I’ve fallen a bit behind in reviewing my free Kindle books, and with the holidays I’ve had time to do a bit more reading than usual. The latest:
- Through Wolf’s Eyes, by Jane Lindskold. I was expecting this to be mediocre at best, and instead ended up enjoying it enough that I’m thinking about actually paying for the sequel (if Tor gets around to releasing it for the Kindle).
- Tobsha Learner’s Soul. Now this one was thoroughly mediocre. It bills itself as a thriller examining whether we are formed more by nature or nurture, but the “examination” is cursory at best. Plus the story isn’t particularly thrilling, and there are a number of plot holes and threads that don’t seem to have any purpose. On the other hand, Learner can create pretty good characters, which is more than the authors of some of the free Tor books have been able to do.
I think I’ve only got two free Tor books to go, but then I’ve got 9-10 other freebies to tackle. In the meantime I’ve also been reading a few Xmas gifts:
- You’re Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger, by Roger Hall. I actually heard about this through Bruce Schneier’s blog; it was entertaining (although perhaps not quite as good as Bruce billed it to be) and a fast read.
- Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I’m not quite sure how I made it so long without it, but I’m glad I finally got around to it. I’m not sure I would list it as one of the 100 best English language books since 1923 (which TIME did; and what’s with the 1923 cutoff?), but it’s easily well worth the time and $ to read.
Overall, I’d recommend three of the four (and the fourth was worth what I paid for it).
During the housing bubble the San Jose Mercury News took great delight in publishing each Saturday a large, full color “heat map” of exactly how much real estate prices in different neighborhoods around Silicon Valley had appreciated year over year.
And then the bubble burst and housing prices started crashing (the median and average are now both down almost 40%). And the large, full-color map lost its color and relocated to another section.
And then this past week my wife and I noticed that the map disappeared altogether.
Apparently the change in housing prices is only important news when it’s going up. When the prices are crashing back to earth, our local newspaper would really be happier if you minded your own business and just went about your life. Trust them, it’s always a good time to buy or sell real estate (one of my favorite NAR slogans).
Randy Pausch was my PhD advisor at CMU, so I have ties to both Randy and CMU. And it initially didn’t bother me that CMU was leveraging Randy’s sudden celebrity; I understand that they wanted to celebrate one of their own, and Randy certainly thought the world of CMU and thought of it as a way to give back to the university. But recently I think CMU’s starting to tiptoe perilously close to the line between celebrating Randy and milking Randy. Seriously, an educational DVD? What’s next, Randy Pausch Foam Brick Walls to practice crashing through? Randy Pausch t-shirts sporting “Spot the head fake?” Exactly how crass is the nose-diving economy (and presumably value of their endowment) going to make them?
I find this fascinating; the Ubuntu team is working on a version of Ubuntu Server that’s specialized to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (aka EC2). Need to quickly set up web and email servers? No problem; just a few commands and you’re up and running. I’ve occasionally toyed with the idea of setting up my own email and web servers, but generally regarded it as being too much hassle. With an offering like this Canonical is making it relatively easy to get going, and with Amazon hosting the servers it probably wouldn’t be all that expensive.
Must be that time of year. Just one free book this time, though.
… is brought to you by Microsoft. Last January I paid for a OneCare subscription basically as an experiment to see how good it was since I wanted some antivirus software for the Windows virtual machine I run on my Mac. Since I had a few spare minutes today (gotta love the end of the year), I figured I’d take the update the virtual machine (I haven’t used it in awhile). When checking mail in it I discovered that my OneCare account was set to autorenew next month.
Now, I’d been planning on cancelling my subscription (pretty much the only time I use that Windows VM is when I want to use FrameMaker, so OneCare just isn’t worth it), so this renewal was news to me. It turns out that automatically set you up for renewal when you first subscribe, and you have to read some really fine print in the license agreement to discover that fact (plus there’s no way when signing up to opt out of it). No problem, I thought, there’s a link to cancel the renewal.
Of course, if you follow that link to Billing, and then to another page listing help for cancelling service, and then on to what in theory is a OneCare web page you in fact end up at msn.com. Not quite what you’re looking for.
If you dig a little deeper, you in fact discover that there is no way online to cancel your autorenewal; you have to call customer support and talk to an actual person. And the way to find that number is to search online for other people complaining about OneCare, since the OneCare webpage (once you actually find it via a web search) link for the phone number leads to a dead page (note that there is a link to renew your subscription, which just creates the illusion that renewal is a separate action).
Given that I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to make it through cancelling the auto-renewal without being thoroughly pissed off (lord knows I didn’t), you have to wonder whether the accidental $50 renewals they’re collecting really balance out all the cranky users venting about bad your customer experience is. I almost found myself wondering what would happen if I didn’t call Microsoft to cancel the autorenewal and instead just reported the renewal fee as a fraudulent charge to my credit card company. In the end I figured the latter course would be more work, so I sucked up it and called. But it’ll be a cold day in hell before I ever subscribe to anything from Microsoft again.
Those people who claim that one of the great things about web-based services is that you can access them from any machine seem to overlook the fact that web-services just make a different trade-off; rather than being dependent on a particular operating system, they’re too often dependent on a particular browser. At my company we have web apps that only run in Firefox and apps that only run in Explorer (6, mind you), which make it a little tough when you primarily use Safari.
Yes, the differences between browsers are arguably smaller than the differences between operating systems, so porting an app across browsers is usually less work. But please, don’t try to pretend web apps are write once run anywhere. Or if you do, please instead say that they’re just as write once run anywhere as Java.
Ah, bless the fine folks at Random House. Just when I was starting to run low of free Tor books, Random House just handed out 9 free books to Kindle owners. I think I’m pretty damn close to 30 free books now since May; that’s pretty good in my book.
I asked my daughter today if she’d like to write a letter to Santa telling him what she’d like for Christmas this year since she’s learned how to write.
She turned to me and replied, “Dad, I don’t need to write a letter; Santa can read my wishlist.”
Ah, the technologies our children take for granted.
Having finished Ubuntu Kung Fu, I’m returning to working my way through my collection of free Kindle books. The first one I tackled was actually my most recent free acquisition, M.J. Rose’s The Reincarnationist. Basic plot: protagonist gets in an accident, starts having flashes from previous lives, tries to find out whether they’re real, starts getting caught up in events that mirror those from previous lives.
While not aggresively bad, free was a good price for it. There were a number of holes and less than compelling parts of the story that make me glad I didn’t pay money for it. And one pet peeve; this is the second of the free books I’ve gotten for the Kindle where the author seemed to think that telling us the character felt a particular way was an effective way of communicating how the character felt. That just doesn’t work, particularly when the rest of the time the character doesn’t act that way at all. Please, show us the character feels that way, don’t just tell us they do and expect it to be compelling.
jeff pierce 