Just now there was the panicked squawking of birds, then a hawk swooped down and slew a sparrow about ten feet from me. The hawk then looked around for a moment, as if guarding his prize, then carried it off. Somehow my perspective on little birds has been altered, knowing they are the constant prey of larger birds. Like me with the hill giants nearby.

I got a Barnes and Noble Nook E-Reader yesterday, the new one with the integrated glowlight. This is my first Nook; I've been using Kindle exclusively until now, but I was attracted to the glow of the glowlight, as a moth is attracted to the reflection of the moon on the still surface a bucket of cold beer. The glowlight glows and it's definitely better than a clamp-on light. The Nook is also easier to hold than Kindle 3, which kept sliding out of my hand until I got a goofy-looking aftermarket sleeve for it. And Nook supports the epub format, which isn't as big a deal as it used to be (utilities now abound for converting formats), and possibly in jeopardy due to Apple extending it with proprietary crap, but it's still nice to be using an open standard.

Still unhappy with the new Ubuntu. Replacing Unity with the Gnome 3 shell improved things a bit (from a D to a C-) but when I tried to get some work done today I grew frustrated with the task switching. Also everything crashed twice and I had to reboot the desktop once and the entire system once. I switched to "Gnome Classic" and that made things considerably better except this desktop has not been tested as well as the others and I'm seeing a number of annoying bugs. Still I'll probably stay in Gnome Classic until I figure out a better solution. That may be moving from Ubuntu entirely, maybe dropping down to Debian with Gnome 2, which sounds a bit like paradise right now.

I went and installed the new one. I already hate it.

It's Ubuntu release day, one of two that take place every year, and this time it's a Long Term Support release. I've been using 10.10 for the past year or so, having backed off the initial Unity desktop release because I hated it like dogs hate Pavlov, but support has run out for that version and I have to switch to an LTS. If I want to keep using Ubuntu, the choice is between 10.04 LTS, which has support for another year, or 12.04 LTS which is released today. I admit I am tempted to give Unity another chance. Surely they must have improved it beyond Total Suck by now, right? Right?

I'm not a big fan of book trailers, book trailers are always crap. But I guess I don't hate this one. It seems they realized that book trailers are always crap so they just embraced the crap.

I've lately gotten into electronic cigarettes, having been influenced by the pestering of an e-cig aficionado whose many perplexing characteristics shall go unmentioned. E-cigarettes are similar to traditional cigarettes in that you suck on some kind of tube, might inhale the smoke/vapor it produces, then exhale this smoke/vapor into the air. The difference is that e-cigarettes do not use tobacco for fuel; they use e-liquid (or "juice") which is typically a solution of propylene glycol or vegetable glycerol and some some added compounds for flavoring. Instead of "smoking tobacco", one "vapes" e-liquid. (E-cigarettes have evolved their own set of jargon. Smoking an e-cigarette is called "vaping", as in "I'm vaping with my Personal Vaporizer, yo". Traditional cigarettes are called "analog" since the e-cigarettes are said to be "digital"; a distinction that somehow has retained popularity despite being around at least since the early '80s). There are a multitude of flavors (I'm puffing on Black Tea right now), and nicotine levels (I actually tend toward the juice that has no nicotine at all). Another difference is that the tube is not necessarily shaped like a cigarette. Many are, and for most tobacco smokers trying to rid themselves of the tobacco habit by switching to e-cigarettes, a cigarette shape is most desirable, but there are many shapes and sizes available, and the further one drifts in one's ideas about what "smoking" is, the more receptive one becomes to these new, sometimes strange shapes and sizes. In fact, what is most striking to someone newly introduced to this hobby is just how distinctive it is. It is not just a substitute for smoking tobacco: it is it own thing entirely, and one has the sense that as this evolves it will grow more and more distinct from traditional tobacco smoking. (Personally I have a difficult time comparing the two. An e-cigarette will never compare to a fine Cuban cigar, but neither should it try.) In fact, it is significant that many e-cigarette smokers claim to enjoy e-cigarettes much more than analogs, touting the greater levels of control and flexibility inherent to e-cigarettes, the greatly reduced health risks involved, the lower cost, the reduced social stigma (you are now considered odd rather than offensive), and the fact that the vapor is odorless and won't stain your furniture.

For more information (and a truly bewildering amount of it) check out the e-cigarette forum.

This month I finally got around to reading the penultimate two volumes in the Wheel of Time series by the late Robert Jordan, these authored by Brandon Sanderson from Jordan's notes and drafts. I was reluctant to read these books since the replacement of an author at the end of a series rarely goes well (look at what Frank Herbert's son has done to Dune), and I have been reading little fantasy or speculative fiction of any sort lately (my genre trough has been filled with mysteries and procedurals lately -- no kidding -- and I've been wandering around in Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor once again, which is sort of the reading equivalent of mountain climbing). And yet -- and yet! -- those books kept glancing over at me as I passed my recently depleted book-shelves (I've been donating my books in my ongoing effort to own few enough possessions to enable instant mobility), re-tweeting (yes my bookcase has internet access) all the sweaty anticipation of the final volume now in the hands of the publisher and projected for release next year, and reminding me of the great reviews, and so on with things like this (for inanimate objects they are very persuasive). SO on a weekend lull I idly began paging through Book 12, The Gathering Storm. I was immediately bored, and put it back down. But then -- later! -- I felt somehow obliged, as if I owed it to myself or to the sorely missed Mr. Jordan to put myself done with this series of books that has been an occasional and incidental part of my life for about 20 years, so I returned and kept reading. And remained bored for much of the first volume. I find adjusting from one genre to another sometimes difficult, especially with such a wide swerve as from Michael Connelly to Brandon Sanderson, so it took some time to get into the suitable frame of mind for epic fantasy; not just the trappings of magic and monsters but the slower pace and the greater depth of detail in the text. But eventually I did manage to adjust, and not only read and enjoyed the first Sanderson volume but also the second, Towers of Midnight, which is really very good. I found, in fact, that when I finished Book 13 I wanted more, and even contemplated the daunting prospect of going back to Book 1 and starting over (which I did once already, somewhere around the time Book 6 was published). Happily this did not happen (maybe it will in 20 years or so) but I do now anticipate the long-awaited final volume, and can heartily recommend Books 12 and 13; Sanderson does a capable of job of filling in for Jordan, and was the right choice to finish the series.

This site gave me correct instructions for fixing my IPad after an attempt to update it to the latest software caused it go dark and sulky.

This article about why it's foolish to stay at any large company for a long time made giant gong-sounds of sense in my ears. I haven't decided if that's because I've been seriously pondering a move-on or because he's very convincing. Probably the former: my mid-life crisis is making it almost impossible to stay in my current situation. But I always enjoy a good rationale for what my recklessness wants me to do!

It's the end of February and I haven't added to this bLoG yet, so I think I'll just complain for a few minutes. Yet another group of people annoying me at the moment are those absurd Suburbia dwellers who attach little white stick figure stickers of their happy little families on the rear window of their car-- There's a daddy stick figure sticker with a briefcase or a hardhat some some shit, a mommy stick figure sticker maybe in a house dress with a cake or something (sexist stick figure sticker!), and a few sticky people stick figure stickers: a girl with a soccer ball, a boy with a trombone, etc. Maybe a pet. This is the kind of crap you have to wade through in Suburbia on a daily basis; everything includes families (except for the occasional remnant porno store on the corner still clinging to life by virtue of all the horny sticky dad stickers whose house-dress-wearing wife stickers won't let them stick it as often as they want, and are frankly tired of the same old sticker sticking anyway -- so sad for them all). And but so it gets worse than even that! Inevitably there are parodies of these stickers: copulating stick figures, really fat stick figures (or maybe that one is just honest), a stick figure family being run over by the car they are stuck to (oooh postmodern sticker!). The other day I saw one car where the daddy sticker had a big knife, and the mommy sticker's head was not attached to the mommy sticker's house-dressed body. There was a big, disturbing slash of red between the two. Horrible and terrible and bad? Yes! But inevitable I fear. All those stick figure stickers on their cars drive them nuts.

I wasn't going to write one of these this year (too busy playing Skyrim) but had a flood of requests and complaints (ok one of each), so anyway here, this will be as terse and desultory as possible:

Books! Books mostly sucked in 2011. I read mostly fiction books this year, mostly genre novels and stories; a few non-fiction books, a lot of comic books, and even a non-fiction book about comic books (Supergods by Grant Morrison which is actually a stealth autobiography: Morrison knew that very few people would want to read his autobio so he pretended it was about Superman and Batman then wrote mostly about himself. Gee, thanks.) I read Richard Kadrey's "Sandman Slim" novels about a wizard detective fresh out of Hell; Larry Correia's novels about an institutionalized gang of monster hunters; Suzanne Collins' novels about a society that forces its children to fight to the death; and, possibly the least plausible of them all, Michael Connelly's novels about a lawyer who works mainly from his car. I read four or five of the Jack Vance novels I had not read before (sadly leaving just two).

Favorite Book of 2011: Ready Player One by Ernie Cline.

Most Surprising Book of 2011: Reamde. I think Stephenson is probably writing a gothic romance about a school for teen vampires next.

Most Disappointing Book of 2011: There were several high profile fantasy novels published this year that were disappointing. I try not to read much fantasy (and end up reading a fair amount of it anyway), but I do read Joe Abercrombie, Patrick Rothfuss, and George RR Martin. Each published a book in 2011 and I found each one disappointing. If you want to know why, too bad.

Movies! Movies mostly sucked in 2011. There were a bunch of superhero movies that were formulaic and dull: Green Hornet was crap, Green Lantern was crap, Thor was crap, X-Men: First Class was slightly better than crap, and I haven't see any of the other ones yet because there are too many superhero movies. I saw maybe two comedies: Horrible Bosses was pretty good. Hangover 2 was pretty bad. Are we done? Oh, The Adjustment Bureau sucked too. Phtheeew!

TV! TV mostly sucked in 2011. I didn't watch as much of it this year as I used to; I spent more couch time staring into the hand-held screens of my Kindle and IPad than into the considerably larger screen just beyond them, and the big screen usually showed me sports, CNBC, or one of those strange little reality shows that have been breeding on the History, Discovery, and A&E Channels (most of them are sort of a cross between Antiques Roadshow and Jersey Shore). I kind of lost interest in most TV shows: I still have episode backlogs of Breaking Bad, Dexter, Bored to Death, Sons of Anarchy, Chuck, Walking Dead, Boardwalk Empire, even Curb Your Enthusiasm. I managed to watch Fringe but I didn't like it as much as last year; I missed the alternate universe plots and the alternate Olivia (who is somehow ten times sexier than the dull normal one). I probably would have enjoyed Game of Thrones more if I had not known what was going to happen all the time. Doctor Who was a disaster as expected. I liked Rubicon and Suits. I hated Terra Nova.

Music! Music entirely sucked this year.

Games! 2011 had Skyrim in it! I didn't play any other games but I will soon try to squeeze in Portal 2. I wonder if I can smith my own weapons in Portal 2....

If you share my Doctor Who affliction you may find this infographic the same as I found it: AWESOME!

About a year ago I bought an XBox 360, mainly because there was a big gaping vacant space in the bottom of my TV stand and the game console was just sitting there in the store going to waste. I bought a few games (Call of Duty: Whatever, Madden: Same as Last Year, A Two Guys Fighting Game, etc) and played them once in a while but not often. I didn't like the controller for FPS games, and the other games bored me. I kept thinking, "Hmm, I could be reading about starships and inscrutable aliens right now instead of watching my TV screen pivot around chaotically as I try to steer my soldier guy toward the enemy." Eventually I never turned the XBox on at all, and for months it just sat there waiting for my cleaning lady to dust it, going to waste again. But then -- then! -- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released. I had played previous editions of Elder Scrolls on the PC, and I was dubious about a console translation, but I *did* have the XBox after all, and I couldn't play it on my PC since I don't run Windows anymore.... So anyway, since then I pretty much do nothing but play Skyrim. I shirk my job, ignore friends and family, eat junk food, and ride my couch playing Skyrim. This guy sums it up well. It's a real problem.

People keep trying to get me to inject flu into my blood so it must be November. I need a post for November or else the archives page will get screwed up (don't ask -- it's a homegrown blog tool), so yay, here ars some books I've read this month:

• Reamde by Neal Stephenson: I enjoyed this book but I never expected it from Neal Stephenson. Even his trilogy of enormous historical novels was less surprising than this for some reason. Basically it's a thriller, and there's not much more to say about it. But what were the odds that both Stephenson and Cory Doctorow would write books about virtual gold farming at the same time?
• The January Dancer by Michael Flynn: This one started great, especially the second chapter which had a nice tall tale vibe to it; I almost felt like I was reading a modern Washington Irving. But then oh no! it got dragged down and down into tedium, and I got bored with it. Sigh.
• What's The Worst That Could Happen by Donald Westlake: a fun caper novel by the master of the genre. A classic.
• The Magicians by Lev Grossman: a fantasy about a boy who goes to a wizard school! Yes. But it was billed as "adult" and sophisticated or something. I didn't hate it but the protagonist was a twonk and I enjoyed seeing bad things happen to him. The book is about how he learns that the things he most desperately wants are delusions intended to mask his deep dissatisfaction with himself. Or something. I will skip the sequel.
• 11/22/63 by Stephen King: I got about a third into this before it got too boring to continue. Maybe I'll go back but I doubt it. Stephen King is not what he once was.
• Aloha from Hell by Richard Kadrey: this is the third book in the Sandman Slim series, which is in that newish Fantasy/Horror Noir sub-genre popularized by Jim Butcher. I guess it's a bit edgier than Butcher's Harry Dresden books