Public transportation is a good idea, it really is.  Maryland just happens to have implemented it in a rather sucky manner.  And I get to deal with it.

I was actually up earlier today, so I figured I’d stop at Baltimore Coffee and Tea for chai and a bagel to server as my breakfast/lunch.  I missed the bus I was aiming at, which was my fault because I was a little late and it was on time.  I caught the next one, which was three minutes late.

Got on the Light Rail in Baltimore and off next to Baltimore Coffee and Tea, ten minutes later than scheduled.  Well, I still had ten minutes before the next train, and it was probably going to be late, so I went and got my food.  Came back ten minutes later to see the back of the train receeding along the tracks.

Now I made my big mistake.  “Oh,” says I, “I can just go catch the 8, rather than waiting twenty minutes for the next train.” I walked for six minutes to the bus stop, then waited for another twenty-five.  In that time, two buses were supposed to have gone by.  None did.  From past experience, I really should have known better than to trust the 8 when I needed to have anything resembling a schedule.

I ended up walking back to the Light Rail stop and taking the next train, which was only seven minutes later than scheduled.

All told, if I’d left right after missing the first train, I could literally have walked to work and gotten there sooner than I ultimately did.

Bah.

A lot of critics seem to like Archform: Beauty, and I can’t really disagree with them.  It tells its story from five points of view, switching among them as it progresses.  Despite the title and the presence of five narrators, I didn’t really see much evidence of Bartók’s arch form in the structure of the book.  Beauty is, however, on the minds of the characters, though each has different ideas about what is beautiful.

Mostly, though, it’s a detective story.  Illegality has transpired, and the characters, variously, have committed it, are chasing it, or are affected by it.  The different threads of the story tie together marvelously as events work their way forward.

Modesitt also gets points for a very well-developed world.  Language usage has changed a bit in three hundred years, and the book is littered with new turns of phrase.  It’s not too hard to figure out meaning, though, and a short ways into the book I found the terms nonintrusive.

Spoilers

I’ll admit that I was disappointed a bit by Kemal’s death, mostly because he didn’t get what was coming to him.  Nevertheless, it was quite reasonable in the context of the book.  I was very happy with the tying together of Parsfal’s and Cornett’s threads at the end—the poet and the singer.

With respect to me discussion of endings in an earlier post, I’ll point to this one as an ending that left things loose or unresolved but still gave me a sense of closure.  (I had tears in my eyes at the last scene, even if Parsfal’s poetry wasn’t spectacular.)

• Beauty versus utility
• Everything I know about UI design, I learned from GAMES

Folder delivery:

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17882995    1913 /dev/null
12268067     810 spam
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  383989     391 cronjobs
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High cronjob count was because of a couple of power outages that left some hosts running, but without nameservice.  Thus, the uptimes project client that runs every eight minutes left error messages complaining about not being able to resolve hostnames.

spam: 
Cnt: 2536
Max: 46.1
Avg: 14.0206230283912
Dev: 6.2294772771236

Zodiac is one of Neal Stephenson’s earlier books, and it shows.  A lot of the writing style that went into Snow Crash is there, but it’s rougher.  It’s hard to pick out specific examples, but the whole book didn’t feel to me that it flowed as well as it ought to have.  On the other hand, the story was a decent one, and had several nice moments of chemistry geekiness that reminded me of the mathematically-geeky side trips in Cryptonomicon.

Surprisingly (at least to me), I liked the ending.  I haven’t really been happy with the endings of Stephenson’s more recent books; I prefer something with a sense of closure.  All three of his books that I’ve read (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon) had endings that felt unfinished.  (Note that I don’t mind endings that deliberately leave things open-ended, but I do like to feel that the main story has been resolved.)  Regardless, Zodiac’s ending did have closure, and I was happy with that.

So, it’s a decent read, especially if you like Neal Stephenson’s writing, but not really something I’d recommend going out of your way for.