I’m now off to Burning Man, for what will be my first visit to the desert.  (Note to potential burglars: the martial artists are still in residence.)  will see everyone when I return.

This one’s a worthy successor to Rusalka.  More that’s familiar Cherryh style, including characters worrying over their choices and not knowing which characters to trust.

Spoilers

I thought the climax seemed more hasty than Rusalka’s.  Sasha & company show up, confused stuff with Draga and Eveshka happens, Draga and Chernevog end up battling it out at a distance, and it’s over.  I felt more of a sense of completeness at the end of Rusalka than I had from this book.  Still, the writing throughout the thing was good enough that I’m happy to have read it.

Other stuff I liked.  The exploration of the difference between wizardry and sorcery, though I would have liked to see more definite results from Sasha’s claimed better understanding of wizardry.  I was rather expecting to see a Sasha/Draga showdown, with Sasha defending himself by cooperating with the natural things that Draga was trying to change.

The characterization was, not too surprisingly, well done.  It was nice to see more of Chernevog and get a plausible, “He’s wrong, but understandable and isn’t completely evil.”

I need to see if I can get a copy of the last boog in the series, Yvgenie.  Interestingly, that name doesn’t appear anywhere in the first two books, so my guess is that it’s Peytr’s and Eveshka’s daughter.

(Perhaps this should go in Links, but I might get around to writing some more original content here eventually.)

Rant from Simon Wistow about the practice.

RFC 1855, Netiquette Guidelines.

How to get Outlook Express to bottom-quote.  (Relatedly, How to get Outlook Express to send in text.)

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet?

I decided I liked the design of Blosxom better than weblog.  So I switched.  Have to wait and see if I decide to stick with this one, though I think I will—it’s flexible enough for me to do most of what I want with it.

The Light Rail was fun this morning. Got on at the Convention Center stop as normal, then drowsed until reaching North Avenue. At that stop, we were informed by the driver that we would have to get off and take buses further north. There were two buses waiting and an MTA supervisor directing people onto them. I said I was going to Timonium and he pointed me at the first bus of the pair.

I was a little annoyed at this point because the service update board they’d put up were blank—this was not an announced outage. Upon reading the Light Rail service status page the MTA provides, I learned that this was unplanned. Still, they could have been more prepared, especially since they’re planning to do this sort of thing regularly in the future.

It turned out that the bus I was on went directly to the Timonium area, skipping the more southerly Light Rail stops. This makes sense, since buses are slower than the trains. The driver, however, was unfamiliar with the area and had not been given driving directions. I had to direct her from the Lutherville stop to the Timonium Business Park and Timonium Fairgrounds stops. I only realized after going past it that she’d been told to only stop at the Lutherville, Timonium Fairgrounds, and Hunt Valley stops, so the Timonium Business Park one was a waste of time. I then gave her directions from the Timonium Fairgrounds stop to the Hunt Valley stop.

Neither she nor the supervisor communicated adequately to the riders what exactly was going on. It wouldn’t have taken too long to say, “This bus is going to the Lutherville, Timonium, and Hunt Valley Light Rail stops,” and that would have made things go a little more smoothley, I think. Several people (including me, though I was less affected) were confused by the stops the bus skipped.