Dennis loves quilts,
quilt fabric, and Cindy.
This combination has sharply decreased the number of shelf-feet available for books, since Cindy can't make quilts as fast as we find fabric. Ah, well, the library can use the books, the shop owners love to sell fabric, and Cindy loves to quilt: everybody's happy!
Dennis's coworkers at Smith & Nephew (SNN on the NYSE!) get to enjoy a number of wall-hangings, including full-sized
("Husband, that won't fit on the wall!") quilts and things that are more
reasonable.
It did too fit, and not much of it was hidden behind the
furniture...
Non-Game Software
I finally found an MP3 compressor that works acceptably for me. MusicMatch JukeBox 4! I have a CD I love, but I hate having to put it into the drive to play it...there is always a game in there! I have had a (legal under fair-use) copy on my hard drive as a .WAV file. 47MB. Not cool. Can't keep too many online at 50Meg each. Sigh. Enter MP3. I compressed it to about 6 MB...and the sound was SO awful I knew this could not be what people were talking about. So I waited and watched and found some nice songs that I liked available as freeware audio on MP3.COM. The sound was great. So, the problem was my software...but I was unwilling to pay for a commercial encoder. Today, though, I got a copy of MusicMatch, and compressed my beloved Eine Klein Nachtmusik, and it is truly magnificent. Through the adequate stereo I have attached to my PC, I cannot hear any significant difference between .WAV and .MP3, and the file compresses to 4.77MB. I may have to spring for the $30 version to get the benifits of "full-quality" MP3 bit-rates.
I use a W95/W98 ZIP file manager called FreeZIP. It integrates into the Explorer and is quite adequate. It does not support spanned disks, but it does most of what I want, and it is free. The web site is listed as freezip.home.ml.org but does not seem to be correct.
I downloaded a cool piece of ware from SETI@home. It performs processing for
the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Inelligence. The neat thing is that, like GIMPS (the
Great Internet Mersiene Prime Search) it uses otherwise-lost cycles on CPU's. I have
it set to run as a screen-saver. My P2 450 completes processing of a block of data
in about 12 hours of CPU time. Then it wants to connect to the Internet to get
another block. I do wish the blocks were bigger, and I wish the program and my W95
Internet Wizard were better friends. It can't autodial more than once, then it
crashes the dialer. Sigh. But it is a beginning.
Web Sites
Obviously, my favorites are on the Links page. But I expect to
write more about any special favorites.
Games
I got EverQuest for my birthday. I went through the tutorial, which was nice but limited. I am now getting the Patches. I will create a separate EverQuest diary-type page here.
My perennial favorite game is "Empire Deluxe". Strategy. An old and simple game based on an even older public domain game called "Empire." I first saw Empire on a Digital VMS VAX 11/750 (3 gone, VMS going, now) in the early 1980's. It played on a dumb terminal, in character mode, of course. Even in this latest (last?) incarnation, the goal is simple: take over the world. The game-play is simple, the opponents are simple, and winning is simple, unless they start off close to you, then you can be toast. Or unless you give them a slight advantage in production or combat. If anyone creates an updated version, please let me know. Beware, the game has copy protection (some of you won't even understand what I'm talking about, lucky you), so you must not lose the manual.
I bought a copy of "Mech Warrior 2: Titanium Edition" for a $1.88 bargain at Compusa. Not bad. It has not addicted me, but it is fun. I sure got my money's worth! Mech Warrior 3 is out, and I may try that. I finished MW2. It was fun, but I found it impossible to win some of the scenarios. Not enough patience probably. I read a couple of walk-throughs and is STILL died endlessly. Thank you, game-authors, for cheat codes. Most especially SU, IS, IN, CR. While holding down CTRL+ALT+SHIFT, type the 2-letter codes, which are:
 | SU - Invulnerability toggle |
| IS - Unlimited ammo toggle |
| IN - Gives any mech jumpjets (very cool - 100ton flying/walking tank). |
| CR - Infinite jumpjets toggle |
Interestingly, I found the limitless ammo to be most valuable, and the jumpjet cheats to be the most fun.
I played Quake 3: Arena test. I like the effects, although the jump-offs do seem VERY similar to things I saw in Unreal. I found that 64MB was JUST BARELY adequate. I cannot recommend it. I see in the press that the full version of Q3 Arena is out. I will hold out as long as I can. My wife always misses me when I disappear inside the computer and give up sleep. People at work complain that I am crabby, the cat stops trying to get me to pet it, my beard gets scraggly, sigh.
I just finished "Might And Magic 7: For Blood And Honor" in late July. RPG. I loved it. It is VERY similar to a new set of areas for M&M 6, but with a few updates. Some of the updates are GREAT. If you did not like M&M 6, don't try it, you won't like it. If you did: "Wow!" You Are In For A Treat. I bought it a Mall computer-game store because I was too impatient to wait for it to appear at WalMart, so I paid full price. Yech. Patience is a virtue. Who cares, I'll spend it all anyway. I had to cheat to win, I was not able to find (or found and lost) the 2nd piece of the altar, so I had to use a "cheater" to create one. Odd. I found a couple of bugs, and once one of my character's inventory was damaged. If I placed anything in the top left 2 blocks, the game crashed instantly. I got around it by putting an object bigger than those 2 blocks there, then throwing it away. That cleared it up...but it was hard to figure out. I played as a "good" group, choosing "The Path of Light" rather than "Dark" This deprived me of my favorite indoor fighting spell "Dragon Breath", but what the heck. The "meteor shower" spell is not a deadly as it was before, you can no longer kill the bad-guys from outside their range of detection, so it is a bit more "fair", and certainly more challenging. Enjoy.... but do not try this with less than 64MB, and I recommend more... with 64MB there are LONG pauses while the OS unloads and reloads chunks of code and data. Once I had won, I started over and cheated throughout. Don't do it, it will not work well. Play it straight. Trust me on this one.
I just finished "Quest For Glory 5: Dragon Fire" in June, 1999. Adventure/RPG hybrid. The design was a bit dated, and many people had warned me that it was aimed at QFG fans in particular. I found it enjoyable, even if it does seem a bit old-fashioned. I found the hints available online to be absolutely terrible, and have written my own.
I finished "Lands Of Lore III" in early May, 1999. RPG. A juvenile game, but fun if you can suspend disbelief and ignore the more sophomoric humor, and the INCESSANT BABBLE of your character and familiar. I had typed up a fairly good review of this game, but my PC crashed and I lost it. I don't feel strongly enough to retype it. If you really want to know, drop me a line, I'll type up my thoughts. Worth the $40 it cost at WalMart, but just barely...not worth the $50 at Best Buy.
I finished "Baldur's Gate" in March or April, 1999. RPG. A good one, with annoying limits (you can only advance so far). For those who play as I do, gaining every experience point I can, and learning every spell, getting every trinket/weapon/armor/etc. so that I can PULVERIZE the bad-guys at the end, this is VERY FRUSTRATING. The hacks I found on the Internet could not get me past this. Sigh. A good game.
I finished "Might And Magic 6" in the early fall, 1998. RPG. It has been a long time since I played a great RPG. The last game of any kind that really captured me was the public domain "Adventure" game "Moria", which many will remember only as a version of "Hack" or "Rogue", but with no dog. This was not only the first RPG to capture me, it was the only one I did not regret spending money on. If M&M 7 is not great, I may cry. I keep checking to see when it will come out, but it keeps not being ready. Sigh. The only thing I really want is to be able to move (as the monsters do) during turn-based mode. Not Fair! I would also like to be able to dig for treasure. Mainly, though, I wanted the game to go on, and on, and on. Awesome!
I finished "Unreal" in the late fall, 1998. Action. AWESOME graphics. It had some of the most beautiful graphics I have ever seen, and certainly the best 3d solid-rendered game graphics. On a 12 MB Voodoo 2 card, it was truly unreal. I kept getting killed because I was too busy looking at the scenery. Hours and hours of simply being enchanted. The gameplay was not as good as some other games I have played recently. Who cares!? This is a truly beautiful game. If you don't play these kinds of games, borrow a copy from a friend, get the cheat codes, and fly through each level in invincible mode on a sight-seeing tour. The lead-in video does not exist in the game, but the Nali Castle is very similar.
My mother gave me "Half-life" for Christmas, 1998. Action. Cool Game. I finished it right away, because I cheated. Big Mistake. This game has the best game-play I have ever experienced. If you get as stuck as I did, use the walk-through, rather than the cheat codes. The world is very neat, and there is a good deal of "life" outside your character. The "life" is very simple, though: predictable and repetitive. The world is not a beautiful as "Unreal", but it is neat.
Books
25 Nov 1999 - Thanksgiving
| "Exile's Challenge" by Angus Wells. Fantasy. Conclusion of the Exiles Saga. I could not get past the first few pages. I need to find the earlier books in the series. I'll try again...it looks good, just too hard to follow without the history... |
| "Bazil Broketail" by Christopher Rowley. Fantasy. A fun story. I liked the dragons. "A battledragon's best friend is his boy." The battledragons fight with the infantry. The magic is a bit unique and fun. The badguys are bad and interesting. The goodguys are good and interesting. Worth the time, lightweight and enjoyable. |
24 Nov 1999
| "Catswold Portal" by Shirley Rousseau Murphy. Fantasy. I could not finish it. I found the plot weak, the motivation of the characters indecipherable, the conflicts (and, indeed, the characters themselves) confused. Took it back to the library without finishing it. |
21 Nov 1999
| Boy Have I Been Lazy! No reviews since 12 May?! |
| "Stone Angel" by Carol O'Connell.
Murder/Mystery. An excellent read. I was
disappointed in the last of the "Mallory" series, and did not plan to read this
one. BOY am I glad I did?! Yes!! I read it until just before
dawn. Wonderful twists. I love Ms. O'Connell's characters. The quality
of the story is a bit uneven, but overall, excellent. My wife warned me that I would
not be able to put it down. I sneered inside "Hah!" She was right.
I did not even feel sleepy until the everything was over but the "polishing
up". Mallory goes home to a small town in Louisiana. There, she closes in
on her mother's murderers. We find out why she insists on being called
"Mallory" instead of "Kathy". We find out the reason her mother
was killed. We meet some great characters. Charles waffles in his devotion,
and grows quite a bit as a character. The FBI is painted as a bunch of incompetent,
dishonest manipulators (I am tired of this, and it was one of the big disappointments in
the book. The other is the characters of the Loisiana people. They just did
not ring true. Spoiler warning: Burying the spoiler in text so you will be less likely to read it if you hate these things... Mallory is a corruption of the name of the man who led the killing of her mother... Mal Laurie. The bad guys pretty much get what they deserve. The good guys get away with it. |
| "Four and Twenty Blackbirds: The Silence of the Blackbirds" by Mercedes Lackey. Bardic Voices Book IV. A Good Read. Fantasy with some Science Fiction more or less gratuitously added in. A cop/thriller/murder mystery, too. It works better than most of these hybridized (others have a stronger word, but I don't agree) stories. I also read another one of these Bardic Voices books, and it was quite good, and very different, too. The conflicts are well done, and seem credible. I like the society-wide conflicts of magic/science and commercial/royal/church organizations for power. Well done and worth a read. The head of the legal arm of the church (a bit like the Judge Advocate General) and an aging cop search for a bizarre serial killer. |
| "The Eagle and the Nighingales" by Mercedes Lackey. Bardic Voices Book III. A Good Read. Fantasy with some Science Fiction more or less gratuitously added in. One of the best of the Bardic Mages seeks to learn why the King is doing such a miserable job...he was a fine king, almost a great king, only a few years before. Her adventure merges with that of others trying to find the same information. Of course there is a great, evil plot. |
| "The Best Of All Possible Wars" created
by Larry Niven. A Great Read if you like Larry Niven's "Known
Space." Science Fiction. 1 short and 3 novellas. The original
Man/Kzin story "The Warriors" - Excellent! "Madness Has Its
Place" by Larry Niven - Easily the weakest. Still good. "The Man Who
Would Be Kzin" - Greg Bear and S.M. Sterling. A good story, a Great idea.
"In The Hall Of The Mountain King" - Jerry Pournelle and S.M.Sterling.
Caution: I love Pournelle's work. Still. This is easily the best
story, although the idea is not as great as the previous. I was glad to finally meet
the tnuctipun! The words and quotes that Pournelle/Sterling give to their aliens are
great! Kzin - "I scratch sand on the dung of fear." - "Fear is nothing." tnuctipun - "Food that talks" - Other intelligent species. |
| "Owlflight" by Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon. A good read. A young boy's village is destroyed, and he joins a group of Hawkbrothers. They drive off or destroy the bad guys eventually. This book takes place in the world of the Bardic Voices series. |
12 May 1999
| "In The Wet" by Nevile Shute. A good story of what the world might look in 1990, viewed from 1959 or so. Odd political ideas this fellow had, IMO. |
| "Cat On The Scent" by Rita Mae Brown and Sneaky Pie Brown. A good story of murder, with the
usual "Mrs. Murphy" animal hi-jinks. A fun read.
Spoiler warning: Burying the spoiler in text so you will be less likely to read it if you hate these things... The bad guy and girl get away with it in the end. A good read. |
| "The Big Bad City" by Ed McBain. Another good "87th Precinct" novel. If you don't like the 87th Precinct, don't go... |
| "Into The Darkness" by Harry Turtledove. The first of a series "The World At War". The world war neatly parallels the development of W.W.II, but this is a land of low technology and high magic. A very neat idea, developed well. There even seems to be a Manhattan Project. Fantasy. A good read if series don't make you deranged. |
| "Beyond the Great Snow Mountains" by Louis L'amour. Another (2nd of 3 planned) collection of his short stories. Good stories all, from different periods in his career, and varying style and quality. I am enjoying the progress reports on his biography, a work in progress by his son, Beau L'amour. Different genres. Read it. |
20 February 1999
| I just finished "Jed The Dead" by
Alan Dean Foster. Fantasy/Science Fiction. The tagline on the cover is
"Unearthly. Unidentified. Unbelievable.
Unembalmed." Mine would have been "Enjoyably Improbable, Improbably
enjoyable." This was really a pretty fun book, although suspending disbelief
got a bit hard, Several Times. All the characters are "unbelievably"
shallow. But I liked the good guys, and disliked the bad guys. A fun,
light-weight book. If there is a sequel, I probably will not read it, though. A side note: A good deal of the book is spent covering a drive from Abilene, TX to Sonoma, AZ, mostly over backroads. If you like to travel on your own four wheels (or 2 wheels, if you pick the season Carefully), I recommend this drive very highly. If you chance to come down out of the Sacramento Mountains into the valley when the weather is clear, White Sands National Monument is truly an amazing sight! Its like looking down onto bright-white clouds from an airplane. See it. This is also the home of the Stealth Fighter, and we got to watch one extensively. It came by at eye level, very near the mountains, as we came down, and did "touch-and-go" landings the whole time we were driving toward White Sands. Wow. |
| I also finished "Talion: Revenant" by Michael A. Stackpole. Actually a very good Fantasy. Especially for a first novel. I hope Mr. Stackpole writes more fantasy. I like the Talions, and I liked the the protagonist very well. The author has created an interesting world with great potential. If he comes out with more books based in it, I'll read them. |
4 February 1999
| Best book I ever read Last night, I was bored, and pulled down my wife's old, old copy of "On The Beach" by Nevile Shute. At the time it was published, this was probably Science Fiction, but now it is not really classifiable (by me)...I am very tempted to classify it as Social Commentary. As long as I can remember, people have been trying to get me to read this book. It never sounded very good. "Hohum another end-of-the-world book." NOT! I have not read a book that moved me as this one did. What a magnificent story! I was literally not able to put it down, and burned through the whole book between 11:00PM and 4:00 AM on a work night. First, "On The Beach" refers to the naval meaning: "on the beach" means "not at sea", and has connotations of not really being alive. Second, I expected more science in the science fiction. Wrong again: the science is almost all off-camera, and very well-done. Third, I really expected some sort of moralizing. Instead, I found a great tragedy, and ordinary-and-not-so-ordinary people facing it with great bravery. There are insights available here, but no real moralizing. If you love people, and enjoy tragedy, read this book. If you never cry at sad movies, pick something else. |
2 February 1999
| I finished "Lord Of The Isles" by David Drake the week of 2 February 1999. This is very enjoyable Fantasy. I think I liked it better than any of the other reviewers on the Amazon page for this book. I loved his characters and found the whole very enjoyable. I did enjoy one reviewers comment that "...all the men are Very Strong." [capitalization in original] If Mr. Drake writes more of these, I will certainly grab them as soon as they come within my reach, and sit down to read as soon as may be. |
| I just reread an old favorite "The Rolling Stones" by Robert Heinlein the week of 2 February 1999. This is excellent, if dated, juvenile Science Fiction from the master. It is a great book for adolescent boys of all ages (say, 13, 30, 53, 62...). |
| I tried to read "Acorna" but gave up quickly. |
Music
Shania Twain - "Come On Over" - This is a great album.
Movies
"The world is not enough" - A good movie. A must see if you are a Bond fan, of course. Not as good as the last one...and Brosnan is looking a bit long in the tooth. Less nudity and sex, clearly an effort to be less offensive and let the younger audience in. I enjoyed it.
"Titanic" - See it on the big screen. If you have not seen it, wait for it to come back. Ignore the TV screen version unless you have a BIG screen and DVD at least... A great movie, but the 3rd time they went back into the water I was a tad put out...
"The Grand Illusion" - A fine anti-war, anti-class-system movie. Magnificently shot in 1937. I loved the reviewer comment "After it won a prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1937, the Nazis declared the film 'Cinematographic Enemy Number One.' There can be no higher praise." --Robert Horton "
The Quote Ring
The random quote display and the full list of quotes are driven from this spreadsheet. It is still fairly primitive. Bear the site copyright in mind. If you wish to use the code, or the spreadsheet (not the quotes, those are either public domain or their copyrights are held by their respective owners), you MUST NOT do so unless you receive my written permission.
Conjectures and thoughts
If you are interested in amateur, maybe kooky conjectures, you may
want to read: A Martian Dust Conjecture.
If you enjoyed that, then you may also enjoy: A Cool Sky
Conjecture.
I read a fascinating bit on a new conjecture about dark matter at EurekAlert! by Marcus Chown, submitted
by New Scientist. The idea is that
regions exist where the "arrow of time" points in the opposite direction.
This makes me wonder. Why would the arrow only point in 2 directions. The
author even speculates that "normal" matter might interact with "reverse
time" matter, resulting in mass with a null time vector. Hmmm. To me,
that would mean that the mass would "exist" at all times, in the same
"place." How could it "move" if it had no time vector.
Other
Dennis's Test Page *caution* Use at your own risk. If your computer explodes, don't call...
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