fine whine

As much as I like to try and distance myself from the so-called blogosphere (see? I did it just then) I find that I cannot completely abandon it. While I find myself contributing very little to it (this very site is about the extent of it) I nevertheless read an awful lot of what's out there, digital and otherwise. I tend to reserve any book that sounds vaguely interesting that gets mentioned on the internets, and I haven't been too disappointed yet (although The Pirates! In an Adventure With Scientists by Gideon Defoe wasn't nearly as good as I'd expected. It had great potential but less-than-great execution). I've finished another novel based on a blogger's tip-of-the-hat and I must admit that I liked it a great deal.

The book in question is John Scalzi's Old man's war. It's a SF look at the future of intergalactic competition, war, and old people, with a dash of classic SF homage-ry and sex thrown in here and there. There's enough humor to keep me smiling throughout but few things warrant a guffaw, but that's fine with me. The speculative bits about physics come off as real conversation, not a severe beating with the expository dialogue stick. This is a good thing.

Scalzi's thoughts about the alien cultures is interesting as well, delving into a little more depth than the stock unrationalized bloodlust and all-out thirst for conquest.

To say that I enjoyed Scalzi's book is to admit that Cory Doctorow told me to do so. Well, he was right. So read it, but because I said so, not him.

That said, Cory did manage to get his pullquote atop the back cover. Friends in high places, I suppose...

Thinking now, I would shelve it up with Alan Dean Foster's Codgerspace, which is also an excellent read about old people in the future. That's about the only overlap between the two books. So, read them both, I suppose.

At just about midnight this morning my hard drive died. I was using the computer at the time, and it suddenly spun to life and started making some forlorn clicking noises. Windows shut down and when it restarted my drive wasn't recognized. You see, I need to use two hard drives to run Windows: my 20 gigabyte drive, partitioned into five or six virtual drives, filled with pictures, music, and games, and the one gig dinosaur that boots Windows because it can't recognize the bigger drive.

I'm sure that if I monkeyed with it enough, I could've gotten down to one drive, but now that is a purely hypothetical exercise. It's all gone, now, and I'm going to have to find somebody to pay to get my stuff back. I've been bad about backing stuff up, since I figured that since I bought this hard drive new it wouldn't give me a problem after a mere five years.

This is, of course, not the first drive I've lost. It's not even the fifth. It is, however, the first one that I bought new, and moreover the first one I had that was manufactured after 1997.

I've got hundred megabyte hard drives from 1992 that still work, dammit.

So I'm a fool for not making backups, and a sad fool at that. To think just a couple days ago I was so happy to be in Chicago with my friends, and now I have this instead. I want to go back; I want to go to bed and to have this all be okay in the morning.