Rui CarmoAfter a couple of evenings devoted to other considerations, I finished Century Rain today, and found it to have a few interesting twists indeed. Without spoiling all of the fun, I found it pretty funny to discover that Alastair Reynolds' Slashers took their name from Slashdot -
(...)Niagara made a careful gesture, like some religious benediction: a diagonal slice across his chest and a stab to the heart. 'A slash and a dot,' he said. 'I doubt it means anything to you, but this was once the mark of an alliance of progressive thinkers linked together by one of the very first computer networks. (...)'
I found it even funnier to learn, later in the novel, that Niagara was a double agent hell-bent on killing three billion people - now that's trolling, er... progressive thinking in the best Slashdot style.
Cool Waters, In Moderation
I've been mostly staying away from the news these past few days, but as usual there are some things one can't help but notice.
First off, I'm way more relaxed about the way I hunt and peck through my newspipe inbox - there's no rush in getting to it all, and Spotlight is pretty useful in weeding out the chaff. The notion of taking a stab at Bayesian classification is still there, just to make sure the stuff I'm interested in gets flagged in some way.
Regarding the news themselves, besides new bouts of iPhone madness, there was also some noise regarding Skype's new Universal version, which seems to actually work this time (still no video, though, so no compelling reason for me to try it). Which reminds me, Om has a nice eBay stock chart which I invite you to look at and make up your own mind about whether Skype was worth all that cash.
I've also been sifting through the E3 hype and watching the PS3, Xbox360 and, er... Wii videos at my leisure. Nintendo looks like they might be on to something here, although given my moderate (to low) interest in games I'm more interested in figuring out what Sony is going to do.
You see, replacing my current DVD, PlayStation 2 and XBMC setup in one fell swoop with a single box with access to all my stored media is much more interesting, especially now that Sony has announced Mac support for LocationFree.
Who knows, maybe the PS3 will talk DAAP and DPAP and see my MP3 and photo albums. The icing on the cake, however, would be it acting as a PVR...
Last, but not least, I picked up Carlo's sensible piece on the forthcoming Nokia/770 replacement with a built-in Google/Talk client, to which I would add: I surely hope Nokia has learned from their mistakes and throws in a decent keyboard besides upgrading the screen and CPU.
And no, I am most likely not even going to try to buy one this time around.