Readings

Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
Woah. If you can, get the edition with the foreword by Dave Eggers.

Lud in the Mist, Hope Mirrlees
This charming little book lives in the same corner of Faerie as Tolkien's and Dunsany's works. The Other Realm touches on ours during moments of artistic transcendence, and the aristocracy show up and save us all from the merchant class.

Virginia Woolf describes the author as "a very self conscious, wilful, prickly and perverse young woman, rather conspicuously well dressed and pretty, with a view of her own about books and style, an aristocratic and conservative tendency in opinion and a corresponding taste for the beautiful and elaborate in literature".

The Dragon Waiting, John M. Ford
Roger Zelazny liked this book, but I don't. The author plays a fun What If? game with history but then bores us with his characters and plot. Of the four main characters, only one is interesting; another plays Ishmael to Richard of York's Ahab and the others are just dreary. Great concept, wasted potential, too many vampires.

Blogosphere

This age groans under a surcharge of new books, that, though the many good ones lately published do much to balance the great swarms of ill, or at least needless ones; yet all men complain of the unnecessary charge and trouble many new books put them to: the truth of it is, printing is a trade, and the presses must be kept going[...]

— G Burnet, from the preface to "The Life of God in the Soul of Man", circa 1650.

Forget The Milk

I'm officially giving up on Remember The Milk. I don't like it. It doesn't feel solid, the keyboard shortcuts are confusing, the animation bugs me and I can't really figure out how to get my 'system' in there.

It's really the feeling that gets to me. It somehow feels flaky, unpredictable. I think this is partly due to the way it handles item selection. It's never really clear what's selected and what's not. The impression I get is that they are trying to copy Gmail (a worthy goal) and not quite making it.

Instead, I'll be going back to Emacs (my text editor, kind of like an acid-breathing, gamma-radiated Notepad that has an adamantium skeleton and can walk through walls). It's not ideal, but I reckon it will be more effective than RTM. The ideal system would be fun to use, Emacs is merely not painful.

Do you have a suggestion for fun Linux task management software?

Got Internet

iiNet have apparently hooked me up. What a pity I'm in Huonville.

Palmerston North Library

I can imagine a librarian; call him Norris. Norris is sitting on a verandah, drinking an iced tea that's just started to sweat in the weekend sun. He's reading a book that re-interprets the reign of King Richard III in the light of a vampiric illness, but his eyes just move over the same few lines.

Norris is really thinking about how he can make his library a more pleasant place to be, somewhere people like to hang out. Perhaps a potplant or two? Maybe some artwork from local residents? We could even arrange some sort of special with the café downstairs. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Your problem, dear Norris, is that your library is built to house books. Everything about it is there to keep them organized, contained and available. It's a warehouse—nothing more. Adding a pot-plant will make it a warehouse with a pot-plant. In this way, books are worse than boxes. Books have a force of their own. Too many together in one space can become oppressive. Being in such a place is like standing at the edge of a great cliff, or sharing a cage with a tiger: awe-inspiring, exhilarating, terrifying; never comfortable. Face it Norris, it's too late for you and your library.

In another place, a place where the ducks rule and the traffic lights whistle, in a university town without a university, in a village where the square at night is home to racer boys and a fluorescent cross of many colours, there is a Library.

It's hard to say what makes this Library different. Other libraries feel like temples, or crypts; this one feels like a big lounge room. There's not the buzz of an urban café, but there's not the usual solemn quiet either. From the main floor you can see the CD and film area downstairs. Around the corner from the non-fiction area there's a public phone. The walls have reds and blues and yellows. On the north side there reading chairs next to large windows that look onto the town square and the town's duck lords. While I was there a boy played the piano part of Bohemian Rhapsody from memory. Anyone could easily spend a whole day here and reckon it pleasant one.

Obviously it was intended to be this way from the beginning. The comfort of the Library is partly because it is whole, not a few token efforts scraped together. The planners must have asked themselves "How can we make this a pleasant place to be" over and over. They had a core value by which all decisions could be measured. They have sacrificed some virtues—there are many fewer books than the space permits—in order to excel in this hospitality.

Perhaps poor Norris can take comfort in this. His library may never quite be the place that Palmerston North Library is, but it can certainly have more books. After all, what's a library for?

From iiNet

I got this in the mail from iiNet.

Your payment has been processed.

If you are paying by direct debit, please allow up to 4 working days for this transaction to be approved by your bank.

Payment Date: Saturday 23 August 2008
Received from: Mr Jonathan Lange
Amount: $109.00
Payment Method: Automatic CC Debit
Receipt Number: XXXX
Invoice Number: YYYY ($109.00)
iiNet Limited ABN: ABN 48 068 628 937

It's confirmation of a late withdrawal fee. I have never withdrawn my application.

Is the incompetence or is it actually part of some malevolent plan? I miss Internode.

Internet, again.

I applied to iiNet for my Naked DSL line on July the 7th. I still don't have Internet access at home. I won't have it, they say, until next week or the week after.

I'll be in Hobart for two weeks from Wednesday afternoon, so I will have waited two months for an Internet connection at my house. That's assuming nothing goes wrong.

Internet and Coffee?

Dear Lazyweb,

Does anyone know of cafés on the North Shore of Sydney that provide free / cheap Internet and don't mind it if someone sits by themselves quietly spending money all day? The closer to Lindfield the better.

jml

Palmerston North

Palmerston North is a strange town. There are three things that single it out from other towns, which I shall enumerate as follows:

1. No one between the age of 25 and 60 has a New Zealand accent.
2. The public library is the coolest place in town.
3. It is ruled entirely by ducks.

More later.

Tolerance

Tolerance is all about acknowledging that some people, somewhere are allowed to say "different than" when they actually mean "different to".