No Middle Name

" Through Wolf's Eyes ", by Jane Lindskold, would have been a chunky great doorstop of a novel, had it not been another of Tor's free ebooks that I read on my phone. It's your average girl-raised-by-wolves-goes-on-to-great-things-in-fantasy-land-by-using-her-wolfish-ways-and-her-straight-talking-to-the-nobles story. Firekeeper, the wolf-girl, is well-written, as are most of the characters. She's believable, once you accept that wolves wouldn't just eat her. The world they live in is a slightly different take on standard mediaeval fantasyland, but only slightly. It's still kings and queens and castles and nobles and commoners, but this time women get to be knights and they worship their ancestors instead of dodgy gods. That's about all the differences. The plot is pretty good, concerning itself with aging King Tedric's choice of an heir. His own children having died in nasty ways, he is forced to select an heir from a wide variety of nobles and ...

more work benefits Originally uploaded by No Middle Name sensis is such a large company that they have a budget for marketing stuff internally. to celebrate an upgrade to the trading post site, they are giving us lamingtons today.

Previously on File Sharing Farces, I had upgraded to Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, royally buggering my networked hard drive that used Samba for file sharing. I tried a workaround by installing MacFUSE and setting up an FTP file system. This worked ok, except it would keep dropping out and iTunes didn't play nicely with it (complaining that the original music files could not be found, and it wouldn't let me sync my ipod or add new music). After a bit of intense googling I found this forum thread about the many different guises my LanServer NAS goes under (Hotway LanDrive, NAS900, etc). On the last page ( 27 ), there was a link to a firmware upgrade from one of the other manufacturers that use the same chipset. This claimed to support Mac OS 10.5. I gave it a go, fully expecting it to turn my NAS into an expensive shiny aluminium brick. It seems to have worked perfectly, I can now browse the shares in Finder. My next task is to get it automounting and serving music. Hoorah!

BBC Wales and BBC Drama has announced that Bafta and Hugo Award winning writer Steven Moffat will succeed Russell T Davies as Lead Writer and Executive Producer of the fifth series of Doctor Who, which will broadcast on BBC One in 2010. -- BBC Dr Who News Awesome stuff - Moffat wrote Blink, The Girl in the Fireplace, and The Empty Child.

Ok, three books that have escaped the merciless scalpel of my reviewing are below. A paragraph for each, chronological order of reading, usual stuff, usual quality of review ("it was a gud book. I liked the peepl and the wurds"). " Signal to Noise ", by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, is the story of a dying film director and his final film. It's Dave McKean so the artwork is outstanding, as much a part of the narrative as Gaiman's words. This is probably the only work by Neil Gaiman I haven't thoroughly enjoyed, although that may be due to the sombre subject rather than any fault of the work. It certainly had the power to affect me emotionally in parts. Definitely an interesting book. " The Devil in Amber ", by Mark Gatiss, is another of his Lucifer Box books. This time his gentleman/painter/spy/playboy has moved on twenty years or so, but now he's embroiled in a Dennis Wheatley style occult thriller, battling demons and shagging hotel porte...

I have just finished the last of my stock of real books, " Black Swan Green " by David Mitchell, it's back to the ebooks again. While I have thoroughly enjoyed everything else I have read by Mitchell (Number9Dream, Ghostwritten, and especially Cloud Atlas), I was a bit wary of picking up this one. It's about a year in the life of a stammering, bullied, sensitive 13-year-old. It didn't sound too interesting -I remember 13 being a bit crap, I did not particularly want to read about someone else's crap year of being 13. I 'm glad I did though. I should have known that nice Mr Mitchell wouldn't steer me wrong. It starts off in a slightly Diary of Adrian Mole style, but you quickly realise there's a lot more going on in this book. He lays on the 80s ephemera thick, references to Monster Munch and puffball skirts abound, and it works well dragging us unwillingly back into the horrible style vacuum that was 1983. The plot's a good one, not terribly su...

Previously on "Gareth's Geek Hour": our hero had battled with the NetInfo Manager in Mac OS 10.3 and succeeded in getting his ibook to automount a smb share on a networked storage device. Music streamed off the little box over the network, and there was much rejoicing. Disaster struck when subversion refused to work over a samba share. Our intrepid idiot hero decided an upgrade to Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) was in order, believing it to have the solution to all life's problems... Leopard is pretty, has some great new features, and seems a little snappier than Panther on my aging ibook. One problem: it has kicked my little automounted samba shares right in their wrinkled little happy sacks. They just don't work. They seemed to have been migrated from the NetInfo database into the local directory (/var/db/dslocal), because it would still try to automount them. Except it would lock up completely and need to be turned off with the power button whenever I connected to them....

giant james blunt Originally uploaded by No Middle Name he'll destroy us all, with his giant feet!

james blunt Originally uploaded by No Middle Name tiny wee man

neil gaiman Originally uploaded by No Middle Name woot! Neil Gaiman reading from The Graveyard Book at the state library, Melbourne. Very funny and interesting. Unfortunately I had to get back to work so couldn't get my book signed. boo.

hot hungarian salami Originally uploaded by No Middle Name I love a mouthful of hot sausage on the weekend, especially of the eastern european variety.

So, the nice people / cheapskates at Schmap have used one of my Creative Commons Licensed Crappy Cameraphone Pictures (TM) for their Scienceworks Museum review . Which was nice. They're doing a mashup thing, using flickr photos and google maps. Looks good.

Tor's free ebook assault has claimed its first victory: I've just finished reading " Axis ", the sequel to Robert Charles Wilson's " Spin " - the first of the ebooks I read. This wouldn't have been a book I would have picked up had I not been impressed by "Spin". Axis is set 30 years after the end of the first book, and sheds a bit more light on the nature of the Hypotheticals, the mysterious entities that hid the Earth away from the normal passage of time. Not much more, mind you, but then the point of the books is to explore how mankind would react to direct contact with something entirely unknowable. As before, the characters have a depth and authenticity that stands out. The story is definitely about the people caught up in the events, not the events themselves. A good read. Highly recommended if you've read "Spin".