Once again, Alastair Reynolds cranks out a weighty tome in Redemption Ark (Part of the Revelation Space universe) that proves, at least to me, hard SciFi can be surprisingly entertaining. Part of the problem with sticking directly to physics, as Alastair with his Ph.D. in Astronomy is likely to do, is that space travel is necessarily limited to current breakthroughs in physics, even when targeted hundreds or thousands of years in the future.

I just finished The Short Victorious War by David Weber and I’m starting to notice a pattern here: Honor Harrington thrust into difficult situation complicated by politics. Honor thwarts an invasion while overcoming said politics. Profit. Now, I understand these have to be somewhat formulaic, and this book was in fact, enjoyable, so I can’t complain excessively here. The real weakness of this book is that it’s so short, and Honor plays such a minimal part in the action.

I just finished Gust Front by John Ringo, and Ringo is a hard man to understand. He clearly loves the SciFi genre, and with the continuation of the Posleen War, proves he can delve into the stickier details many gloss over. The problem is he goes way too far on occasion, detailing for pages on very intricate and specific troop movements and justification. I felt like I was reading a historical account of each battle.

Well, maybe I spoke too soon about Drupal. Why? Well… it’s 2010 guys, stop with the ID links. I know there’s a plugin that overcomes this shortcoming, but all the internal links, including edits, redirects, and so on, won’t use the aliases you define. No, foo.bar.com/node/123423 is not a valid url. It requires approximately ten minutes to add a table column for a ‘slug’ to look up the appropriate entry, but Drupal refuses to compromise.

Jen suckered me into volunteering to help her music boosters with their choir contest this weekend. This entailed waking up at 4:45AM so we could leave at 5:30AM to finish setup and get ready for the festivities to begin at 8:00AM. Woo? My job description was Sound Technician for the day, where I handled four Sony voice recorders; three for the judges and one to record the choir. Each choir used between eight and twelve minutes for two or three songs, but each time block was twenty to act as a buffer between groups.