No Middle Name

qv fashion show Originally uploaded by No Middle Name ooh, the exciting things you get to see from our office.

Got the blues Originally uploaded by No Middle Name Liveblogging the Wilson Botanical Park Blues Night. Stuff yer $6000 TED conference.

good morning Originally uploaded by No Middle Name waiting for the train, with cracking sunrise.

Charlie Brooker on skiing: It's almost the time of year when the nation's braying upper-middle-class idiot quotient collectively decides to stand up and go skiing. Good for them. Speaking as a control freak, I'm opposed to skis, snowboards, and skates on principle. I like to know where I'm going, how soon I'll arrive there, and how quickly I'll stop. I can't imagine doing that on skis. They're slidey. I don't like slidey.

Terry Pratchett's books are best sampled sparingly, I find. One book every now and again is fine, and helps keep the idea alive that he is a great author, and his books are really funny. In the last year I've read "Going Postal", which I thought was really funny, then "Monstrous Regiment", which wasn't as funny but still very good, and now " Thud! ". I think it's time to give Discworld novels a rest again. A couple of years should do it. That's not to say that Thud isn't a good book. All the usual Pratchett qualities are there: a decent plot; page-turning prose; familiar characters; and a threat to Ankh-Morpork that only grizzly Commander Vimes can put down in a no-nonsense, old-fashioned, common sense way. It's funny, exciting and intriguing. But there's the nagging feeling that this is a bit too familiar. You know how this is going to turn out. I'd recommend this to anyone - as long as they've had a nice long break...

J.G. Ballard's " The Drowned World " is set in a future where our sun has entered an intense phase of solar flare activity, causing the temperature to rise on Earth, polar ice caps to melt, end of civilisation, yadda yadda yadda. You know how this sort of thing works. Ballard captures the atmosphere of intense heat, and the lethargy and disinterest it causes in his characters really well. So well, in fact, that the lethargy and disinterest proved contagious and I was bored stupid throughout the book. It was written in the early sixties, and it is showing its age. The geophysics is a bit dodgy - the sun is pumping out lots more heat and energy, and yet the climate only gets hotter. There should have been high winds, constant storms from all that warm air expanding. The female character is utterly pointless, having no opinions or ability to think for herself. She's just a device to give the hero something to do. The characters are all very British, with stiff upper lips...

Neal Stephenson writes in the natural language of geeks, nerds, and affiliated techies. If Computer People, as my lovely wife umbrellas us, could string sentences together that didn't reference Star Wars in some way, then maybe we'd be Neal Stephenson. Geeks love his books, as do normal people (closet geeks), because he writes about complicated technical matters in an interesting, funny, exciting way. Examples: in Cryptonomicon, he makes cryptography exciting; in the Baroque Cycle (a series of three abso-fucking-lutely massive chunky doorstop novels) he makes the history of modern economics into a swashbuckling pirate yarn. In Snow Crash , there is an entire chapter that's all about ancient Sumerian history and the origins of the Bible. Geeks are normally sensitive to this sort of infodump, but I got to the end of the chapter before I realised. I felt like Syndrome in the Incredibles: "You sly dog! You got me monologuing." Stephenson's skill is to make it not...