The Spirit Rover has been making head-lines recently; an interesting site I found today points out that Mars is ahead of Earth 20 points to 16.

That’s a relatively forgiving score, by the way. The author gives Earth a point just as long as the spacecraft manages to send back some amount of science data–even if it crashes immediately afterwards. If he granted Earth a point only for missions that were indisputably successful, the score would be much worse.

It began to seem like I’d been reading this book forever.

Don’t get me wrong; I like Harry Potter. It’s fun stuff. But when David
insisted that I read him the second Harry Potter book as his bedtime story I was
reluctant. I wasn’t in the mood for it, and anyway I’d read it to
myself late last spring in preparation for the publication of
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It was simply too
soon. On top of that, Dave already knew the basic story very well, from
watching the movie.

When you’ve got an adult who’s reluctant and a kid who already knows
what’s going to happen, there’s no real tension, and thus no incentive to
read a book quickly. And so I read it to him a few pages a night, taking
three or four days per chapter instead of one. And let me tell you, read
that slowly this book is a real dog.

Reading a book aloud word by word casts a bright light upon it, and all of
its flaws and imperfections spring out. It’s a dangerous thing to do. I
had an entire series of books by a guy named Craig Shaw Gardener that
I summarily disposed of after a failed attempt to read the first one
aloud to Jane. So long as I could read them at speed I was able to
ignore the lack of substance, but let the harsh light of slow and
careful reading be once cast upon them and my enjoyment ceased.

This book, fortunately, is not that bad. The first Harry Potter
read aloud adequately (though not superlatively), and I’ve no doubt this
one would have read aloud adequately as well under better circumstances.
I do confess, by the end of the book I’d started editing Rowling’s prose,
omitting needless adjectives and adverbs here and there.

I haven’t quite decided what to make of this book. For a story so
deceptively simple, the more I think about it, the more complex it becomes.

On the one hand you can read it as a very simple children’s fairy tale with
giants and good guys and pirates and bad guys and, of course, The Girl Who
Need Rescuing. But Goldman then goes and sticks all those personal comments
in about himself and the original manuscript and his first experience of the
story and things just get more and more murky. And interesting.

I have to read it again when I have time to think about it more as I’m
reading and not just to get the plot down. In the meantime, if anyone cares
to enlighten me on what to look for, I would be appreciative.

Now, I read Soul Music so I could go on and read this one.

As you’ll recall, Susan Sto Helit is Death’s granddaughter. She’s also
the Duchess of Sto Helit, but as she has philosophical problems with
being a non-working drone she’s currently supporting herself at the only
job deemed appropriate for young unmarried gently-born ladies–that is,
she’s a governess. And she has a problem. Her predecessor was a
believer in the “bogeyman” school of discipline, i.e., “If you don’t stay
in bed, the bogeyman will do thus and such!” Reality is thin on the
Discworld, and the result is that after dark the nursery is regularly
infested with one kind of bogeyman or another.

But Susan copes admirably and dispassionately; as a believer in the “iron
rod” school of discipline she simply applies an iron rod–specifically,
the fireplace poker–to all and sundry bogeymen….and then lets them go,
to spread the word that her nursery is To Be Avoided.

Meanwhile, for reasons I refuse to explain, Death is standing in for the
Hogfather this year. The Hogfather? You know–the Hogfather. Jolly old
fellow in a red suit, says “Ho, Ho, Ho,” rides in a sleigh pulled by four
giant pigs, and fills stalkings with sausages and blood pudding and toys
every Hogswatchnight. Him. For good and sufficient reasons, Death is
filling in for him this year. Consequently he’s having to shirk his
usual duties, and so Susan gets pulled in to take care of them–and Susan
Is Not Amused.

This is a book that answers a great many interesting questions, including
one great and abiding mystery: just what does the Tooth Fairy do with
all those teeth?

I’ve just released a new stable version of Notebook, V2.0.3. This one has lots of new stuff over the last stable version, V1.1, so go and check it out. It’s at
the Notebook Home Page.

I picked this book up for two reasons. One is that having read a great deal
of the literature from the Victorian period in British history, I have never
read anything about the actual monarch who lent her name to it. The other is
that I spent an entire summer reading the diaries of Virginia Woolf once and
Lytton Strachey figures prominently in the Bloomsbury group she was part of.
His writing piqued my curiosity.

This is a nice little précis of the life of Victoria. It dwells on the
personal side of her life and touches on the political less than I could
have wished but all in all I found it enlightening. He also brings to the
front the importance of Albert in British foreign policy and suggests that
had he not died just on the eve of the American Civil War, the British
policy towards the war may have been significantly different. His emphasis
on the personal loneliness of Albert, an intellectual man married to a
non-intellectual woman who adores him was also new to me. I had never given much
thought to Albert as more than the man Victoria mourned for over half her
life.

The book read well also. I was surprised at that since my take on the whole
Bloomsbury group is that they were well above the general level of rest of
us and wrote for themselves and Art as an abstract rather than for general
consumption. To find a little gem like this was a treat. Now I have to go
find a biography of Strachey to find out more about him than Virginia
Woolf’s sometimes catty observations in her diary.

So suppose you’d really like to do some stop motion animation, a la Wallis and Grommit. You’ve got the clay; you’ve got the camera; you’ve even got the necessary modelling skills. But how do you keep Wallis from falling over while he’s stand off-balance on one leg, arms waving madly? Simple! Just give some money to these guys!

Take a look at what this guy has had to go through.

Here’s a summary of Peter Jackson’s Return of the King for the non-humor impaired. Favorite line: “Bad steward. No cookie.”

This site went down some time today; I’m not sure when. I noticed it this evening about 8PM–I couldn’t access Movable Type, and the entire site appeared to be gone.

My web hosting service is DreamHost.com. I went right to their support page, and submitted a problem report.

Around 8:30 I checked my e-mail, hoping that I might at least have gotten some kind of automated message saying that they were going to look into my problem. Instead, I got an e-mail message from a real person saying that they had just fixed my problem. And indeed, they had.

Now, that’s service. 30 minutes from problem reported to problem solved, at 8PM at night–for a tiny little customer like me.

I signed up with Dreamhost three years ago; I heard about the company through a banner ad at Slashdot–the only time I’ve ever responded to a banner ad. I’ve never regretted choosing them.

When I first signed up with Dreamhost, they offered to host my domain for $9.95 a month–a price they promised would never increase. It hasn’t. For that price, they would host my domain, host a website at my domain, give me reasonable amounts of disk space and bandwidth, and redirect e-mail. Since that time, they’ve added many new services. I now have full shell access, CGI-scripting, MySQL databases, mailing list administration, and a bunch of other services I’ve not even used yet. And I’m still paying just $9.95 a month.

In all that time, I’ve only had my site go down twice (that I’m aware of). The second time was tonight; the first time was due to a credit-card/billing screwup which was entirely my fault. In both cases, the problem was resolved quickly and painlessly as soon as I noticed it.

Every so often I read about people having trouble with their ISPs or hosting services, and I just smile.