Books

March 13, 2006 · Posted in Reviews · Comment 

The Tyger Valley Exclusive Books has a surprisingly good F&SF section. I now have both halves of A Storm of Swords (book 3 of A Song of Ice and Fire), Pandora's Star (which I hope will live up to the positive reviews) and Endless Nights (the Sandman graphic novel).

I've read the first half of SoS. I can see why people are frustrated with Martin; the story is becoming increasingly unfocused, complex and slow-moving (as huge fantasy sagas that start off as trilogies and don't stop are wont to do), but I don't care; it's still good.

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Working appliances

March 9, 2006 · Posted in General · 1 Comment 

The washing machine is fine; we paid R300 to have a hairball removed from the pump. We now know where the pump is.

The computer is mostly fine; the hard drive itself is probably not broken, Simon turned off its direct memory access capability (which is what all the error messages were about) and now the computer is running and hasn't frozen yet.

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Doom. Doom. Dooooooooom.

March 7, 2006 · Posted in General · 1 Comment 

The last two days have been days of broad-spectrum sucktitude.

Our washing machine is broken. It will not drain. We disassembled all the parts of the outlet that we could reach and cleaned them, finding no significant blockage, and to no avail. Lots of damp kitchen floor clean-up, kneeling in water, wringing out of soggy clothing, lifting, unscrewing, etc. At least the waterlogged clothes dried quickly, since it was an extremely hot day yesterday. Someone from Defy is coming to fix the washing machine tomorrow.

My computer is broken. It freezes at random times, usually shortly after booting, sometimes temporarily and sometimes permanently. We thought it was overheating because one of the fans isn't working, but it looks like a problem with the hard drive. Something may have been damaged by a power spike; ironically not because of the power outages, but because I blew the fuses in our flat after plugging the iron into a wall socket into which I had not previously tried to plug in the iron. It could also be a weird software error. I guess this is a great time to finally upgrade my operating system from the antediluvian Fedora Core 3 to Ubuntu, which Simon has now test-driven on his computer.

Cobweb is performing increasingly acrobatic feats to use a large potted plant outside, which I have covered with a crudely constructed wire cage, as her toilet. I will have to upgrade the defences.

I read Golden Witchbreed, by Mary Gentle, and found it vaguely unsatisfying and disappointing. It has a neat alien culture, and a lot of cool ideas, but nothing ever happens, and the aliens are all interchangeable.

According to recent news, the DA has received an offer from the ACDP “and smaller parties” which would give it a majority in Cape Town, with a bare 106 seats out of 210. Since the ANC has 81 seats and the ID has 23, it follows that to form this coalition they would need every single other party that has won a seat. Yeah, that looks like a really good idea.

So, instead of having an executive council with the major parties being assigned voting power in proportion to how many people actually voted for them, we would have a dodgy coalition of immiscible tiny parties and the DA doing what it likes because it has a majority, after their internal decision-making has taken place behind closed doors.

And those tiny parties, which would have practically no voting power in a fairly distributed multi-party government (as, I would say, the voters intended), would have massive bargaining power within the coalition, because if the coalition doesn't keep them all happy and two seats' worth of them bugger off, the coalition falls apart. And I really, really don't want the majority of those parties to have any power. Can you see why I hate coalitions yet?

OK, I'm going to stop now. Perhaps sanity will prevail and the DA won't go for it. Back to work.

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Stuff

March 3, 2006 · Posted in General · 2 Comments 

My lack of blogging is getting embarrassing. Please excuse the sparse summary of things further back in time; if I were to include an exhaustive detailed report it would take hours.

So: I got lots of book vouchers for Christmas, spent them, read the books. Got lots of book vouchers for my birthday; haven't spent them yet. Got lots of other cool stuff, too varied, numerous and at home to list.

Mark, Dave and d@ve got mugged by a gang of well-spoken, not-very-poor-looking young men on the lawn outside our flat (dodgy students, probably) after we went to Maynardville to see Twelfth Night (which was OK). We are inheriting Philip & Jo's alarm (not that it would have helped much, but I'd rather forestall any break-ins than wait until one happens), since they have moved and the landlady didn't want to keep it. It's a bit cheaper than getting a totally new one installed.

A recent purchase of a chest of drawers means that we can see more of the floor. Another three or four chests of drawers, and we'll be making great progress into putting away the stuff we don't use and putting the stuff we do use somewhere where we can actually use it.

The “scheduled” (ha, ha) power outages are irritating, mostly because Eskom is being weaselly and not telling anyone anything unless they absolutely have to, and the government isn't making enough of an effort to determine what is going on. It looks like a buildup of incompetent management, with existing structures not being properly maintained, and new structures not being built to accomodate the growing demand which a toddler could have predicted (it's not like the Northern Suburbs popped up overnight, seriously).

On the bright side, there's not terribly much I can do at work when the power has gone out, so I have put a small but appreciable dent in my huge pile of unread books. Looks like a lot more of the same in the future. Oh, boy.

Voted. Reasonably happy with the election results; the minority parties are doing quite well (at least in the Western Cape), which is a good thing.

Seriously annoyed with the DA's rhetoric and specious reasoning: “Most people [in the WC] voted for parties other than the ANC, therefore most voters clearly voted against the ANC, therefore most voters would obviously want all the parties which are not the ANC to form a not-the-ANC coalition led by the DA, and the ID is selling the voters out by refusing to cooperate, and in fact it's as if they were putting the ANC back in power!“. I'm not joking; see here.

Sorry, DA, your psychic powers need work. And well done, ID, for telling them to take a hike and not selling out your voters by joining a coalition after you specifically promised that you wouldn't. I hope there isn't another explosion of floor-crossing which will make your stand futile.

OK, enough ranting about politics. How things turn out remains to be seen.

Went to the Community Chest Carnival. Got over 5kg of books, a shirt for R10, sweets and a Guinness. Might be going again early on Saturday.

I'm sure I'm totally forgetting about important, momentous events, but now it's time to go.

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