pushing the sky

Well, after Part 1’s overly extended meandering get-nowhere introduction, I really shouldn’t be attempting a second round of introduction. So if I said here that I wanted to go through and try to introduce the Wheel of Time series to those who hadn’t read it, you wouldn’t like that, right?

Thought so. So for those who haven’t read the Wheel of Time, you … might not want to read the next, oh, 6 or 7 posts about this. On the other hand, if you’re looking to draw yourself into an epic fantasy series, you might want to go down to the library and borrow The Eye of the World.  (or if you’re looking to get into an epic fantasy series that’s not endless, go borrow Magician by Raymond E. Feist. And stop reading after Shards of a Broken Crown.)

Side note: so, so very glad we don’t get the American cover for The Gathering Storm in Australia. That just looks awful.

Ahem. Enough of the chitter-chatter. More below the cut!

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A Prelude, or What on Earth is The Gathering Storm?

When I heard Robert Jordan had died, I gave up on the idea of ever getting a satisfying conclusion to the Wheel of Time series. Here was an author who had stretched and stretched a story over 11 meaty volumes, one which apparently at the start had only been destined for 3 books, but due to burgeoning sales managed to get extended. Every book introduced new characters, new plot threads, and somewhere around book 7, I found myself thinking I should only ever pick up new series when they’ve already been finished or the author is dead and I know there’s no more coming.

Jordan promised the readers a conclusion in one book, A Memory of Light, and he said he was damned if he wouldn’t deliver. Well, fate caught up with him first and so his series was doomed to be left with an unfinished story, the remainder of his notes locked away for all we knew. So now we find ourselves with an author who has passed away, and yet the series continues… because there’s a demand out there for this damn story to be finished.

Naturally, with sales to be had, the publishers hired on another author, and so Brian Sanderson was picked to fill the shoes of the indomitable Jordan. Sanderson got to writing… and writing… and writing. It turns out he’s either even worse than Jordan at concocting a quick conclusion, his editor is just as bad at chopping unnecessary bits (not surprising given it’s Jordan’s editor, his wife), or they’re all out for a quick buck.

Maybe all of the above, because what we have now is not one final volume, which would end the series on an appropriate 12 book note, but rather 3 final “volumes” of A Memory of Light, the first of which is The Gathering Storm. I don’t want to complain at the prospect of having more reading material, but lordy, this thing is heavy enough already. Coming 4 years after Knife of Dreams, tGS isn’t so much a book as an old-fashioned tome. I can only imagine what this will be like when bound in smaller paperback format. And what has me worried is that this is only volume 1 of 3 of the final book – and by gods, will it be hefty when finished.

So, it is with this trepidation… that I rushed down to the book store and picked it up, and have been reluctant to put down since yesterday. And it is with some assumed knowledge that I assume you are coming into this, because I know for sure it’ll make little enough sense to anyone else. And if you really do care, there’s a jump to click through:

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At least, not like they used to. Dan Cederholm caught the mood rather succinctly:

Like anyone who used to blog with frequency pre-2005, I’d like to post here more often — not just to fill up bits and bytes, but to write again. Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here.

Looking around at the blogs on and formerly on my blogroll, those which are still around mostly lie fallow, updated sheepishly every few months. There’s a few who are still going strong – Dooce, Kottke and the like – but they were a different part of the internet experience to begin with. Few who once posted on a regular basis do so any more, and the list of inactive sites has grown over the months to include former favourite sites.

And here I was thinking what sapped the conversation for me was just a change in lifestyle…

Err. Well. That’s quite the embarrassment. I appear not to have updated with anything of significance since, well, 4 months ago when I said I couldn’t post anything of significance due to looking for work. Since then it has literally been one thing after another that’s just kept me occupied and neglecting this place significantly. Suffice to say, it’s not something I’m proud of.

So. Stuff.

Looking at what I get up to most weekends and even week-day nights, I wonder what it is that is keeping me so busy, but that’s only in hindsight. When you try to recount the story of the day, it sounds a little lame – e.g., Saturday: woke up late, hung out the washing, did a bit of hedge trimming and lawn mowing, played a bit of basketball, helped design my parent’s 25th anniversary invite, went over to a friend’s place and watched Speed while chattering away. Oh and when I got home we had people over so I stayed up talking until 1.

And don’t even get me started on Sunday, where I genuinely was shocked when I looked at my watch to find it was nearly 2pm when I decided to go for a shower. Or, indeed, Friday night, where I managed to get four separate things in between 5pm and 1AM when I got home.

So in summary, a social life is no more conducive to blogging, in any extent beyond that of say Facebook status updates or Twitter, short of setting aside time specifically for it. Which says loads about the time when I could pump out four posts a day no hassles. Has anyone else found this to be the case?

I have, on the other side of the coin, been attempting to flex some creaking web design muscles while helping out a friend with a site for his new business, and boy, has it been a while. I forgot how to lay out columns for one, and was half tempted to yank out an ancient copy of Dreamweaver I’m sure I’ve still got a license for and lay about with Tables. For design. Luckily I stepped back from that brink shortly before the temptation was too much, but there’s nothing pure about my CSS for this site, and the theory of grid based design I explored for a short while was put out to pasture while I try to actually get something done.

I am a huge fan of CSS3’s more design-focused properties, like box shadow and rounded borders. Suddenly those hours spent trying to get pixels to line up and not look too incongruent with the CSS-rendered remainder of the page are  gone, replaced by a few minutes of fiddling with a text file. Thank you, powers-that-be, for Gecko and WebKit. Now if someone can give Microsoft a poke…

Brilliant article on “The $20 Theory of the Universe” (alternatively, The Power of a 20):

One afternoon, Bobby the bellman alerted me to a corporate meeting at the dinner club next door. “It’s all day,” he said. “They have very nice buffets.”

I decided to scam a lunch. I walked boldly to the door, leaned toward the door-man — you come face-to-face with a lot of young, large black men when you are passing twenties in New York City — and said, “Is this the lunch?” He raised his eyebrows. “I forgot my letter,” I said, holding the twenty pressed flat against the palm of my hand and reaching for the shake. He looked confused; I tried to look equally puzzled and said, “Just give me five minutes.” He took my hand and nodded me in. I went to the buffet, fixed myself a large plate of tiger prawns. I got a beer out of a bucket of ice and sat, balancing it all in my lap. Good shrimp.

It took me fifteen minutes to realize I was listening to a symposium on corporate ethics.

For all them coder girls:

The witching hour had been and gone. It was now entering that part of the night where the pretenders had gone safely to their beds, but the hedonists had not totally taken over the club, their drug-addled eyes moving fitfully as their passions empowered them. Or as my mate Dave would have it, late enough that you weren’t a pussy but not so late that you’d be walking home, not a taxi in sight. Or, as Steve put it, Pick-Up Hour. The flirting had to end one way or another.

My mind had been on that particular idea for the last few minutes, actually. You see, there was this girl I’d been eyeing off for quite some part of the night, and sure enough, I’d seen her eyeing me too. The occasional glimpse had our eyes locking, before her eyes would dip demurely as she smiled and returned to her own conversations. We’d eyed each other on the fringes of the dance floor, passing on our way through the masses of late night humanity, eyeing up and down at the bar – all over the place.

In short, it’d been a night where little was said, but plenty was understood.

Now that the crowd had thinned somewhat, I got a decent look at her. She was tall, closer to six foot than five, though ably assisted by a killer pair of heels. Her legs entirely did justice to the heels, and those in turn were shown off to a greater extent by the is-it-a-shirt-is-it-a-dress number she had on, which I swore and hoped would ride too high at any moment. Deep brown hair framed her tanned face perfectly, and a seemingly too-serious mouth broke into an easy grin at the slightest word from one of her friends.

This time, she leaned forward on the bar, patiently awaiting the swamped bartender. Her gaze slowly wandered the club until our eyes locked, and this time she held it. She smiled again, nodded and mouthed something. My guess was “I’ll be over in a minute.”

Hello. The night was just about to pay off.

It’s at this point, as a guy being approached by a girl, you get two conflicting feelings. The first, primary one is simple: fuck yes, I am the shit tonight. King Dingaling, got ‘em coming right over. Doesn’t matter if she’s not perfect, it’s her coming to you, not the other way around. This is the way these things should happen, you think.

And that’s rapidly followed by the second thought. Fuck, shit, what am I going to say? You’re used to approaching and seeing your lines get shot down, brave soldiers in the conversation war go to a thousand needless deaths. Now that she is coming to you, you’ve only got one job: don’t cock it up. If you can get away with it, don’t say anything: your body’s obviously done the job already, why mess with the formula? But, shit, what if she gets closer and then changes her mind?

Do women go through this every time? It must be excruciating!

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• Extract is a new comedy from the creator of Office Space, starring Jason Bateman (Arrested Development, Juno) and Ben Affleck (almost unrecognisable). Could be a little feel-good, but seems like anything with Jason Bateman is gotta be worth a few laughs.
• The Men Who Stare at Goats is… well, hard to define. Syriana on a drug trip, maybe. Looks blissfully un-self-conscious about putting George Clooney as a man who thinks he is a Jedi in with Ewan McGregor as a journalist trying to investigate “psychic troops”. Ostensibly a true story – and the only reason I can believe that is that it would be just the kind of thing Bush ordered at some point.
• The Blind Side is actually based on a true story, that of “Big Mike” Oher, a black kid who really was about as abandoned as you can be, only to be taken in by a school and a family, and given the opportunity to shine. And shine he does, in a way that you’d only credit in America, through his abilities playing American Football. I originally read this story on Kottke, and found it a piercing then – I think if you set aside cynicism about the feel-good salvation-through-dedication stories all too common in fiction and movies especially, this one looks particularly good. At least Sandra Bullock isn’t doing one of her standard-issue rom-com performances.
• The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard. Two words: Jeremy Piven. If you’re at all familiar with Entourage, you should know why that cannot be anything but made of awesome.
• Tron Legacy looks simply stunning. I haven’t seen the original Tron, but now I’m wondering where I can get my hands on a copy.
• Sherlock Holmes takes the Iron Man theory of letting Robert Downey Jr. do whatever he wants and applies it to Victorian Britain. Or something. Look, it’s Downey Jr, Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong (Rocknrolla, Body of Lies) all directed by Guy Ritchie in a period setting based on the classic stories of Sherlock Holmes, released on Christmas. How will you avoid seeing this film?
• Whip It is all about me indulging my Ellen Page crush. (also Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut.)
• Late addition: Youth in Revolt is Fight Club: The High School Years. Michael Cera is Jack.

Gizmodo reports that, looking at the laws governing use of hand held device in a car, using a phone based GPS system is illegal in Australia:

According to Traffic Services Commander of the NSW Police, Assistant Commissioner John Hartley:

Under Rule 300 of the Australian Road Rules, which prohibits the use of a hand held device while driving, if the unit is a mobile phone then any function connected to the phone would be classified as use and this includes GPS.

Rule 299, of the Australian Road Rules permits a GPS but not one connected to a mobile phone. A smart phone is still a mobile phone regardless of what else it may be capable of.

That means that even if you buy TomTom’s iPhone bracket and stick your iPhone in it to use the device as a satnav, because the iPhone’s still a phone, using it is against the law. The same rule goes for any Nokia device offering turn-by-turn navigation, any Telstra phone with WhereIs. If your satnav has a SIM card or mobile phone capability, then you run the risk of being fined.

[I]n NSW you’re looking at a $253 fine and three demerit points. The penalty in other states might be different, but the law is the same across the country.

Urrk. Watch out for that before you drop a hundie on the TomTom app for the iPhone.

Between the birthers, deathers and the general right-wing lunacy on show in the US, I think David M. Green picks up a few important threads that we’ve seen:

Can we really live in a country populated by so many fools, people who can so readily, proudly and belligerently be made into tools of their own destruction? Can the greatest political, economic, cultural and military power on the world’s stage possibly be so incredibly backward at its core?

This is what I don’t get: where have all these … nutjobs come from? What makes these people, who ostensibly have some education, behave in such an irrational manner, especially over a topic as apparently uncontroversial as health care?

[W]hat seems to me new about this moment is the political road rage, the thuggishness of masses of Americans who not only are venting about insane nonsense, not only are undermining their own interests acting as marionettes of laughing corporate predators, and not only are taking down democracy around themselves in order to do so, but are in fact also destroying the entire Enlightenment project of rationality-based management of public affairs as well. The single most frightening characteristic of this movement, to my mind, is that fact that no amount of evidence or logic could persuade these folks to abandon the lies they’ve attached themselves to[.]

It’s certainly astonishing to me that these people are arguing against a government service. Virtually everywhere else in the world, government services are considered good, exemplary even. You pay taxes, and in return the government provides services. Sure, commercial entities might be able to do the same deal, but at least you know with the government they’re not looking to make a buck out of it.

But I think the point being made above is that some time in the last 40 years, logic disappeared from the public sphere. It’s as though the last generation to witness truly involved war refused to educate their children about some basic things about respect for others and their views; that or some were taught too well and ended up on the left side of the nominal fence, while those who didn’t pay attention to lessons about humility and the importance of reason ended up on the right side. That or these people truly are pawns of a vaster conspiracy.

Anywho, go read the whole article before I repeat it word for word.