Mad Times

While I waffle over whether or not to post reviews of sexually explicit graphic novels on a blog that my mother reads (Just one of many neurotic reasons why I’m months behind in posting book reviews. This blog isn’t called “Mad Times” for nothing. ;-), you can get your book review fix over at Goodreads where Becky has been reviewing up a storm.

Here’s a sample, her review of Isabel Allende’s Zorro: A Novel:

I’m a Zorro fan, but not to the extent of obsessiveness. I remember watching Tyrone Power late at night on my grandma’s black and white TV, and I’ve seen George Hamilton, Antonio Banderas, and probably some other actors in that role, but I haven’t sought out everything-Zorro. When I saw Allende had written a novel about Zorro, I was thrilled. I even waited for a good time to read it. It tells the story of how Zorro became Zorro–a sweeping tale that is both chilling and fun, just as it should be.

Lots more behind the link up there. There’s even an rss feed for updates.

She won’t drink water out of her dish, but has to drink out of our water glasses. Or the water that has flowed through the roots of the wheat grass. Good thing she’s cute.

Peaches should not be crunchy.

Insert rant about insanity of optimizing food to survive an epic journey from tree to mouth rather than for something crazy like… I don’t know, taste maybe?

Sightline drew attention today to an article that points out that for an expensive stretch of road, the cost of building the road cannot be recovered from the gas taxes generated by traffic on that stretch of road. It’s kind of a specious argument since road funding is kind of like insurance where the cost and benefit are spread across the entire network so asking that every subset pay for itself is naive at best.

But the idea that gas taxes pay for roads is one that comes up frequently in discussions of transportation equity especially between car folks and bike folks. The argument is that people who primarily ride bikes aren’t entitled to use the road network because they don’t pay gas or vehicle taxes.

The fact is that while those revenue sources do contribute to road funding, they are far from the only source. Roads are funded from a complex array of sources. And the real kicker is that it’s different for every state.

Here in the northwest, if you look at funding sources for just local roads and streets you might be forgiven for believing that vehicle-related taxes pay for your roads. In Idaho, Montana, and Washington, 95-100% of local streets are paid for with vehicle and fuel taxes. In California, only 59% with the remainder coming from the general fund. In Oregon, only 47% of the funding comes from fuel and vehicle taxes with the remainder coming from federal sources.

However when you look at highway funding, you find that here in the Northwest less than 50% of funding comes from gas and vehicle taxes. The rest is made up from a melange of other sources: state general funds, bonds, local government funds, and especially federal funds.

What those sources of revenue have in common is that they predominantly come from the pockets of drivers, cyclists, walkers, and bus riders alike.

Clever Cycles sells cargo and city bicycles and related gear in Portland. I visited them about a year ago just after they first opened the store. I just heard that they’re closing. Not for good, just for a two-week vacation. In the middle of summer. A bikeshop. Are they insane? Turns out it’s not lack of sanity, it’s lack of bikes. They’ve been doing so well they’re sold out of all their bikes. How cool is that?

Our IT guys have been rearranging the network at work the past few weeks. I got an email asking if it was okay to change the IP address on the machine named “hugo”. Hugo is a Sun Sparcstation 10 that was assigned to me in about 1993. It runs SunOS 4.1.4 which was the last BSD-based Sun unix before the SysV-based Solaris took over. The machine has been running in a rack in our computer room with no keyboard, mouse, or display since about 2002.

I told them to go ahead, but they were unable to access it. It was responding to pings, but wouldn’t answer to telnet. There are a handful of other machines of similar vintage in the same rack so I logged in to one of them to see how long it had been since it was last rebooted. 764 days. That’s over two years running continuously without a reboot for systems that are 15 years old. (These systems are all on UPS power backed by a big old diesel generator)

Since there was no display handy to show what was going wrong I tried power cycling it. It didn’t come back. The system hadn’t been in active use for a while so extreme measures weren’t called for. Time of death was 2:51pm 6/26/08.

I just didn’t think its passing should go unremarked. How old is 15 in computer years?

The kids got lolled again. Actually I think this is Theo’s first time on icanhascheezeburger.

God and the Devil make a wager over whether the Devil can corrupt God’s chosen champion with the fate of the world as the stakes. The good news is that God cheats. Or at least interprets the rules creatively. Joby is a little boy obsessed with King Arthur. Joby is God’s chosen champion. The book follows Joby through three periods of his life, grade school, college, and early adulthood. In each he faces new challenges. The book is way too long, especially in the late section where Joby finds his way to a little corner of Eden that God has hidden away on the north coast of California. Ferrari is obviously a little too enamored of his characters and setting and the resultant stretching of the story feels overindulgent.

This book appeared on my chair at work one day. I later found out it landed there because a friend found it in the company cafeteria, started it and didn’t like it. It wasn’t bad. It’s the third book in a series about a guy who’s part alien and uses his secret powers to find missing persons. There’s lots of violence and lots of sex and lots of car (and motorcycle and boat) chases. Basically a men’s adventure novel with some scifi thrown in for flavor. I got the first two books from the library but other stuff looked more interesting until they came due and I returned them unread. Probably won’t try again. If it sounds like your thing it might be your thing.

Wilson won the Hugo for best novel for this book. If you’ve read any of his other books you know the basic structure of this one: baffling technology indistinguishable from magic mysteriously appears throwing society for a loop with the story told by a person conveniently placed to learn more about it than the general public. The remarkable thing is how much better each successive telling of Wilson’s story is. In Spin he has struck a fine balance among interpersonal, political, and alien influences resulting in a novel of a future stranger than we could imagine but still somehow familiar in a way that feels almost nostalgic. This is science fiction that pushes the buttons that made me a fan. It bent my brain quite agreeably. I just learned while writing this that there is a sequel out and another on the way, but Spin stands alone just fine.