This book is the third in the third in the Robot mystery series, and is once again set on a Spacer world. This one was written 30 years after the first two, and Asimov’s style has noticeably changed between the 1950s and 1980s. The book starts off slowly, with a lecturing tone which I found…
Month: May 2008
Coke cans are a weird shape in Japan
I give you the can bottle, which is clearly the best shape for a coke can, ever. Update: I noticed the image was broken on this post, so I found another.
Shibuya, Tokyo
Panos (a dude I work with) and I got to Tokyo ok last night. The flight left SFO at about 1pm and got into Narita airport at about 4pm. By the time we’d done immigration and collected our bags we only had about a ten minute wait for the limousine bus to the hotel. We’re…
Tokyo tomorrow
Tomorrow I’m jumping on a JAL flight to Tokyo. I will be in Tokyo for a week, mostly for work meetings. I’m hoping to fit some sightseeing in on the weekend. Let me know if you have any recommendations.
Naked Sun
Bill Clarke was kind enough to lend me a compendium of Asimov that contained the next book in the series I’m reading at the moment. I’ve had to skip over some of the earlier collections of robot short stories, because they’re quite hard to find. Specifically, I haven’t been able to find anyone with a…
Caves of Steel
Caves of Steel is interesting because it is a murder mystery set in the future, which at the time this book was written was a novel concept. It also presents an interesting almost-communist view of the future, where individual liberties are surrendered one by one in order to improve economic efficiency in order to support…
I, Robot
The 1950s must have been a great time to be a science fiction author. WW2 was finally over, and seemingly massively stupid ideas like mutually assured destruction, nuclear rifles so powerful that they were as much a danger to those firing them as those who were on the receiving end, and Brylcreem were all the…
Bill The Galactic Hero
This book is an interesting read, but for unusual reasons. Its as if Harrison sets out to write a terrible book, and learns new techniques to achieve this terrible along the way. An example of his mastery of the art: A hundred bucks a month was good money, though, and Bill saved every bit of…
Estimating the progress of queries on MySQL
I’ve been doing a lot of batch updates on one of my databases at home recently. show processlist says something like this: mysql> show processlist; +——-+——+—————+————–+———+——-+———-+——————————————+ | Id | User | Host | db | Command | Time | State | Info | +——-+——+—————+————–+———+——-+———-+——————————————| | 18354 | root | maui:37403 | smtp_servers | Query |…
The Complete Hammer’s Slammers Volume 2
This book is as good as The first volume. This book comes highly recommended. Stories included: At Any Price Counting the Cost Rolling Hot The Warrior The Day of Glory [isbn: 1892389738]