Post 1978

With the winter receding and spring rolling in fast, I got inspired enough to return to the gym. My target is a pace of twice a week workouts. The first time after the winter felt very good indeed. I’m delighted to notice that I’m not nearly as broken as the last time I returned to the gym after a long hiatus; my legs ache a bit, but that’s about it.

Once the snow’s really gone, my intent is to also return to running, also going for a twice-weekly rate. About time, too, the stomach was beginning to gain bulk. I’m aerobically clearly more fit than before, though, so last summer’s running didn’t go to waste.

So for all of January we couldn’t get any snow, now the nature is doing its best to even out the winter average during February.

It’s -25 Celcius (-13 Fahrenheit) out there, with a wind of 3 meters (9 ft) per second to boost it to an effective temperature of -35 C (-31 F). Freezing damage is a real risk if you either don’t equip yourself properly or stay outside for too long. It’s actually going to get colder still, with predictions of -40 C (-40 F), including the wind factor.

With the air this cold, the streets are practically empty, you can’t trust the public transportation and yu avoid trying to start your 15-year old car. If we lived outside city limits, there’d be freezing plumbing to worry about.

I had a parallel to write about in my mind during the commute this morning, but I can’t think of it now. I guess the winter magic erased it from the synapses.

Alastair Reynolds’ concluding work in his Revelation Space series is the first book in the series to feel like a sequel. Indeed, you won’t get much out of it without prior exposure to the overall story.

As usual, Reynolds has two main storylines interweaving though the book, set at different times but concentrating on the same location. This being a universe of slower than light space travel, those separating decades can evaporate over the course of one interstellar passage in cryogenic sleep.

The bigger story pulls together the ongoing destinies of the Revelation Space central cast. It does so in a satisfying manner, but there is an undercurrent of wrapping things up, which takes away from the overall value of the story.

The other story is all about the titular Absolution Gap and is much more interesting than the overarching plot. it is set on a planet orbiting a gas giant. The gas giant has disappeared for an eyeblink some dozens of times over the past centuries. This has led to churches forming on the world, who take it as their duty to watch the giant, waiting for another disappearance, hoping to get a glimpse of the divine. They literally stare at the planet all the time, using machines, medicine and drugs to keep their eyes open.

However, because of orbital drift, the churches need to be mobile to keep the giant in their view at all times. This has lead to a mass of tracked cathedrals, making their way across the planet to keep as directly below the gaint as possible. The story concerns a girl who makesher way to the cathedrals to look for her lost brother, but stumbles upon much bigger things. The moving cathedrals make a stunning backdrop for pretty basic intrigue.

Reynolds is by no means running out of ideas, and Absolution Gap is filled with cool stuff and great moments. It’s just its attempt at providing closure which undermines it.

I’ve been very busy at work for some time, which is no wonder considering how much my role has changed over the past half a year. I’m pulling regular overtime – not a huge amount, but something that adds up to whole days quickly.
The thing is, potential days off to compensate for the overtime aren’t helping my stress level or lack of time with my family at all. I have now decided to schedule a day off, or half a day off, whenever I’m adding up my hours and notice that there are whole days in the reserve.

I used to think that I’ll save up the days and extend one of my regular vacations by a substantial amount, but it’s no good pushing all that overtime by half a year or so. Another thing that’s been holding me back is thinking that I can’t be away for one day. In my new role I’m pretty much in control of my own schedule, so I can decide well ahead of time that I’m absent on a given day.

This situation aggravated yesterday as I put in 14 hours in one day, but I’m glad it did. As I’ve said before, it is easy to get lost in the daily grind.

My wife asked me to draw a comic for a publication she’s working on. I haven’t done any illustration in ages, and I had to install my Wacom tablet to get started. The same night, I was frustrated over my ergonomics while working on my laptop – I couldn’t use a mouse too well from where I sat and the touchpad is frankly the devil’s tool. Well, at least in all the Acers I’ve used it is.

Today as I sat down to work on the laptop again, it dawned on me to hook the tablet into the laptop to take over the mouse’s functions. It’s worked very well! I have to move my hands only a bit to grap the pen, and it’s much faster and more precise than the touchpad. I can rest the tablet in my lap, with a separate keyboard on my knees – I can’t actually use the laptop on my lap, because it weighs a ton and heats up to very uncomfortable levels. It should be noted, too, that my tablet is one of the small ones, roughly A6 input size.
Still, I continue to dream about a Mac laptop – yes, even with their touchpads.

I spent several hours this morning looking for a good solution to sharing files (in this case, art) with my team members in the indie game development group I’m producing for. We haven’t yet taken it into use, but Folder Share seems to be just the ticket.

The service is still in beta. Microsoft acquired them in 2005 and the service now bears the Windows Live brand elements. It is completely free to use. To my surprise, it actually integrates automatically with my Google Desktop.
The interface is clean and unobtrusive, unlike every other similar service I checked out today. It’s completely hassle-free to setup, at least within my home network. It works precisely the way I wanted to: you work as normal, and it keeps all of your team members (and folders) up to date automatically.

The only thing I’m worried about is the web access to your own devices (not the workgroup’s), which is enabled by default, because it lets you see and access all the files you have not shared, too. It is simple to disable, though.

I picked up Alastair Reynold’s novel Century Rain at the airport. I quite like the author; I’m still going through his earlier effort, Absolution Gap. (And haven’t read the latest, Pushing Ice.)

Century Rain doesn’t take place in the same Revelation Space continuum as the body of his work does. It is much simpler in terms of plot complexity and characters than his space opera outings are.

The book was a good holiday read, easily digested. It didn’t always feel convincing, though: it seemed to lack a character or two and there was a bit of running on empty. The portrayal of Paris in the 1950s didn’t really hold, either. I felt the author was dropping French names to sound authoritative, without success. The future stuff held some crunchy bits, but overall I was a little underwhelmed. Not a bad effort, but I was expecting more. In the end, it feels like the author needed a break.

(Re-posted from my old game blog on January 16, 2006.)

I was away on a two-week vacation to Luxor, Egypt. It was my first actual paid vacation. I’m 27, so I guess I’m a bit late to that train, but it did feel good and did the recharging trick pretty well. It’s the middle of the winter and very dark in Finland. It was good to get some sun in and be really away from the day to day.

I did miss videogames out there. I played some Dweller on the phone, but nothing more. Once I got sick and had to stay in for a couple of days, in the very cold apartment (+14 centigrade), I was longing for some multiplayer Soul Calibur II or Dead Or Alive 3. Something relaxing to take the mind off the boredom and the cold. I read the books I had along before craving for videogames, though, so I guess I’m not that hopeless. But I sure hope I had brought some card games along! Like Mythos, Pokémon and INWO – I was quite a bit into the collectible card game thing back when they were new.

Our group was mostly students of Egyptology. We didn’t have a paid guide, but the trip was organized by a former guide. We got to know some interesting people over there and two weeks of free time is quite enough to get to know a small city like Luxor (150K inhabitants). Some culture shock did set in, in the end, but I got to like the atmosphere a lot before that.

When I came back, I played some Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, but that’s been about it. Too much quality TV occupying the free time right now: backlogs of Shield, Survivor and Desperate Housewives. Deadwood and Galactica open this week in Finland, too, so lots of tube time heading my way.

(Re-posted from my old game blog on January 16, 2006.)

Over my holiday I read a book by Nick Cave which I got for Christmas from a friend. I had seen it on another friend’s bookshelf, but never got around to loan it. Which is just as well, I hate returning (good) books to their owners. I read the Finnish edition, Kun aasintamma näki Herran enkelin.

Cave’s writing is very fluid. The story drags in mud and ugly (very ugly) things, but the writing rolls on independent of its subject matter. I wouldn’t recommend this to everybody, but it’s very much worth checking out. It feels good to read, even if the portrayed proceedings make you feel ill. It’s all about one setting and one overall feeling to it, which pull the novel together much in the way of some of my other favorites, like James Ellroy’s American Tabloid. It’s more about the way it’s told than the story itself.

(Re-posted from my old game blog on January 17th, 2006)

Last weekend we watched what was left of the last (fifth) season of the HBO show Six Feet Under. It was something like six episodes in a row.

It left me moved – in fact, I’m still actively thinking about it, three days later. Sure, the last episodes were very emotional and there was a lot of crying and saying goodbye to dear characters, but I think it had that effect on me because of how it related to my (and everyone else’s) life. When we were watching the various characters’ funerals, I was actually thinking about the funerals I had attended to and would probably still have to attend to.

You might think that a show about dealing with death would get old, but it doesn’t really. It takes time until you know the characters well enough to see things from their point of view, but when death starts calling on the ones you do care about, it just doesn’t cease to bewilder you. What do you do now? How are you supposed to feel? How do you go on? Was anything accomplished? Was it a good life? Was it a good death? How does everyone else feel?

I don’t think that avoiding to think about death is intentional with most people, but surely it would be healthy, psychologically, to realize – and accept – at least on an intellectual level, that yes, you and everyone you care about is going to die. And most likely, some of them sooner rather than later.

I think that should make one think. For many people, it must be much easier to entirely avoid thinking about death, but wouldn’t you lead (and leave) a better life if you didn’t have to avoid the reality of it? For me, I’ve thought about death over the past few years, and yes, this thinking has had an effect on some facets of my life. While hard, that is absolutely a good thing.

TV sure has come a damn long way since the days of He-Man. Even if Six Feet Under’s fourth season was largely stale.