No Middle Name

Evil Robot Monkey , by Mary Robinette Kowal. It'll take you about 5 minutes, don't worry.

Review backlog again. " Thirteen " (or "Black Man" outside the US), is another Richard Morgan techno-noir thriller, with all the kick-ups, shagfests and beatings you expect from his previous work. Takeshi Kovacs Carl Marsalis is a chiseled killing machine, a hit with the ladies, and a genetic experiment. Complicated plot involving lots of violence, shagging, more violence ensues. Keeps ensuing. Never seems to stop. Eventually does, pointlessly. If you've read "Altered Carbon", stop there. The rest of his books are pretty much the same. His prose style hasn't improved much, there are still viewpoint changes mid-paragraph which dump you out of the action and make you re-read to work out who's thinking what about whom and whose leg just got splintered by someone's obscure martial art technique. At 600 pages, this book could have done with a hell of a lot of trimming and a lot less plot. " Behemoth ", the last of Peter Watts' Rif...

As of this morning, Google Reader tells me I have 947 unread articles to view. Of these, a third are from the BBC news website telling me things about politicians I no longer recognise, celebrities I've never heard of, and sporting events in which I have no interest. Over a hundred each are from TechCrunch (companies I've never heard of going bust while trying to do things I don't understand), Wired (ditto), io9 (providing me with spoilers for programmes I'll never watch and the plots of films I'll never get around to watching), and SciFi Wire (ditto). My twitter feed tells me all about the mundane lives of Graham Linehan , Stephen Fry , Jonathan Ross , Lily Allen and other people I don't know, doing things I'm not really that interested in. Let's not get started on Facebook. Time for a cull. Blogs down to a minimum, twitter down to people I have communicated with in some form.

can we still say that, it went straight to video, in DVD age? a raft of big stars, a fantastic location, no sign of a plot.

Review backlog to clear. Let's keep it short. " Clean Code ", by "Uncle" Bob Martin , is a manual for programmers that care about their craft. I went to one of his tutorials at JAOO last year in Sydney , where he successfully explained the Liskov Substitution Principle to us. Lots of good advice in this one, and I'll be recommending it to all my minions. " This Modern Life " is the third in Steph Swainston's series of books that started with "The Year of Our War". As always, interesting, different and exciting fantasy, with a little sneaking in of SF via the backdoor. " Maelstrom ", by Peter Watts, is the second of his three (maybe four) Rifters books. Lenie Clarke rampages across America, spreading a deadly microbe in her wake. Good stuff, with plenty to think about like all good SF. " Mainspring ", by Jay Lake, a master of short fiction. I was hoping for great things from this story, and while the worl...

Vegetable recognition Originally uploaded by No Middle Name Turnips on the left. Swedes on the right.

Adelaide's old town, north of the CBD, is beautiful. Quirky architecture, nice restaurants, bars, walking distance to the botanic park and the CBD, warm weather all year. Only a tram ride away from the beach, so that I may disgust the pretty young things with displays of my wrinkly, saggy body.