More Book Reviews

Books by Maria Mann and Cindy Vine.

Read my reviews here and here.

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"You'll love this!"

"No I won't."

I can't help it. Whenever someone forecasts my reaction to something which I have yet to experience, it has the effect of predisposing me to the opposite reaction. Perhaps it's just a part of my somewhat contrary nature, an aspect of my personality which has been described, by those I will generously refer to as having a less than generous nature themselves, as being 'bloody minded'.

I prefer to think of it as a reflection of my rebellious tendency to refuse to accept things merely on the say so of others. Am I the only one who baulks at those emails which tell you that if you don't find whatever follows the most hilarious/shocking/fantastic/whatever thing you have ever seen then you are less-than-human/in-need-of-professional-help/dead/whatever? I immediately think that whatever follows cannot be very hilarious/shocking/fantastic/whatever if I have to be told how to react before I've seen/read it.

So, you may, or may not, like/love/hate/feel-indifferent-about the following video, but of course you won't know unless you click to watch. All I will say is that it's by the same guys who gave us the Treadmill Dance.

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Sweaty Palms and Coconuts

I've watched, and held my breath, as nimble young men have scaled coconut palms with nothing but their bare hands and feet, and had the pleasure of drinking the fresh buko juice from the newly plucked coconuts. Watching those guys scamper up the tall trees left me full of admiration for their fearlessness.

The guys in this video take that fearlessness to another level entirely. I was surprised to find that the palms of my hands were decidedly sweaty watching it. (Lezenie na stožiar = Climbing the mast)

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Burnt Offering

I visited a "holy shrine" yesterday. Or rather, I drove a group of people to a place where they visited a "holy shrine". I waited in the car while they carried out their devotions.

I've put scare-quotes around "holy shrine" because a shrine is only holy to adherents of the particular faith who claim it as such. Not adhering to that particular faith myself, I can't really think of the place we visited as holy, although it was obvious my group of friends considered it so.

It's not important which faith my friends' devotions fall under, nor where the shrine in question actually is. All faiths, I believe, have special places to which a visit is recommended, for one purpose or another. The purpose, in this instance, was, as far as I understand it, to obtain a general 'uplifting of the spirit' rather than anything more specific, as is often the objective of a visit to somewhere like Lourdes, in the south of France, for example.

We arrived early and secured a parking space quite easily. Not long after my friends had left me to make their way to the shrine, things started to get rather busy. Long queues of traffic began to form as the pilgrims arrived in large numbers; quite possibly the result of an extensive advertising campaign over the previous month on many popular radio stations.

I had a bit of a Batman and Robin moment while I was observing the congested motor vehicles, inching their way forward, their occupants hoping for a parking spot close enough, to their intended destination, to avoid a pilgrimage of the pedestrian kind.

"Holy smoke!" I thought, seeing the growing cloud of poisonous exhaust fumes ascending towards the heavens.

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A Moving Experience

Been busy moving house. I like my new abode but I'll like it a lot better when all my stuff has settled into familiar locations and I no longer have to think where I put things. Most importantly though, Wimax is now up and running. So much better than connecting via my smartphone.

Meanwhile, Sa Toya has extended the duration of the giveaway of The Jeremy on PP & L so hop on over if you fancy the chance of a free copy.

And just to give some counterbalance to my shameless self-promotion, if you like cool tunes, check out my good friends' YouTube video below or click this playlist link to see all five parts on YouTube.

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Perspicuously Perspicacious Perspectives

Blame The Scaffold and their 1968 UK hit 'Lily the Pink' for the title. I have no idea why that song popped into my head but pop it did. And having popped, I was obliged to silently sing along until I got to the last line of the chorus, when I found myself singing 'most perspicacious in every case'.

"Hang on a mo! That's not right," I interjected.

I had to go on-line in search of the lyrics where I was reminded that the correct word is 'efficacious'. Of course! 'Perspicacious' means insightful... doesn't it? Dictionary.com confirmed I was more or less right, but also pointed out that it's commonly confused with 'perspicuous' (clearly expressed or presented; lucid). Well, I do like to be lucid whenever possible so I thought I'd have a go at incorporating all that into this post about perspectives.

Perspectives? Yes, but not those used in the drawing technique which mimics 3D. I'm thinking of the sort of perspective which flavours how we see the world around us and our place in it.

Take a look at this video by Charles & Ray Eames. Now that's what I call perspective.

Not bad for a film made over thirty years ago.

Oh, by the way. What did you make of the red line-drawing at the top of this post? Studies have shown that if you saw a picture frame around a blank canvas then you are a realist. Alternatively, if you saw an open box with nothing inside it then you have a probing nature. Or less commonly, if you saw a pyramid with the top lopped off then you tend to look at the 'big picture'.

Which type of person are you?

Hopefully, you are the type of person who can spot some bullshit when you see it! Here's Lily The Pink and her medicinal compound, if you can stomach it:

PS. Don't forget to check out the book giveaway over at Sa Toya's blog: Paper, Pens & Lipgloss

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Step away from the blog, ppl!

Did the title catch your eye?

Update: The giveaway event at Paper, Pens & Lipgloss scheduled for this weekend has been postponed til next weekend (6th - 8th August).

The good news? You're not too late to get a free copy of The Jeremy - Snaps of the Dragon. Click the link to Sa Toya's blog to keep up to date.

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It's Book Giveaway Time at PPL!

PPL? That's Sa Toya's booky blog, otherwise known as Paper, Pens & Lipgloss. Hop on over and take a look (the link's at the bottom of this post).

She'll be running a giveaway of The Jeremy - Snaps of the Dragon this coming weekend. Not only that, she'll be publishing her interview questions and the answers I gave. Exciting init!

Wanna get your hands on a free copy of The Jeremy? Follow Sa Toya's blog...click here.

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The Perils of a One-Track-Mind

"You've got a one-track-mind!"

It's often said derogatorily, directed towards a male person and delivered with a high innuendo factor. Just another hackneyed cliché*, it's always eager to be rolled out, sitting at the ready on the tip of many a friendly wag's tongue.

Thing is, there is no other sort of mind. At least not when it comes to using the 'thinking part' of one's brain. Sure, there's a plethora of tasks going on in the old grey matter, all at the same time. You could be eating a bar of chocolate while climbing the stairs while reading a text message while thinking about the witty reply you'll send. You might switch your thoughts to how tasty the chocolate is, or how sexy the person in front of you looks from this angle, or how much more sexy they'd be if covered in melted milk chocolate (a token nod to the standard 'one-track-mind' accusers) but I'll bet you will only actively think about one of those things at any one time.

Multi-task! That's what we need to do. Even us men. The modern world demands it. But multi-tasking doesn't mean you're applying your brainpower to more than one thing at the same time. It requires you to switch your attention from one thing to the next and then the next and so on until you switch back to the first thing and start all over again.

And often, starting all over again is exactly what we do. It's hard to pick up where you left off without a recap of where you were in the particular process of each task in the chain, and the more tasks in the chain the greater the amount of time spent recapping at each task-switch. "It don't seem very 'fficient to me, mum!"

It was, perhaps, logic of this sort that led me to apply myself solely to the task of organising all the files on my hard drive after the Big Crash, I've-started-so-I'll-finish style, rather than switch between that and regaling my multitudinous blog readers, writing my next novel and attending to my correspondence. The upside is that my hard drive is now lean and clean, which gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside, me being a bit of a geek and all that.

Downsides? I'll just pretend there aren't any - got to protect the warm fuzzy feeling dontcha know!

_{* 'hackneyed cliché' - now there's a cliché for you!}

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Roll up! Roll up! 75% Off at Smashwords

The Jeremy - Snaps of the Dragon is just one of many eBooks available in the Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale until 31st July. Get it here.

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Did You Miss Me?

CRASH! Well, perhaps not quite that dramatic but the end result was that my PC would not boot after it hung.

Ironic really, considering I was installing software to emulate a PC so that I could try out new software in the emulation without the risk of it crashing my real machine. Just as well I'm not phased by having to reinstall Windows. I've done it enough times that I've got used to it as a normal part of PC-using life. It's the price you pay for allowing your TechoNerdGeek-self the freedom he craves to fiddle (I mean 'make things work better', of course).

If you're not TechoNerdGeeky then your eyes have no doubt started to glaze over already, and I'll warn you now there's more to come, so if you prefer to listen to some music there's an appropriate song at the bottom of the post.

One of the real pains of reinstalling an OS is that all the tweaks you implemented since the last time it crashed have to be set up again and invariably you can't recall exactly how you did this or that. Grrrr!

Just as well I'd found the marvelous Dropbox, which does such a good job of backing up stuff without making a big deal out of it, so my data was safe.

Of course, my applications needed reinstalling and setting up, a very time consuming and tedious business. It's a good thing that I'd started using some 'portable' applications, ones that store their configuration info in their own folder rather than the eggs-all-in-one-basket Windows Registry. I was checking for updates for those applications when I came across LiberKey.

It really is the dog's bollo ... errm ... the bee's knees. Managed, portable apps that can run either from a USB stick or, and this is the good part as far as I'm concerned, from any folder on your hard drive. The 'managed' bit simply means you are automatically notified of updates which can be downloaded and installed automatically. Dare I think that I've found a crash defying solution that will have me up and running in no time after the next crash? I've no doubt I'll have the opportunity to find out at some point.

In the meantime, it's good to be back.

Everything But The Girl 'Missing'

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Book Review - A Child's Wound

I just put up my review of Dwayne Kavanagh's book A Child's Wound on the Book Reviews page on my WordPress blog.

The (dot) Matrix - Lego Style

The output's a bit 'blocky', but then it is Lego.

_{Hat-tip: Pharyngula}

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CLS and the CLI

Nope. Nothing to do with crime scenes or forensics.

Those of you of a certain age (commonly known as getting on a bit) and of a sufficiently nerdy inclination, might recognise CLI as an acronym for Command Line Interface and CLS as the mnemonic command entered into the CLI, at the command prompt, to CLear Screen.

Okay. Nostalgia time over. We've moved on from there and now we have multi-touch screens, mouse gestures and voice recognition to control our computing devices.

But one thing hasn't changed.

Ten U.S. Lynx*

CLS also happens to be the initials of one Christopher Latham Sholes, the man largely responsible for the QWERTY keyboard layout that most English speaking people still use to input text to their computers. He invented it, along with the typewriter, way back in the 1870s.

I've heard it suggested (usually with an accompanying wink) that the layout was designed to slow typists down, but the reality is the reverse of that. The clever design of the mechanical typewriter, which ensured that letters were typed in perfect alignment, also had the unfortunate side effect that if two adjacent keys were pressed in quick succesion, the metal arms, which bashed the letters onto the ink ribbon, would jam together. The design of the QWERTY layout minimizes the liklihood of that happening, which helped typists achieve greater speed without jams.

So why on earth are we still using it now that our keyboards are electronic devices which cannot suffer from such mechanical jams?

Inertia? Probably. Apathy? Probably that too. The thing is that for all its quirkiness, it works well enough. The billions of words typed on it every day are testament to that. There are other layout designs, such as the Dvorak layout which has been around for years, but none of them have been able to topple king QWERTY from his dominant position.

It's not really an issue for me. I'm not a very proficient typist so the layout of the alphabetic keys won't make any significant difference to my output. But oh how I wish the pereipheral keys were in the same place on UK and USA keyboards. @Hello world@. That's what you'll get if you forget you are using a USA keyboard and hit the keys you would use on a UK keyboard to type "Hello World", and vice versa too.

I can understand that the £ and € symbols are superfluous on USA keyboards, but why oh why is it necessary to swap @ and ", both of which get the same amount of usage regardless of which country one happens to be in? It beats me. If someone can explain it I'd be all ears.

Perhaps it won't be long before it's no longer an issue. I can imagine a keyboard on which the keytop markings are displayed using LCD technology, or e-ink perhaps, and the user can select the layout of their choice via a pop-up menu. Or if they are really fussy, they could program the display for each key individually, and save it as a new layout.

Remember, you saw it here first!



* _{The sharp-eyed will have noticed that not all the lynx pictured are USA natives. Some are indeed Iberian. But come on, they're cute, and as tenuous links go, they're cuddly too!}

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Any old iron, any old iron?

We went in search of a new built-in gas hob the other day, but not necessarily exactly like the one pictured here. We had some basic selection criteria, such as the controls must be along the front edge rather than the side. But if I did want controls positioned at the side, I'd be mighty glad I'm not a 'leftie' because all the ones we saw had them on the right.

Other criteria included the number of rings (three, or maybe four, five even, or perhaps two mini-hobs with two burners each, or ...), and the materials used for the manufacture of the main bit which catches all the stuff that boils over (stainless steel - no, ceramic - no, stainless - no, ...)

What we hadn't given any thought to was the material used for the pan supports, but it soon became clear that this is in fact the most important criteria for choosing a hob.

"It's got cast iron pan supports."

It's obviously the 'new black', because I heard it so many times. Eventually I asked a particularly eager salesperson what was so good about cast iron as opposed to enameled steel. Quick as you like came the reply, "it's more durable."

I did a rapid memory scan and concluded that, in my experience, the cookers and hobs I've been aquainted with have all been cast aside due to the dictates of fashion, long before the durability of pan supports became an issue. Intrigued, I asked what the 'life expectancy' of an enameled steel pan support is.

"Ten years."

No hesitation, no doubt, not a flicker of uncertainty. I expect you want to know what it is for cast iron pan supports as much as I did, and I will resist the temptation to cruelly delay the imparting of the received information to you.

It's double that.

Well, they do say you learn something every day. I don't know about you, but when it comes to finding answers to metallurgical questions, my first port of call will always be my local kitchen appliance sales centre from now on.

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First Post

Perhaps I should have sub-titled this blog Irregularly Verbal Too because it will mirror what I post on my WordPress blog. Or if you prefer a more Google-centric view, I will mirror what I post here on my WordPress blog. Is that synchronicity?

With one breath, with one flow
You will know
Synchronicity

A sleep trance, a dream dance,
A shared romance,
Synchronicity

A connecting principle,
Linked to the invisible
Almost imperceptible
Something inexpressible.
Science insusceptible
Logic so inflexible
Causally connectible
Yet nothing is invincible.

If we share this nightmare
Then we can dream
Spiritus mundi.

If you act, as you think,
The missing link,
Synchronicity.

We know you, they know me
Extrasensory
Synchronicity.

A star fall, a phone call,
It joins all,
Synchronicity.

It's so deep, it's so wide
Your inside
Synchronicity.

Effect without a cause
Sub-atomic laws, scientific pause
Synchronicity..................................

The Police


Well, I do like the song but I'm just not sure about those lyrics!