Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Monday, 25 March 2002

# 9 PM

The web version of TurboTax refuses to work with Mozilla for Linux. I was a bit leery of the whole notion of having my personal financial info stored on some web server somewhere; on the other hand, it would have been nice not to have to go to the hassle of getting the traditional edition, dusting off the Windows partition that exists solely for doing taxes, etc. etc.

Wonder if it's worth complaining at them. Probably not.

Behold: very funny semi-blog of one man's experiences with MacOS X. Lots of instructive criticism of user interface.

# 6:30 PM

I can now speak to my test board. It apparently does not understand hardware flow control. Now I have to rewire my local network so that there's a fast comms channel to download code to it over. (It is theoretically possible to do everything over the serial line, but at 9600 bps I'd never get a test run completed.)

Shweta took my dreamwalking rules, turned around and inflicted them on the hapless PCs in our game. Who have no clue that these things are possible. I should know better than to be so bloody clever.

book reviews

John Varley's Titan: A space expedition comes across a mysterious moon-sized spaceship orbiting Saturn--or at least, they think it's a spaceship. The reader is aware from the beginning, since it says so clearly on the front cover, that the entire ship is one intelligent life-form. Ten points for concept, ten points for thinking through most of the consequences, minus five for unnecessary sex geared to shock readers in 1979. Good book but I am not going to run out and buy the second two-thirds of the trilogy.

Fritz Lieber's Conjure Wife: I'm not going to say a word about the plot, because I want you to read it yourself and have the realization slowly dawn on you, too. Find this book and read it now. (Long out of print, but republished by Tor/Orb in 1999, so it should be findable.)