one. I think that both the remake and Deus Ex Machina are better. This one seemed a bit lacking. Maybe it's just how old it was.

#27: Doctor Who, Planet of the Dead. A great adventure, and a worthy entry in the last 4 episodes for the current doctor.

#28: Starship Operators. I've already commented on this one before, it's great. It's so good that I even posted about it out of sequence. 5-stars for me.

#29: El Hazard: The Alternative World. Another oldie. Standard fare for what usually got translated back in the dusty old days of them first bringing anime over. Not great.

2:32am: Dragon Quest 4
I've finished Dragon Quest 4! That means I'm officially half-way done with playing all of the mainline Dragon Quest games... at least until DQ9 comes out in the US.

36 hours and 19 minutes to complete. There's still more bonus content, but I haven't done that content on any of the DQ games yet... I really should get around to it at least on 4 and 8...

36 hours is definitely short for a DQ game. I wonder what I should play next on my DS?

Poll #1445785 What DS game should I play next?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 2

Approval Voting Stage

Plurality Voting Stage

1:10am: Starship Operators
I normally don't post about individual DVD series I watch until I can aggregate a bunch of them into one post, but this isn't a normal series. I'm a David Weber fan, and enjoy the sort of political intrigue combined with the slow paced combat that his books provide.

Starship Operators is probably the first TV show I've seen that really captures the essence of this sort of space combat and political intrigue all at once. It's a little shallower on all fronts than most novels, but it's hard to fit as much into a 13 episode series of 22 minute shows, and it is deeper than many space combat oriented novels I've read. If you're a fan of space combat novels, then you really should watch this even if you're not an anime fan. I place this one amongst my top few for all types of anime. Cowboy Bebop is one of the few I would put in the same class as this, and it's hard to say which one is really better between the two. If you're on netflix, then it's only 3 dvd's worth of rental...

2:38am: Multimedia completion.
I didn't get to as many as I wanted to in the last 2 months. With all the trips and constant working, it's been hard to get any time in at all. If it wasn't for the mobipocket on my phone I probably wouldn't get any reading in.

( More books, more DVDs... )

9:54am: Servers!
For ages now I've been operating my entire network presence off a single server, Precis.arkaic.com. This worked out pretty well as the antiquated 2.4ghz celeron was solid and hardly ever needed attention. Unfortunately my company was purchased and I needed a new home for my web/irc/etc hosting.

I had some parts laying about that I was going to upgrade Precis with, so I took the oppourtunity to buy the last few remaining bits and assemble them. Phenom x4 with 2.0ghz and 1gig of ram, 160gig mirrored hard drives.

http://Yukiko.Arkaic.Com : This one is half-donated to Bookworm and Nightstar, and is hosted by http://bkwm.com . We had been planning on donating parts to Bookworm anyway, but hadn't heard about the status of the project. This way we can get an upgrade of the Troika cluster and I can get my web hosting done at the same time.

Chie.Arkaic.com : this one doesn't have a webpage up, but it's a $20 per month http://Linode.com instance. My current plan is to have everything hosted on Yukiko, and have Yukiko dump out the Postgres and ZoDB databases and rsync them hourly back to Chie. If disaster strikes, I can have everything up and running on Chie within an hour, and point all the domains back using Dyndns Custom DNS hosting. Yukiko and Chie both have IPv6 tunneled through http://www.tunnelbroker.net on Hurricane Electric.

Yosuke.Arkaic.com : No webpage either, but this is hosted on http://prgmr.com for $8 per month. It's the second spare server in my system. The plan is to do daily backups to this, so that if I ever have a complete disaster where somehow both of my other servers go down at the same time, I can import all the data here and be back up. It's only 40gig transfer though so I can't do the Hourly backup here. Prgmr is a bit of a mom and pop sort of xen hosting company, but they seem competent and fun to chat with on their freenode irc channel. Some of their hosting sites have ipv6, and others don't. I'm currently on a Doesn't have IPv6 node, but will eventually have that when they get the new router built.

9:45pm: Miracle of Science
I finished reading through this whole comic this weekend. Very interesting. I do have a couple of comments though.

Miracle of Science

( Spoilers: If you haven't read it already... )

So really, I still haven't seen an example of a collective that is non-evil and also subsumes the entirety of the individuals within it when those individuals are sentient. No matter what the authors of the comic say.

2:38am: More Windmill Tilting
I've been tilting at a couple more windmills this month. The big one is IPv6. I've gotten my home network back up, this time through a Hurricane Electric tunnel. I've poked the new IT company that my new megacorp parent company hired to do our IT and prodded them about planning our IPv6 transition again. I've also mentioned yet again to another person from my home internet provider that it would be really nice to have IPv6 natively.

I've also been trying to push people to actually start using my GPG key. I've added big notices to my signature for my email, I've added a big notice to the front of my homepage, but only 1 person has ever used my GPG public key to send me an email message. :(

I hope that people realize that it takes time to setup IPv6, and that it will become important here in the next 3 years... and that sending email without encrypting it is like putting the details of your private life on the back of a postcard and mailing it...

But people are SO lazy. They whine and whine about email privacy, but won't lift a finger to do anything about it... and they would rather wait until the last minute and throw some slipshod junky IPv6 equipment in without testing it instead of gradually doing the work up front...

7:43pm: Newscorp says that ad supported services are on their way out
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/05/hulu_may_adopt_subscription_service/

I agree, news corp. But let me be the first to point out that you already sell your services by a subscription based service. Show us a little honesty here and start pulling all your ads off our subscription service (Cable, Satellite...) and then we might consider paying yet another subscription for your content. ;)

5:56pm: Banning future technology weaponry...
http://www.slugsite.com/archives/1126

Huhwhat? Banning electromagnetic weaponry from hunting purposes?

What kind of backward state is this "Wisconsin" place...

8:04pm: The UK playstation site has this nice little badge to stick on websites...



I wonder if they'll ever get that on the US site...

1:45am: CDs that do not participate in the Loudness War.
Given that every darn CD out seems to be wound all the way to the top on the loudness meter, it's both surprising and annoying when I find ones that aren't. When I try to play them on shuffle, I have to turn the volume up, then back down again at the end for the next song, at least on Amarok. I have an automatic adjuster on Winamp at work...

In any case, the most recent one is Veruca Salt's cd IV. 2006 and it sounds very quiet unless using the booster. I only noticed it now that I've mixed it into my home playlist. Very good CD, and apparently at the proper volume.

The other two are older CDs that I picked up on Emusic. I [heart] Mekons and Retreat from Memphis, both from Mekons. I was on the verge of dropping these from my playlist until I found the leveler because of how annoying it was to change the volume up and down and before I had heard about the Loudness War in general.

It would be nice if all music would go back down to these levels just to save wear on my volume knob. Taking these up to the current normal volume would be counterproductive.

2:03pm: Multimedia Consumption
Not just for books anymore! I just looked back at my journal and found it's been 3 months since I posted anything about books and such... So here goes.

#5 Witches of Karres. Very amusing mix of magic and science fiction. Witches with a magic spacedrive basically force a guy to rescue them from slavery, then make him into a fugitive. Ultimately they travel all over the galaxy and end up fighting a race of transdimensional worms... This is the sort of thing Schmitz is known for, though even more magicy than his Telzey Amberdon series.

#6 Year 1 Issue 4 of Baen's Universe. Darn these things are long... Some good, some mediocre stuff. Nice to see the Ancient Ones series progress. The fish tales story is a bit tiresome so far. Murphy's Law was amusing...

#7 First Meetings in Ender's Universe, This is very good, but short. 5 short stories going from when Ender's father was a child, up until he first meets with Jane. Includes the original Ender's Game. I find the Ender's Game novel to be better though.

#8 Exiles of the Well of Souls, Interesting new characters, Obie, Mavra Chang... Fun until they got to the Well World, then it dragged on a bit.

#9 Quest for the Well of Souls, It actually starts interesting, drops off a bit in the middle, and then improves at the end.

#10 In the Event of My Untimely Demise, A fairly amusing book of advice originally written for the guy's kid.

#11 The Return of Nathan Brazil, My favorite wellworld book since the very first one because of the length of time it spends dealing with the universe outside the Wellworld.

Next up is probably The Dance of Time. It's another paper book, so it'll probably take me awhile.

On the TV front...

#1 The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. So bizarre, but exceeded my expectations. Worth a watch compared to most typical Japanese School series. Haruhi herself is a complete jerk though.

#2 I've watched the first 4 seasons of the new Doctor Who, and most of the first season of the original. If you haven't watched the new Doctor Who, you're really missing out.

#3, Xenosaga Animated series... Short and seems to follow the game story closely. Good if you don't want to slog through such a dull game for the story.

#4, Highlander Anime. Dreadful. Boring... I think I would have given it 3 stars if it wasn't so freaking preachy about the environment.

#5, Origin: Spirits of the Past. Same as the Highlander anime, but it is slightly better.

#6, Nausicaa and the Valley of Wind, 4 stars after the adjustment for environment preachiness.

#7, Deathnote. Geniuses battling it out with notebooks that can kill just by writing a name in it. Excellent series...

#8, Castle in the Sky. Pretty good Ghibli film. Not their best.

#9, Howl's Moving Castle. Like Castle in the Sky, it's decent. It does have an anti-war pacifist bent like Zaitcev says, so it deserves to get a star knocked off.

I discovered Netflix Instant queue watching... and ended up watching a few series that I might not otherwise finish...

#10, Red Dwarf. Not really Scifi, but comedy with a SF background setting. Quite amusing.

#11, PaniPoni Dash. I had high hopes for this one given the premise of a 10 year old genius teaching high school, but it disappointed me. It was amusing in spots, but they just completely bungled the main plotline. It went all the way over to surreal and had tons of inside jokes. Also... When your main characters are an 11 year old and a school full of 15 year olds, that's a pretty good indication that this isn't an anime series you should be doing excessive fan service in... Just saying...

#12, Air TV. After Paniponi, I had very low expectations for this one. It looked haremy and like it would start throwing the same fan service stuff in. This one really exceeded my expectations though. It turned out to be a very nice story with little to no bad content. Mostly a story about mothers and daughters...

#13, Best Student Council. I had low expectations of this given the cheesy setting (An all girls school owned and operated by the students), cheesy title (Best Student Council? Really?) and the Puppet that was prevalent in the title sequence. Even with the cheesy setting it was well done, and the first episode's absurdity didn't really spill out too much on the rest of the series. It's by no means a great show, but at least a solid one. Huge ensemble cast means that about half of the episodes just deal with one character or another's backstory though.

#14-16, The Cat Returns, Kiki's Delivery Service, Whisper of the Heart... All excellent, you should rent them now. What are you waiting for. Go on...

5:21pm: Another problem with Democracy
Last.fm... They pick their artist pictures via a democratic process where you can vote them up or down. The other major issue with last.fm is that they have no solution for disambiguation of artists, so when you get down into the small indie bands there's a great deal of overlap in names with different bands songs getting intermixed as well as the tags related to them.

In this case, both problems are cropping up at the same time. A band that I really enjoy, but has a very low profile is Goner. They've released 3 CDs thus far and I enjoy all of them. They share a name with a band that seems to have only released a single song and has been tagged as "grindcore," their only song is about 1 minute long and absolutely awful compared to the other band.

The problem is that the smaller band and their friends are aggressively promoting their pictures on the "goner" page and voting down the pictures from the other band. Because only a handful of the hundreds of listeners from the larger band even look at that page, they're getting away with it. This goes back to the concept that democracy is rule by those able to speak loudest and convince the most people to pay attention on their side.

Because of this, whenever I play a song from the great Goner band, I get that urgly picture from the horrible Goner band on my profile...

If anyone feels like helping me out on last.fm though, http://www.last.fm/music/Goner is the band, and http://www.last.fm/music/Goner/+images/21975209 is the only picture from the real band.

2:01pm: Only one US car maker worth considering..
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=al89RU9gWof8&refer=home
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a5326d50-332a-11de-9316-00144feabdc0.html

The government owns 50% of GM now. The UAW owns 39%. The UAW will own 55% of Chrysler, and the government gets 10%.

There's really no point in buying a GM or a Chrysler car anymore. The companies are going to go one of two ways. They'll either make crappy cars and go under, or they'll make crappy cars and be continuously propped up by the government. Either way, there's no possible way they're going to make good cars in the future. It's really too bad. Before the government started meddling, Chrysler made some of the best cars ever. Unfortunately they haven't managed to bring most of them to market due to a combination of the government and Daimler.

I'm looking into Ford now for the next time I pick up a new wheeled transport mode.