Raja's Blog

This is quite an entertaining book, once it gets started … which took a while, according to my tastes. Ignacio somewhat jokingly compared it to Dying Inside when he first told me about it; while the lead characters have similarities, this is nowhere near as beautifully written or compelling … on the other hand, it doesn't take itself at all as seriously. This is pretty much your standard first book in a series of humorous Vampire murder mysteries in rural Louisiana ;-). The novel opens well, with the first chapter setting up the main two characters, and putting them into action immediately, but after that, much less happens for the next 70 or so pages. Then a character's death starts things really rolling. By the time somebody close to the narrator is accused of murder, the book becomes hard to put down, and near the end, I was wondering if the author would have enough space to close the narrative threads. She does, because by then she was moving at breakneck speed. Perhaps (probably?) the author did this on purpose: Start out slow, and just keep building and building speed, but I think more uniform pacing might have improved the book.

Overall, I rate it 9 of 10. If I have a chance, I'll stop by the MCPL tonight before meeting Ignacio at Vintage Phoenix, and try to pick up the next book(s) in the series. If I don't have time, it's not a complete tragedy; I should reread Red Thunder (our next SFDG book) soon anyway.

Last night at the SFDG meeting, I was somewhat surprised when Ignacio and Kate complained that it had been more than a week since I'd posted here. I was surprised that (a) it had been so long, and (b) anybody was watching my blog so closely. So, Ignacio and Kate, here's a new entry ;-).

As I mentioned last night, I'm somewhat surprised to find out that entries here tend to deal with things that are above a certain interest/importance threshhold to me—but below another threshhold. Ok, so I'm not surprised that I won't go to the trouble of authoring an entry about something that I didn't care much about (and more to the point, that I'm not worried about remembering), but I'm mildly surprised to find out that things that are very important to me don't get entries in a timely fashion here because I'm afraid that doing them justice will take too much effort.

Let me mention a few in passing, as stubs: There's the single most important upcoming life-changing event, announced last night at the SFDG. On a less significant note, there are two works of art that I recently experienced that had a huge impact: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (fourth in the series) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Six. If I find the energy, I'll write (much) more about these two, but for now, I'll just say that I highly recommend them. Even though I had some problems with the latter (and I don't know how much I can say, given my strong preference to avoid spoilers here), both will reward your time more amply than most anything else out there. In My Horseheaded Opinion, of course.

Kate's blog had a link to a Wired News article a while back about blogs, and how most blogs aren't very interesting to read. Two blockquotes, the first from John Dvorak:

In a column that was almost universally panned in weblog circles, John Dvorak of PC Magazine said that while a few blogs were insightful, many new webloggers were getting into blogging for all the wrong reasons. They were “wannabe writers” who were looking for “ego gratification,” Dvorak wrote.

Further in the article is an extended quote from Dave Linabury, who "loves blogging" but said,

One of the things I don't like is the blog where someone says something like, 'Today I had a cheese sandwich.' That's the kind of thing you see in most of these blogs. You know, fascinating. I don't give a flying ... whatever what you ate. Don't tell me you have a flat tire. And if this is how boring their writing is, I can't imagine how boring they must be to talk to in general.

For me, both of these comments fit into the long tradition of journalistic idiocy and trying to force-fit a new medium into the patterns of an old one. Remember how the web was supposed to turn into television (i.e., huge one-way broadcasts with passive viewers) when the big media companies came in? Or how the web was going to turn into pay-per-view or how everything was going to be tiny bits of content in between huge banner ads? There are good reasons why none of these have come to pass, at least so far.

If Dvorak and Linabury think that blogs should be written to professional standards, they should hire and pay professional writers ;-). As it is, many people blog for many different reasons, and certainly I read different blogs for different reasons. I read jerrypournelle.com (which isn't a blog, but golly I wish he'd get some blog software) because I'm very interested in Dr. Pournelle's opinions on trends in space travel (and I have been for some decades). I read Jeffrey Zeldman's zeldman.com for ideas about how to make websites prettier while staying standards compliant. I read Dr. Jakob Nielsen's useit.com for ideas on how to make (and keep) my websites usable. (Again, useit isn't a true blog, and again I wish the author would make it one ;-). And I read Ignacio's blog and Kate's blog to keep track of what's up with them ;-).

As a closing comment, let me say that I write my blog not to impress anyone who wants professional writing (there are paying outlets for that sort of thing), but to have a little fun, and to record my time-stamped opinions of things that have caught my eye or tickled my fancy. I also post the odd reminder here (e.g., how to delete unwanted voice-mail without listening to it, which I got from another blog ;-). I've never kept a diary; this is sort of the closest I've gotten. If you find it dull, there are vast numbers of more interesting places on the web; google 'em up ;-).

Thanks to Kate for posting the link here. Here's a link back ;-).

Got 1 pint of Vanilla at Target yesterday. I'd say it's very good, though I prefer Breyer's All-Natural Vanilla ;-).

Um, even Jove nods.

Today's Astronomy picture of the day is in the I-wouldn't-have-believed-it-if-I-hadn't-seen-it category:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040702.html

(Or jump to the closeup at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0407/encke_cassini_fp.jpg.)

I mean scalloped edges? Come on!

(Thanks to Julie for pointing the picture out to me.)