From My Mind To Yours

Finished the Nights Dawn Trilogy – at last!

richrock — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 22:06:04 +0000

Totalling nearly 3500 pages, I have finally finished the Night’s Dawn trilogy by Peter F Hamilton. A hefty effort, made more impressive that I dipped into the Confederation Handbook from time to time, and now have started on the collection, ‘A Second Chance At Eden’.

Overall, the story is excellent, some interesting views on death, eternal life, judgement and humanity. I did feel however, that the end was short, although given the powers that made the end possible, without spoiling it, justified it’s brevity.

Can’t wait to finish the short story collection, then maybe move on to something like the Void trilogy – I’m itching to get back to the the Commonwealth, and even reading Pandora’s Star/Judas Chained – again.

Refocus.

richrock — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 23:51:09 +0000

I am in dire need of a refocus. I’ll say more tomorrow (actually, later today, as it is now nearly 1am).

Merry Christmas All

richrock — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 08:44:57 +0000

Just to wish you a merry christmas, enjoy it whether you’re working, chilling, with friends and family or not, it doesn’t matter. My wife’s working so my morning is chilling on my own…

Plus I’m lauching a sister blog – richrockphotography.wordpress.com, featuring my photography old and hopefully new!

Finally moved and settled

richrock — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 22:45:35 +0000

Before Christmas… yay! We got into our new abode, loving it, apart from the awful ADSL connection (cuts out every time someone rings). So will have to deal with that, after having dealt with all the other bills that have come our way.

The slightly smaller room means that the dog and cat seem to be at each other more often,but I suspect that is due to space.

During the last week, we experienced temperatures of -6°, which of course meant that a: biking was stupid and foolish, and b: I couldn’t test that theory because my throttle cable was completely frozen. However, lots more snow arrived, and I was able to ride (nervously) today.

Here’s wishing y’all a great Christmas, celebrate Christ’s birth, not the worship of Santa, and see you all on the flipside before new years.

Moving

richrock — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:27:05 +0000

So true.

Implications of online living

richrock — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:34:40 +0000

I’ve been musing today. Aside from packing my physical life, I had to sort out arrangements for my online life too. Considering we don’t yet have a new landline for the new house, we therefore don’t have net access. And this caused me to think about a couple of things:

1. Online withdrawal. I am a web developer. A vast majority of my life is already spent online, making websites, web applications and using various tools available to me via the great world wide web. I’m not going to have proper access at home for up to two weeks. Am I going to suffer some withdrawal?

2. Virtual life. We have become a society living online. As mentioned in previous posts, we email, something we weren’t doing nearly ten/fifteen years ago. Now it’s the norm.

There is a scary side to all this. I can still find emails to mailing lists I belonged to years ago. I have long unsubscribed, but it makes me uncertain about some actions and I was made even more unsettled by an article I found via /. which details the effects of Augmented Reality on our privacy. Somehow, I think this article is a little much, too late. Steady invasion of privacy has been occuring for some time, and has been accelerating since the mass adoption of the Internet.

I’m not going to reach any outcome in this entry, but it’s a consideration that we should make more, as we seem to be blind and unaware to how much of ourselves we are putting online. Your thoughts would be appreciated.