Ergonomic Upgrade
I finally decided to spend the serious cash on a serious office chair. Not some $30 hunk of plastic from Office Depot, but a real grown-up chair, one that would make me want to sit at my desk, instead of slouching off to the chaise lounges in the backyard. For the last few years I've used a hand-me-down chair that I acquired during the shutdown of Circus Freak. I don't remember if it was my actual office chair or not - I'm pretty sure it had been a conference room chair before it made it to CFS.
Out with the old!
I had been contemplating buying an Aeron, but I didn't really want to. There were several reasons. First off I don't really like the look of the Aeron. Second off, they are so mid-90s nowadays. They just scream "Web 2.0" to me, and I assume there's a marketeer lurking nearby - complete with their sob story about how they had to work so late they were in the office after six PM, and the sushi plate they ordered in wasn't even very cold! (Please note: I'm not making that anecdote up. Really happened at Accolade. It was the explanation as to why somebody was getting a "110% award".) Third, they are fussy and finicky. Fourth, even given my desire for a grown-up chair and a willingness to pay for comfort they cost about a grand. That's a lot for one chair. (And please don't start in with me about Craigslist. I want a new chair, and I want to just pick it out, order it, have it show up and not worry about any mysterious stains on it.)
Luckily I remembered Cory Doctorow talking up the Steelcase Think last fall on Boing Boing. I looked around on the web a bit and decided that A) it was the chair I wanted, and B) there was no major discount to be had compared to ordering it straight from Steelcase. They aren't super-fast, it took them about a week to fulfill my order, and a week for shipping, but I did get it last Thursday. It's smart, modern looking, color matched to my desk, and it only has four controls (counting the lumbar adjust). I like it a lot. And it came with a big huge box that makes the cats happy :-)
Most suprising thing? It's quiet. I hadn't realized how much noise the casters on my old chair make with the squeaking and grumbling until the first time I slid from my desktop over to my laptop and didn't hear any sounds.
In with the new!
technorati tags:Office, Steelcase, Think, Chair, Furniture
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I finally decided to spend the serious cash on a serious office chair. Not some $30 hunk of plastic from Office Depot, but a real grown-up chair, one that would make me want to sit at my desk, instead of slouching off to the chaise lounges in the backyard. For the last few years I've used a hand-me-down chair that I acquired during the shutdown of Circus Freak. I don't remember if it was my actual office chair or not - I'm pretty sure it had been a conference room chair before it made it to CFS.
Out with the old!
I had been contemplating buying an Aeron, but I didn't really want to. There were several reasons. First off I don't really like the look of the Aeron. Second off, they are so mid-90s nowadays. They just scream "Web 2.0" to me, and I assume there's a marketeer lurking nearby - complete with their sob story about how they had to work so late they were in the office after six PM, and the sushi plate they ordered in wasn't even very cold! (Please note: I'm not making that anecdote up. Really happened at Accolade. It was the explanation as to why somebody was getting a "110% award".) Third, they are fussy and finicky. Fourth, even given my desire for a grown-up chair and a willingness to pay for comfort they cost about a grand. That's a lot for one chair. (And please don't start in with me about Craigslist. I want a new chair, and I want to just pick it out, order it, have it show up and not worry about any mysterious stains on it.)
Luckily I remembered Cory Doctorow talking up the Steelcase Think last fall on Boing Boing. I looked around on the web a bit and decided that A) it was the chair I wanted, and B) there was no major discount to be had compared to ordering it straight from Steelcase. They aren't super-fast, it took them about a week to fulfill my order, and a week for shipping, but I did get it last Thursday. It's smart, modern looking, color matched to my desk, and it only has four controls (counting the lumbar adjust). I like it a lot. And it came with a big huge box that makes the cats happy :-)
Most suprising thing? It's quiet. I hadn't realized how much noise the casters on my old chair make with the squeaking and grumbling until the first time I slid from my desktop over to my laptop and didn't hear any sounds.
In with the new!
technorati tags:Office, Steelcase, Think, Chair, Furniture
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Aegis Wing
So there's this free 2d side-scrolling shooter available on Xbox Live – Aegis Wing. At first I was pretty skeptical, figuring it was free because it wasn't worth charging for. And after I played it single player I was still pretty much of the same opinion. But the four player cooperative is a barrel of fun. It's super short - it only had six levels and two difficulty settings and I've already won all six levels, but the coop has a lot of interesting options. The main thing is that your ships can "link" into a larger, slower ship that one player drives. The other players then become independently aiming turrets. There are also powerups, and the more people you link the bigger your special powerup becomes. There's a real art to driving the linked ships, dodging bullets, and verrrry carefully driving into powerups so that everybody has enough health and their favorite weapon.
Anyway, if you haven't downloaded it yet you should. If you have downloaded it but you haven't tried it in multiplayer definitely give it a spin. I thought we'd play it for a little bit Thursday night and then probably switch to Catan, but we played it all through the session. And ended getting a pick-up gaming session going tonight to beat the final boss on Insane difficult. I'm not a big fan of arcade shooters as a rule, but this one is surprisingly fun.
technorati tags:AegisWing, Xbox, LiveArcade
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So there's this free 2d side-scrolling shooter available on Xbox Live – Aegis Wing. At first I was pretty skeptical, figuring it was free because it wasn't worth charging for. And after I played it single player I was still pretty much of the same opinion. But the four player cooperative is a barrel of fun. It's super short - it only had six levels and two difficulty settings and I've already won all six levels, but the coop has a lot of interesting options. The main thing is that your ships can "link" into a larger, slower ship that one player drives. The other players then become independently aiming turrets. There are also powerups, and the more people you link the bigger your special powerup becomes. There's a real art to driving the linked ships, dodging bullets, and verrrry carefully driving into powerups so that everybody has enough health and their favorite weapon.
Anyway, if you haven't downloaded it yet you should. If you have downloaded it but you haven't tried it in multiplayer definitely give it a spin. I thought we'd play it for a little bit Thursday night and then probably switch to Catan, but we played it all through the session. And ended getting a pick-up gaming session going tonight to beat the final boss on Insane difficult. I'm not a big fan of arcade shooters as a rule, but this one is surprisingly fun.
technorati tags:AegisWing, Xbox, LiveArcade
Blogged with Flock
Ausgezeichnet!
These showed up in the mail yesterday. Guess the book is out in German!
technorati tags:PlanarChaos, MagicTheGathering, book
Blogged with Flock
These showed up in the mail yesterday. Guess the book is out in German!
technorati tags:PlanarChaos, MagicTheGathering, book
Blogged with Flock
The Last Colony
Let's finish this puppy off and get to my review of The Last Colony, by John Scalzi. This will be a follow-on to my reviews of Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades. There are two minor "chapbooks" set in the same universe and I have one of them (The Sagan Diaries), but I'm not planning on talking about it unless people specifically are interested. Short version of that review is that I liked it fine, but I'm don't think there's enough meat to warrant a separate topic.
I'm going to handle this review the same way I handled TGB - I won't spoil anything in The Last Colony, but I'm going to feel free to spoil OMW or TGB. It's just impossible to discuss the third book in a trilogy without talking about what occurred in the first two books. So if spoilers about The Ghost Brigades would make you sad then stop reading now.
The third book picks up with John Perry and quite a bit of time has elapsed. At the end of TGB Jane Sagan had unexpectedly ended up with responsibility for a child - Zöe Boutin. TLC opens years later, after both Sagan and Perry have retired and are raising Zöe on a human colony world. There seems to be no real conflict but it's not long before the entire family are drawn into effords to found a much more dangerous colony. As I said I won't spoil it, but the struggle between the "Conclave" and the Colonial Union is explored in depth.
I liked TLC better than The Ghost Brigades, but I think Old Man's War is still my favorite of the trilogy. I think TGB just gets the short end of the stick - middle books of a trilogy often do. By the start of TLC I had a lot of open questions about the universe, and a lot of specific questions about how the Colonial Union even operates. TLC does a great job of satisfactorily resolving those, so as the finisher as a trilogy it turns in a solid performance. But there were so many dangling threads that I think the book suffers as a standalone story. There are some really odd notes in the story - conflicts or subplots that seemed rushed. So much of the book is answering the big questions that some of the small questions it wants to ask get short shrift.
One of the things that I think is strange over the whole trilogy is that Sagan's and Perry's relationship changes so dramatically in between books. At the end of Old Man's War they have a tentative relationship, and Perry is hardly mentioned in The Ghost Brigades. Then, by the start of The Lost Colony they are married and have an adopted kid. It's a big jump and the transition from really weird and twisted maybe-dating (based on the creepy fact that Sagan is basically a clone of Perry's wife) to "we've resolved all those issues and are now happily married" is abrupt. I can see an argument that fans of the universe wouldn't want the love story that these two characters have, but I don't think in the end I agree. I would have liked to see more about Sagan deciding to leave everything she knew to be "normal" and Perry adapting to a woman who both is and is not his wife of many years. There are some references to Sagan's adapting to living with "the Realborn", but this is what I mean about the low-level story getting shorted so we can focus on the larger conflicts. I think having someplace across the trilogy where their personal problems amounted to a hill of beans in this crazy universe would have been nice to read.
I reread these last two paragraphs and my review is reading as more negative than I intend. I like the book, and if you've read TGB you're going to want to read TLC, no doubt. Everything else is nitpicking really. I enjoyed TLC, and I'm happy to put it on my shelves - I just didn't like it as much as I liked OMW, or even The Android's Dream. But it does put the capstone on the trilogy, and it goes into the political workings of the Colonial Union for the first time. Ever since I first read Old Man's War I've wanted to know more about how the Colonial Union is set up and how it relates to the rest of the galaxy, so seeing the answers to some of these issues was very satisfying. All in all, if you liked OMW and TGB then you'll be satisfied with reading The Last Colony.
technorati tags:JohnScalzi, TheLastColony, OldMan'sWar, BookReview, ScienceFiction
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Let's finish this puppy off and get to my review of The Last Colony, by John Scalzi. This will be a follow-on to my reviews of Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades. There are two minor "chapbooks" set in the same universe and I have one of them (The Sagan Diaries), but I'm not planning on talking about it unless people specifically are interested. Short version of that review is that I liked it fine, but I'm don't think there's enough meat to warrant a separate topic.
I'm going to handle this review the same way I handled TGB - I won't spoil anything in The Last Colony, but I'm going to feel free to spoil OMW or TGB. It's just impossible to discuss the third book in a trilogy without talking about what occurred in the first two books. So if spoilers about The Ghost Brigades would make you sad then stop reading now.
The third book picks up with John Perry and quite a bit of time has elapsed. At the end of TGB Jane Sagan had unexpectedly ended up with responsibility for a child - Zöe Boutin. TLC opens years later, after both Sagan and Perry have retired and are raising Zöe on a human colony world. There seems to be no real conflict but it's not long before the entire family are drawn into effords to found a much more dangerous colony. As I said I won't spoil it, but the struggle between the "Conclave" and the Colonial Union is explored in depth.
I liked TLC better than The Ghost Brigades, but I think Old Man's War is still my favorite of the trilogy. I think TGB just gets the short end of the stick - middle books of a trilogy often do. By the start of TLC I had a lot of open questions about the universe, and a lot of specific questions about how the Colonial Union even operates. TLC does a great job of satisfactorily resolving those, so as the finisher as a trilogy it turns in a solid performance. But there were so many dangling threads that I think the book suffers as a standalone story. There are some really odd notes in the story - conflicts or subplots that seemed rushed. So much of the book is answering the big questions that some of the small questions it wants to ask get short shrift.
One of the things that I think is strange over the whole trilogy is that Sagan's and Perry's relationship changes so dramatically in between books. At the end of Old Man's War they have a tentative relationship, and Perry is hardly mentioned in The Ghost Brigades. Then, by the start of The Lost Colony they are married and have an adopted kid. It's a big jump and the transition from really weird and twisted maybe-dating (based on the creepy fact that Sagan is basically a clone of Perry's wife) to "we've resolved all those issues and are now happily married" is abrupt. I can see an argument that fans of the universe wouldn't want the love story that these two characters have, but I don't think in the end I agree. I would have liked to see more about Sagan deciding to leave everything she knew to be "normal" and Perry adapting to a woman who both is and is not his wife of many years. There are some references to Sagan's adapting to living with "the Realborn", but this is what I mean about the low-level story getting shorted so we can focus on the larger conflicts. I think having someplace across the trilogy where their personal problems amounted to a hill of beans in this crazy universe would have been nice to read.
I reread these last two paragraphs and my review is reading as more negative than I intend. I like the book, and if you've read TGB you're going to want to read TLC, no doubt. Everything else is nitpicking really. I enjoyed TLC, and I'm happy to put it on my shelves - I just didn't like it as much as I liked OMW, or even The Android's Dream. But it does put the capstone on the trilogy, and it goes into the political workings of the Colonial Union for the first time. Ever since I first read Old Man's War I've wanted to know more about how the Colonial Union is set up and how it relates to the rest of the galaxy, so seeing the answers to some of these issues was very satisfying. All in all, if you liked OMW and TGB then you'll be satisfied with reading The Last Colony.
technorati tags:JohnScalzi, TheLastColony, OldMan'sWar, BookReview, ScienceFiction
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Weird!
NBC announced that it has ordered six segments of a new series called Heroes: Origins, which will air in the main show's Monday-night timeslot when it goes on hiatus, Variety reported.
SCI FI Wire | The News Service of the SCI FI Channel | SCIFI.COM
So the idea is that they can't produce enough mainstream episodes to fill a whole season, but the ratings show that the public hates repeats. (who'da thunk it?) The only reason for repeats is if you missed the first showing and in today's age of A) streaming video and B) Sci-Fi network running repeats of Heroes all the time then if you miss it you'll grab it some other way.
So NBC ordered basically side stories to air next year during the main show's hiatus. This is an interesting idea, but my question is where is the blockage such that a "season" has to have repeats or hiatus weeks? If the blockage is scheduling the main stars, then this makes sense. If the blockage is sets, or writers, or producers/directors, whatever than this doesn't help. In almost every regard other than principal actors Heroes:Origins seems to me to be more resource intensive than six more episodes of the real series would be.
At any rate, it's an interesting experiment. I'll watch the shows to see what the end result is.
technorati tags:Heroes, television
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NBC announced that it has ordered six segments of a new series called Heroes: Origins, which will air in the main show's Monday-night timeslot when it goes on hiatus, Variety reported.
SCI FI Wire | The News Service of the SCI FI Channel | SCIFI.COM
So the idea is that they can't produce enough mainstream episodes to fill a whole season, but the ratings show that the public hates repeats. (who'da thunk it?) The only reason for repeats is if you missed the first showing and in today's age of A) streaming video and B) Sci-Fi network running repeats of Heroes all the time then if you miss it you'll grab it some other way.
So NBC ordered basically side stories to air next year during the main show's hiatus. This is an interesting idea, but my question is where is the blockage such that a "season" has to have repeats or hiatus weeks? If the blockage is scheduling the main stars, then this makes sense. If the blockage is sets, or writers, or producers/directors, whatever than this doesn't help. In almost every regard other than principal actors Heroes:Origins seems to me to be more resource intensive than six more episodes of the real series would be.
At any rate, it's an interesting experiment. I'll watch the shows to see what the end result is.
technorati tags:Heroes, television
Blogged with Flock