How 'bout that. Amazon has posted its top 50 books for 2003, and I just finished reading #3 last weekend.

We had quite the multimedia weekend.

In print, I not only finished Jarhead by Anthony Swofford, but also Kim by Rudyard Kipling. On the nightstand now is Ring of Truth by Nancy Pickard.

On what NTK would call the "Red Book audio" front, I went to Half Price Books to get a Louis L'Amour paperback to put in a geocache (it's a long story; follow the links if you're really that interested) and came away with two CDs from the clearance rack. I remember hearing Amanda Marshall's Birmingham on the radio when it first came out, and I'm surprised and happy to say that it's not the strongest track on her first, self-titled album. I also got The Promise by T'Pau—I've only listened to it once, and so far I think it's not quite as strong as their first album, but I think it will grow on me.

At the other end of the 5" polycarbonate disc spectrum, we rented Jungle Book 2 (if it's possible for a performance by animated characters to be phoned in, this was it—but our daughter enjoyed it, which is really all that matters), Identity (I actually figured out the twist about a minute and a half before they revealed it, which was faster than for other movies, but on the other hand, like The Crying Game, the twist wasn't the whole story), and The Matrix Reloaded (which my wife claims to have enjoyed, at least until she fell asleep; she hasn't seen the first one, and apparently my thirty second synopsis wasn't good enough to keep her from still being confused).

Not much in the way of notable or creative costumes among the trick-or-treaters that came to our door last night. Then again, maybe it's just that my memory is failing.

I finished reading Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles by Anthony Swofford this morning. I've been reading a lot about the military lately—Breakout: The Chosin Reservoir Campaign by Martin Russ and Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden come to mind—but this account stands out for its, well, humanity. Other chronicles portray soldiers as somewhat no-nonsense; they don't necessarily like the job they're doing but they do it because it's their job to do it. Jarhead shows us that it's possible to intensely hate the service and intensely love it at the same time.

Here's an interesting discussion. Apparently, Mac OS X 10.3 defragments files as it reads them. (That's a simplistic synopsis, but there's only so much you can put in a hyperlink.)

For my part, I'm inspired to put ASCII graphics and sound effects in my source comments.

Hard to believe nothing worth blogging happened yesterday. It must be true, though; not only did I not blog anything, but I frankly can't remember much of yesterday at all.

Note that I haven't mentioned anything that happened today, either. That's okay; the interesting stuff comes later tonight.

Drive-by linking: The Roasterie

This seems like a big omission: the URL class in JDK 1.3 allows you to get the various pieces of a URL, but not to set them individually. So, if you want to add a query parameter to a URL, you have to do it manually, which means checking for existing parameters. Maybe I'm just missing something.

In case you didn't notice, I'm starting to rework the layout for my blog. Props to Jason Kottke for providing the inspiration.

I've been having all kinds of problems with my ISP lately. This time, DNS names aren't resolving, as if they've misconfigured a router and big chunks of the backbone are no longer accessable. Unfortunately, my upstream DNS servers are in one of those chunks, so I couldn't even get to the ISP's support website or Google.

("So, how are you blogging this now?" I hear you ask. I phoned a coworker in the Washington DC area, got the IP addresses for some DNS servers from him, and hacked them into my local DNS server config.)

("So, why aren't you using your ISP's DNS servers?" Full of questions today, aren't you? :-) I'd like to, but nowhere on their website do they give the IP addresses for those. I can't pick them up from the DHCP lease, because I've got a firewall between my computer and the ISP, and it has the DHCP lease.)

Add to this the fact that the activity lights on my cable modem are going nuts even when the firewall is powered down, and I'm starting to think that I need to start shopping for a new ISP.

8-0, baby!

I'm still reading Kim, but I worked in two other books this week. One was the calculus primer; the other is Villa Incognito by Tom Robbins. He's something of a guilty pleasure for me—I rarely end up caring much about the characters, but the prose is a hell of a lot of fun to read.

Mmm. Chinese food.

Drive-by linking: Bay View Farm

The new refrigerator just arrived. The compressor went out on the old one, and the cost to repair was going to be almost as much as a whole new fridge.

What's the first thing that comes to mind when I tell you that the new fridge has the freezer on the bottom? Everyone—and I mean that literally—so far has said, "My grandmother used to have one like that." I didn't realize our refrigerator was retro. :-)

Must be like falling off of a bicycle: you never really forget how. This still makes sense.

I picked up a primer on calculus at the library yesterday, thinking I needed to brush up on it before tackling differential equations, which I figured I needed to relearn before tackling heat transfer (specifically, the design of counterflow heat exchangers). Maybe I don't have to worry about that after all.

Now reading: Kim by Rudyard Kipling. Actually, I'm rereading it; it was originally given to me by a friend in college.

The obsession du jour is homebrewing. I just read—well, skimmed—through The Home Brewer's Companion by Charlie Papazian; it feels like it's more for people who already know what they're doing. (Actually, I'm not that lost, since (a) I have a degree in chemical engineering and (b) I like to drink beer.) I've also been reading a lot online, as well as browsing through the web sites for mail-order suppliers. Next, I think, is a visit to the nearby homebrew shop.

I finished reading Pattern Recognition tonight. I have roughly the same feeling I had after reading his first three novels—something akin to "What just happened?"

Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive all followed the same pattern, to my experience. Gibson starts with a great hook, spins it out using several seemingly-unrelated plotlines and characters, weaving them together as the story progresses. Then, about three-quarters of the way through the book, it's as if he realizes that he's forgotten where he was going and why, rushes to the conclusion with the literary equivalent (albeit much more verbosely, and far more interesting to read) of "yadda yadda yadda", but still only delivers 95%, leaving the reader to fill in the rest. I freely admit to a tendency to inhale fiction—I'll suddenly notice a character, or an object, and have to back up several pages to see where it was introduced. With Gibson, though, it's consistent in how and when in the book it happens. Either his writing sucks me in, or he elides big chunks of it, or, I suspect, both.

I thought Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties were tighter, and I figured maybe Gibson had reached a different stage in his writing style. Pattern Recognition feels like a step backwards. There's only one overt plotline, but at the end I had the same feeling that I was lacking closure.

On the positive side, I learned about Curtas.

Drive-by linking: Ben Vollmayr-Lee

We have a goldfish, a red & white ryukin our daughter named Dennis. He's been having problems swimming lately, and today we found him floating on his back, not moving. When I went to fish him out (if you pardon the expression) with the net, he woke up and began swimming around again.

So I did some research, and have decided that he has a swim bladder problem. And how do you cure an ornamental goldfish with a swim bladder problem?

Frozen peas.