Author Archives: wjduquette

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About wjduquette

Author, software engineer, and Lay Dominican.

It’s Amazing What You Can Do With The Right Tools

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A couple of
days ago, Jane showed me a list of words that David is supposed to learn
to recognize. And it occurred to me, “Gosh…I could probably make Dave
a flashcard program.” The current release of the Tcl programming language
includes all of the bells and whistles that I needed. So yesterday
morning I sat down, and in a couple of hours I had a simple program that
displays a word in really big type. When Dave presses the “???” button,
a recording of my voice says the word, then spells it letter by letter,
then says it again. When he presses the “Go!” button, another word
appears. When he presses the “Stop!” button, the program ends.

And most of that two hours was spent recording the words and the
individual letters; the programming was simple. There’s a reason I
like Tcl.

Diamond Dust, by Peter Lovesey

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I am not going to say much about the plot of this book. First, it’s still
in hardback and unless you want to spring for the $23 it’s priced at, any
plot description is going to be a spoiler.

Second, and this is the main reason, I have my knickers in a knot about
what Lovesey did in this book. I will say it is the end of the Peter
Diamond series. And if it is funny in any way, I totally missed the
humor. You kind of grow to expect certain things from a series and when
the author throws the right hook he did in this one, it’s a little
disconcerting. Don’t get me wrong. The writing is great. The murder
investigation is interesting and has some twists you can’t see ahead of
time. I am just a little ticked at Lovesey for doing what he did to Peter
Diamond. I kept waiting for it to be an elaborate charade similar to what
he has done in previous novels. It isn’t. Rats.

Bloodhounds, by Peter Lovesey

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This book explores the locked room mystery plot. A murder victim is found
in a room locked from the inside with no discernible way that the
murderer could have gotten in or out. But Lovesey is not only writing a
book with the plot. The opening chapter of this book reads like a Who’s
Who in crime fiction. A young woman joins a meeting of Bloodhounds, a
bookclub dedicated to crime fiction that meets weekly in the crypt of the
Abbey. Her fellow club members are all eccentric, opinionated critics
with their own favorite authors in the genre, which they discuss in
painful detail. When someone sends a riddle to the local radio station
predicting a crime, the group decides to work solve the mystery,
thankfully.

Lovesey is writing his normal humorous murder mystery with all the twists
and dodges that he has put in the other books of the series. Peter
Diamond is his normal grumpy self. The end is unpredictable at the
beginning unless you are paying very, very close attention. However, it’s
not the best in the series. I found it a bit repetitive, though still
totally enjoyable.

GAUNTLET: Dark Legacy

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Here it is the 14th of November, and I
haven’t finished reading even one book. Part of the problem is the
Burton biography; I’m trying to finish it before going on to anything
else, and while Burton’s life was the stuff of adventure, the bio is
nothing like a novel. I sometimes wonder why I bother reading
biographies; I don’t care for tragedy, and most bios end only with the
death of the principal.

But it wouldn’t be fair to blame the whole thing on poor old Richard
Burton. A lot of blame has to be put squarely on our Nintendo GameCube.
I bought it six months or so ago; I thought the kids would enjoy it, and
I’d get to play it, too. The way it actually worked out is that I play
it and the kids watch.

“GAUNTLET: Dark Legacy” is one of the games I’ve been working my way
through. It’s surprisingly fun considering that the graphics are a
couple of generations behind the GameCube’s best output, and the user
interface is a disaster. As you go along you collect power-ups of
various kinds, and after nearly completing the game I still have no idea
how to figure out reliably what power-ups I have with me at any given
time.

It’s your basic “dungeon crawl”. You’re playing a mean, nasty, violent,
hair-trigger, suspicious sort of person, which is a good thing because
the world is full of nasty monsters trying to kill you. I find this sort
of thing relaxing. It lets my back brain freewheel on whatever problems
it’s working on, while my conscious brain works off stress. Sometimes in
the evening I’ll tell Jane, “Jane, I’m going to go upstairs and kill
things.” She says, “Have fun, dear.”

I’ve doubtless now lost the respect of many of my long-time readers by
making this admission; ah, well. If I get to feeling anxious about it, I
know the cure.

The Bohemian Murders, by Dianne Day

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I realized after about 2 paragraphs that this book is part of a series
that needs to be read in order. It takes place in Carmel, California in
1907. Fremont Jones, the heroine, has moved to Carmel after the San
Francisco earthquake to take a temporary job of lighthouse keeper. On
watch one day she spots a dead woman floating in the sea, unknown by
anyone around and unclaimed by family.

Fremont Jones reminded me a little of Amelia Peabody or Mary Russell. She
is the “independent woman heroine,” refusing to give into accepted norms
for women’s behavior and lifestyle for the period. If you accept the
conceit and ignore the unlikelihood of such a heroine, the novel works
fairly well. This book didn’t have the slapstick humor of Peters
mysteries but I enjoyed it nevertheless. She includes a love interest
named Michael who is some sort of spy–I think that came out in previous
novels. My only gripe with the book is that for all the detecting going
on, Fremont doesn’t really figure out much of anything. And I wish I knew
more about Michael and what he is doing sneaking around in the background
of the plot. I have to read the earlier books in the series.

Lessons in Capitalism

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Some time ago we started giving Dave a
small weekly allowance. We don’t actually give him the cash; instead, he
accrues a certain amount each week in the Bank of Dad. That means that
when David asks how much money he has, I check the record in my PDA and
see how many weeks it’s been since I last paid anything into his account.
Then I add the resulting amount to his balance and tell him how much he’s
got.

Now, for quite some time David has been agitating for a Bionicle. (It’s
a kind of Lego toy.) For quite some time we’ve been telling him that
if he saves his allowance he can buy that kind of thing for himself; in
the meantime Christmas is coming.

This afternoon he said, “Dad, when it’s my birthday I want you to take
my seven dollars and buy me a Green Bionicle.” I said, “Dave, you’re
a little confused. If I buy you a Green Bionicle for your birthday,
I’ll be spending my money, not yours. And if you have seven dollars
(or whatever a Green Bionicle costs), then you don’t have to wait until
your birthday.”

So naturally he said, “Dad, can we go to Toys’R’Us today?”

I checked, and indeed his account in the Bank of Dad was well over
seven dollars, and so there I was, stuck, the victim of my own
teaching. And so we did. It wasn’t what I had planned to do with
my early Sunday evening, but on the whole I think it worked out rather
well.

And so did the Green Bionicle. Dave put it together all by himself,
following the instructions, and it’s really rather cute.

Soccer Update

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My five-year-old has been playing AYSO soccer this
season, as I believe I’ve mentioned before. It’s been something of a
trial for me, as the games are scheduled on Saturday, and usually
Saturday morning.

Now, Saturday morning is my chief project time. I can get a lot done on
personal projects in the evenings, but Saturday is the only time when I
can tackle larger things–when I have several hours together and have the
gumption to focus on something difficult for that length of time. Having
a soccer game take (effectively) a two-hour bite out of that time has
brought my productivity to a screeching halt.

Today, however, the soccer game isn’t scheduled until 1:30 this
afternoon, so I have the morning to myself. Well, mostly to myself; Dave
is sitting on the other side of my desk playing with Legos and
occasionally making staccato “Twang, Twang” noises (I think he’s shooting
something–best not to ask). It’s looking like a good morning.

More Kvetching

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The dearth of book reviews early in the month isn’t helped by the
fact that my current book is a slow, thick one: a biography of Sir
Richard Francis Burton. Burton was a 19th Century soldier and
adventurer; he’s best known these days for his pilgramage to Mecca (he
was one of the first Europeans to go there), and for his translation of
the 1,001 Arabian Nights (the original translation, and still the raciest,
I’m given to understand). More about him when I’ve finished the book.

Good Eats Watch

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There’s exactly one TV show that Jane and I make
it a point to catch every week: Good Eats. It’s a cooking show on the
Food Network, and it’s funny. The chef, Alton Brown, is a regular kind
of guy; he wears hornrim glasses and he’s got bad hair and he usually
wears Hawaiian shirts–or sometimes bowling shirts. The show is filmed
inside of a house the purports to be his (nice Craftsman-style kitchen),
and it’s all about cooking well–not just how to prepare a particular
dish, but the secrets, the gotchas, and why it all works the way it does.

And it’s funny. The show is rife with weird camera angles (it often looks
like you’re looking out of the oven or refrigerator), weird props (a
Magritte-like painting of a roast turkey floating in mid air), and odd
story lines.

For example, there was the show where Butter was on trial, complete with
an English judge in a wig. There have been several episodes of Food
Gallery (a take-off on Rod Serling’s Night Gallery show); one of them
was on how to do souffles, and another was about cheesecake. There was
the Scrap Iron Chef show. There was the show about crepes, where
Alton’s psychiatrist insisted that he get in touch with his French side.
There was the Thanksgiving show on how to properly cook a turkey–and
the following week’s show which purported to be a documentary that was
originally about the making of the Thanksgiving show but turned into a
documentary of the horrible things that happened when the cast and crew
were snowed in together after the Thanksgiving show. There was the show
where Alton’s wife sent him on a vacation to the Pacific Northwest to get
some enforced rest and relaxation with absolutely no cooking; he caught
a salmon and smoked it in a large cardboard box outside his hotel room.
There was the Oats show in which Alton and a partner, both dressed
in kilts, showed (more or less) how to make haggis with a claymore and an
outrageously bad Scottish accent.

You get the idea. It’s on at 6 PM and 9 PM PST (9 PM and 12 PM EST)
Wednesdays and Saturdays on Food Network. The Saturday show is pretty
much always a rerun.

Kvetching

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One problem I had not considered when I started this web log was
the dearth of material at the beginning of the month. I usually write
book reviews a few at a time, and then post them over the next few days.
It gives you folks something to read every day, and means I don’t need to
be writing every day. But the last thing I do every month is finish
writing reviews of all of the books I’ve read, and then those reviews go
into Ex Libris
instead of into the web log. And then, the next
day, I have no reviews to post. Which means I need to write bilge like
this to fill the space.

I suppose I could drone on about the California election, but the only
thing on the ballot that I’m at all exercised about is a proposal to allow
voter registration up to and including Election Day. At present, there’s
a deadline–you have to register some weeks (30 days?) before Election
Day.

Now consider–Joe Blow goes to the polls on Election Day, and registers
to vote–at every precinct in the county. How can this be prevented?
The proposed measure provides for stringent new anti-fraud mechanisms,
but I think it’s wishful thinking. Rigging an election can be a powerful
temptation, and the stakes can be high; I’m in favor of putting as many
obstacles as possible in the way.

So I’m agin’ it. We’ll see in the morning how many folks agree with me.