Toluu

Linus' blog

Eventually this might even contain some Torvalds family pictures.

ReadingYesterday

So I read Brent Weeks' Night Angel trilogy last week mostly while on planes.

Kudos to a new writer for a good debut trilogy, but also extra kudos for releasing a trilogy all at once and having a clean ending and not leaving things hanging just for the future. I guess the two are related (publisher not wanting to publish something from a new author without having the whole series in hand and being able to judge it), but I hate reading an interesting first novel in a series and then having to wait for the rest (hint: "Name of the Wind". Grrr).

Ok, so technically the books were released a month apart, and I also guess that I was lucky that the third one was apparently available a few days early at the Ka'anapali Barnes & Noble, but that's still "together" as far as I'm concerned.

Recommended.

The incredible shrinking wetsuitYesterday

So I was in Maui the last week, doing my best to spend as much time under-water as possible, given the constraint that I also had to at least occasionally meet up with my family for dinners etc.

And I got in a solid lucky thirteen tanks, with the added bonus that I don't think I had a single dive where I came up with less than 1200psi. Which means that I'm definitely no longer the person that forces other divers to come up early due to being low on air. Woot!

So I was being good and sporty all week, but despite that, roughly half-way through the trip, I noticed that I had a much easier time fitting in the ML (male large) suit than the MM (male medium) ones.

And it wasn't just one of them that had shrunk - I checked a couple just to be sure. The suits that were a perfectly good fit on Saturday had suddenly shrunk and become tight by Wednesday.

It's magic, I tell you. Magic. The wetsuit-fairy is out to get me.

In MemoriamNovember 9

It's been about two years now since Randi walked away and never came back.

He was 17+ years old, and his kidneys were failing. He often woke us up (and probably the neighbours too) by being fairly loud about something in the night. But he was a good cat, and I'm surprised at how sad this post made me.

ReadingNovember 6

Book of the day: "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast" by Lewis Wolpert.

Ok, I really wanted to like it, since the subject matter is interesting. But in the end, I think it was too light on the science. The most interesting parts were when Wolpert talks about human mental development or about the various odd belief systems of tribes, but both of those were really not very deep. They were there to explain the arguments, nothing more.

End result: it didn't really grab me. It wasn't bad, but it also wasn't terribly intriguing.

It may be the same thing as with Dawkins - I really found his scientific books more interesting than the one about belief. I'll take his old "Selfish Gene" any day over "The God Delusion".

On another angle entirely, I read 'Warrior' and 'Witch' by Marie Brennan. I find myself looking at literature that I think Patricia might enjoy - so I'm looking at women protagonists. She loved the Twilight series, for example. I just want to read it first myself, because some of the female-oriented stuff really does seem to be sometimes closer to soft-porn rather than anything I'd suggest to a pre-teen girl.

They were fine.

Oh, and the girls are giggling over "Little Big Planet". Maybe trying to find books for them was a waste of time ;)

"Healthy lifestyle.."November 5

I dunno about you guys, but I'm all for giving nature a bit of help. I've had lasik, for example, and am very happy with it.

Not that I actually ever really minded wearing glasses, but I could not recognize my own kids when in a swimming pool and they were more than six feet away. And let's face it. swimming after other peoples kids and tickling them is not socially acceptable. At least in the US.

Which brings me to the other little help I'd like to give nature: I have never found a sport that I find in the least interesting. Sure, I play pool and snooker, and it's technically a sport, I guess. After all, you do move a ball around. And scuba-diving is lovely, but I think that if you see it as an aerobic exercise, you're doing something wrong (the best part of scuba diving is the floating and looking around - very much avoiding exercise).

So let's face it, I sit around like a vegetable 99% of the time. My job is sitting in front of a computer, and when I relax, the last thing I want to do is run around. I used to swim a while, and for half a year or so I actually spent about 45 minutes in the pool almost every day, and it helped, but while I enjoy swimming, at some point it just became counting laps.

So then I lapsed (I kill myself - I'll be here all week), and didn't get back in the habit, and now while there's a pool nearby, parking is inconvenient and I just can't be bothe