Today I have:

- Completed a module for the on-line series my PM "highly recommended" I take. That is the only reason I'm doing them, because these modules are terrible.
- Rearranged the appliances in the kitchen
- Unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher
- Unpacked about six boxes
- Rearranged half the livingroom
- Read two ebooks (both so bad I had to stop reading them)
- Started a third ebook which so far has been readable, even if it hasn't been good
- Put up a shelf in the bathroom so we have a place to store towels
- Called Verizon only to be told that no one was available to explain my bill -_-

I still need to call the apartment complex and let them know about the washer. I think I'll do that right after I finish making this post.

miome should be back around dinnertime. I can't wait for her to be home.

Remember last week when my computer started acting up? Well, today it started doing the exact same thing. Surprise, surprise. A brief talk with the manufacturer and they are now telling me it's the motherboard. So I'm back to a loaner laptop.

It is rainy and cold as the remains of Ida hit the area. I walked to work, but decided to have miome pick me up. It gets dark early and with the clouds, it's too dark to walk home after work. At least the car is nice and warm.

Otherwise, life is good. I am adjusting to the idea of not being in school by reading Terry Pratchett.

Still need to finish unpacking though. -_-

I think the best part about this book is the hints of the on-going drama of Brenda. Brenda being the 1960's girl who once owned this book and scribbles (terrible) poetry and comments in the margins. Make sure you read through to the end to get the as much of the story as you can.

Most of the rest of it just makes my brain hurt.

I'm probably late to the party, but the department secretary just pointed me to Mr. Bobo's Remarkable Mouse Circus which includes Neil Gaiman's video tour where he reads the chapters from his latest book "The Graveyard Book." So if you want to see Mr. Gaiman reading his own work (and my dept. secretary assured me that he is incredibly expressive and worth watching) then there's a link.

I'm definitely going to listen/watch it once miome is finished playing Persona 4.

I had several packages at the office today including books! Thank you itlandm. I'm really looking forward to being able to read everything you sent me when my thesis is over. ^^

Latest news on the whole Amazon debacle (which if you haven't heard about, a good summary can be found here). Now it seems that Amazon is saying that it was a "glitch" that caused the problems. Sure. Right. And I'm the Queen of England. At least they are beginning to realize what a big pile of poo they have stepped in.

EDIT: Here is a pretty good explanation of what I think happened as well. You would think given what has happened to Six Apart, Google, a couple of news organizations, and countless other companies that someone, somewhere would think "Hmm... maybe those people on the internet aren't all sunshine and rainbows and objective complaints. Perhaps we should put some fail safes in to take care of this."

Yesterday at the airport I decided to buy a couple of books to read on the flight. I'd brought three books to entertain me on the trip, but given the 3 hour flight delay, I wound up going through two of them and miome told me the third was depressing. I didn't want to read depressing. That meant stopping at the Borders in the Las Vegas airport and picking up a book.

I like trashy romance novels. I don't read them as much as I use to, but I especially like picking them up when I'm going to be flying. Why? Because they are usually easy reads that don't require a lot of deep thought and I can get through them in one plane ride. This meant that besides getting Terry Pratchett's latest (Making Money) I also checked out the romance section.

Oh god, I think the publisher's have been scanning my brain. Since it's not on the Amazon site, let me type up the blurb on the back of The Dragon Master.

( Back of the book blurb here )

Seriously, did anyone think I was going to be able to pass up a book with that on the back?

The book itself, alas, does not live up to the promise of the blurb. The writing is okay, but the character's reactions to situations are totally unbelievable. I mean really unbelievable. So much so that they have all the depth of a parking lot puddle at times. There moralistic debates are laughable at times. The pacing is off in that I felt that most of the book the characters were blindly moving from one disaster to the other for no other reason than the author needed something to move the plot forward. Which half the time, it didn't even succeed at doing. There were times I was wondering why the scene I'd just read had happened at all.

Also, the author was obviously in love with the characters she created in the previous two books set in this world, because she used every opportunity to have them appear. Worse of all, I felt like the sex scenes were being used as filler. Seriously, the two main characters had sex at the most random moments. Moments when normal people would be doing stuff like, oh I don't know, trying to save the world or panicking because they suddenly had powers they couldn't control.

I do have to admit though, I kind of want to read the other books in the series (which includes Dragon Heat and The Black Dragon). But the best (at least description wise) has got to be Dragon Actually. Read that description and tell me you are not desperately curious. I dare you.

It's still not good enough for me to want to buy them though. Anyone have them or want to buy them out of morbid curiosity? I'm willing to mail my copy off in trade if you'll send me the one you have. Maybe a bunch of us can do a book swap of them? ^_^

Several days ago I made a post about Total E-Bound and the account problems. I did notify them about it and got an email the next day saying that they had switched between payment gateways, the problem did not show up in testing, they were switching back to the old system, and the account of the person I had accidentally accessed had been reset, yadda, yadda, yadda. I figured that would be the end of it and felt better knowing that at least their IT department was on top of things..

Well, no. This is, after all, the internet. Either the author of To Hate and To Hold did a google search or my post showed up in her referrer list, because she left a comment saying that her book was also available at All Romance Ebooks. Great! Now there are choices about where to get the ebook (though it's a little pricier than on Total E-Bound). She also mentioned that she let her editor and the publisher know what was going on.

Still not the end though. The developer of Total E-Bound left a comment as well explaining in detail what they are doing to fix the problem and make sure it doesn't happen again. Heck, he even took the time to mention why he thought kayay was having issue with the sight at work. I will admit a great deal of it goes over my head, but it really seems like they are aware of the issue.

Holy cow people! Why the hell can't I get this kind of explanation and customer service from Dell? Or Best Buy? These people are on the ball. Given the effort both the author and the developer made, I felt the need to make another post letting everyone know what was going on.

Maybe I need to talk about things like this on my LJ more often. XD

Privilege of the Sword is one of the best books I have read in a long, long time. Not only did I find out what happened to Alec and Richard from Swordspoint, but the writing is incredible. Seriously, I kind of wish Swordspoint had been written in the same style as Privilege of the Sword. Or at least had the same level of depth and skill. Then again, Swordspoint was Ellen Kushner's first novel, while Privilege of the Sword is one of her most recent. Her writing has evolved and it shows.

Also, bi girls are hot.

I don't read the Anita Blake series. I just... don't. I think I managed about 2 1/2 of the novels before I just stopped. Not my cup of tea. This was before Laurell K. Hamilton's series dissolved into unremitting porn, so I've always wondered what it was about the books that just turned me off. Was it the characters? The plot? The writing?

While flying somewhere, miome picked up a book in another one of Laurell K. Hamilton's series. The book is called "A Lick of Frost" and is about, I kid you not, a fairy princess. Seriously. So far this is pretty much the entire plot of the book. "There is INTRIGUE and POLITICS. Then some people try to MURDER the fairy princess. But she ESCAPES! After she ESCAPES, she and her HOT BODYGUARDS who are sworn to PROTECT HER talk. And then they have SEX. Then there is more talking and it is DEEP AND MEANINGFUL. Then there is more SEX. ALL of her 20+ bodyguards LOVE HER because of the AWESOMENESS OF HER VAGINA."

I'm still in the middle of the part where she is having sex. It seems like she's been having sex for the last 100+ pages. It also seems that there is going to be even more sex before the damn book is over. What's even worse is that all these events? Take place in the space of one day. I feel like I'm back in the middle of Vagrant Story and am pondering when this chick has time to eat and pee between everything else shoved into her day.

I think sheer perversity is the only thing keeping me reading this. That, and Laurell K. Hamilton does not have a bad writing style. The writing itself is actually enjoyable to read. I think it's her characters and plot that are killing it for me.

After this, I'm just going to make it a point to give her stuff a miss.

EDIT: And then fucking rose petals fell wherever she tread? Give me a break.

Books like this one are the reason everyone makes fun of self-publishing.

Natural Harvest - A Collection of Semen-Based Recipes. No that title is not a typo.

I don't know what's worse. The fact that someone wrote and published this book, the fact people have bought it, or the reviews people have left for it.

Started my period just a few hours before my poster presentation. Surprise! Fucking ovaries.

Poster presentation went awesome. I was able to talk to a lot of people including a professor from another University who gave me lots of good advice and wanted to know when/where I was going to publish my research since he was interested in a similar topic. EEEE! It's so nice when someone actually cares about your research.

My fellow graduate students are awesome. They came down to support me, bought me dinner, and gave me gas money.

I have 46 lbs of books! These are all books I already owned but were at my mom's house in NC. Now they are here. The sad thing is, I didn't even clean off all my book shelves and I almost filled the box. I also managed to send a bunch of my comic cards (I was a collector of them back in the early 90's) to myself as well. So many books that I want to reread. I can't wait.

I managed to roll out of bed last night. See miome has been out of town. A lot of time in my sleep, I'll roll towards her when I get cold. Well last night, I did that only she wasn't there. So I kept rolling and rolling until I hit the floor. When I told her this she laughed at me. UNLOVED.

I have been reading the first decent gay-romance ebook today that I have read. It's not great by a long shot, but I don't feel like stopping in the middle of it. That's a small miracle. This is much better than the one book I read where the beginning and ending were good and the middle was terrible. It was like expecting to bite into a jelly-filled donut and finding that you have nothing. Not even donut... just a hole. I'm still amazed at how the author managed to do that.

Miome is coming home tonight. I am happy. ^^

Why am I reading gay Victorian murder/mystery? Especially when I hate two out of three of those subjects?

Sigh...

So obviously sometime in January the wonderful skylark97 sent me an ebook. Only she sent it to an account I don't check often and it sat there for 8 months. Heck, she might even have mentioned sending it to me and I promptly forgot it. I'm such a ditz sometimes. Anyway, thank you for the reading, Skylark. It's entertaining even if it's not what I would call stellar writing. XD

Were-dolphins. Were-dolphins. I'm not sure I can get past that simple fact without laughing.

miome and I have a lot of books. I mean, a lot of books. I'm currently in the middle of doing an inventory of the books we have in the apartment for insurance purposes. I've done two 1/2 bookcases and already we have 143 books. I haven't done half the books in my room, none in miome's room (which includes a floor to ceiling bookcase and boxes under her bed), and we still have about a bookcase of books and a bookcase of manga left (I'm counting manga as books since they have a ISBN) in the living room.

So here's a contest: how many books do we actually have? Miome guesses 500. I'm guessing 750. I'll takes guesses from people and when I'm done with the inventory, the closest guess gets a story of their choice.

Anyone want to take a bet?

You know what the problem with setting up this Access database of my books is? I ran a query and it looks like I have well over $1,000 worth of books in one set of bookshelves. I haven't even started on the other two bookshelves (one of which has my text books on it) nor have I glanced at the monster bookshelves in miome's room.

If I have to up the limit on my renter's insurance just to cover my books... well, I don't know whether I'll laugh or cry.

Also, this does not take into account the huge bookshelf at my mom's NC house, which is floor to ceiling. Note to self: when in NC in November, ship all the books you want to keep to Indy.

I really shouldn't be this pleased at the fact that I set up a database to catalog all our stuff for insurance in Access and made myself neat little drop down menus for certain stuff.

You can definitely tell I've been taking classes on Access in my spare time. ^^

I seriously thought I was going to hurt myself laughing while reading by this book review Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books. It's about a book called Decadent and the review includes LOLporn. I swear I am not making this up.

Amazon.com's recommendations are terrible. I know I've talked about this before (People who own a PS2 also bought outdoor grill accessories), but it bears repeating. The recommendations are terrible. And yet... I can't stop looking. It's like watching a really bad, bad movie with a group of friends where you spend the entire moving completely trashing it. The recommendations are often so inexplicable that you can't help but click the next button to see what else it's going to cough up.

One of the books that often come up in the recommendations is Discreet Young Gentleman. Now I would not recommend clicking on that link at work or in a crowded computer lab. However, for those of you who have some privacy, go ahead and click.

The absolute irony of putting that title with that book cover is just amazing. When I think "discreet young gentleman" I picture some dashing guy from the Regency era dressed up in his finery, standing a little too close to the rake his sister is marrying or possibly a British navy officer from the Napoleonic war period back home from see his family casually touching the sleeve of his best friend for a little too long.

What I don't see is a "package" that's as big as the guy's head. Good lord. Let's hope he's the one on bottom or the other guy isn't going to be able to walk straight for a month. There's nothing discreet or gentlemanly about that cover. Then again, maybe that's the point.

Only reason I keep it on my recommendations page is every time I see it, I dissolve into laughter. It brightens my day. Though sadly, it seems to have fallen off in favor of 20 million books about cartography.

As a side note, I kept typing "discrete" into the Amazon search agent and wondered why I couldn't find the book. A long, hard look at the results full of mathematical books finally clued me onto the fact that I was using the wrong word. ^_^;

This is, perhaps, one of the most unfortunate choices in books titles I've ever seen.

Cooking with Pooh

Also, to the girl in the women's bathroom yesterday.

Why did you feel the need to sit in the handicapped stall and talk on your cellphone while taking care of business? Did you think we want to be serenaded with how that one girl almost threw your scarf out the window or how it wasn't your friend's fault what happened to Robert when he was drunk because he left on his own? Did you think people who you were talking to wanted to be subjected to the background sounds of peeing and flushing? The answer to both is no. Stop multi-tasking and hang up your phone before I shove it up your ass.

Double shame on you for taking up the handicapped stall when you are not handicapped in any way, shape or form. Unless not having the sense that god gave a turnip counts as a handicap.

No love,
Tsaiko