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

Folder delivery:

   Total  Number Folder
   -----  ------ ------
17882995    1913 /dev/null
12268067     810 spam
 2217635     641 lists/void
 2406290     526 lists/baltwash-burning
 2414109     446 lists/otakon-staff
 2676164     428 lists/bugtraq
  383989     391 cronjobs
 1317429     370 lists/mutt-users
 1469172     334 lists/burningass
 4234167     228 /home/phil/mail/inbox

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.

I’ve just discovered listsofbests.com.  It’s a website with lists of books, movies, and music that various people have deemed to be really good at some point or other.  Mostly, I’m interested in the list of Hugo Award winners.  It’s been a goal of mine for some time to read every work that has won a Hugo, and this site will allow me to keep better track of where I am with respect to that goal.  I’m not doing too poorly; I’ve read 29 of the currently 51 books on the list.  So, here’re my lists:

• Hugos
• Nebulas
• Phobos Entertainment’s “100 Science Fiction Books You Just Have to Read”

Not for nothing did A Fire upon the Deep take home a Hugo.  There are just so many things about it that are good.  The universe within which the story takes place is carefully crafted and very interestingly conceived.  Several alien races are presented, two of them in detail, one of which (the Tines) had been very elaborately created.  The story is huge and compelling, while the writing draws you onward.  And the Usenet-like communications setup is an interesting concept.

Probably one of the things that stands out the most in this book is the structure of the Tines.  Vinge does a good job of explaining by showing, and the details of the race were enough to make my head hurt as I imagined their ramifications.

The writing was well-paced.  It’s a long book, and some parts felt slow-moving compared to others, but they were never uninteresting.  During the more active parts, especially the climax of the book (and the other climax right before it) I was so immersed in it that I couldn’t stop reading.  And the image at the end was echoingly haunting.

Simply put, buy this book.  It’s eminently worth it.

Slashdot seems to have a review of a recently-released special edition of the book.  It has notes by Vinge and those who helped him with his book and is apparently only available in electronic format.  If I had a working PDA, I’d consider getting it, since the annotations would be very interesting to read, but I’d much prefer a more open format (mostly so I could read it with Weasel Reader).