Thursday, February 26, 2009

Reading..

It's getting later in the release cycle, so I'm spending more time in my "wait for people to complain" mode, allowing me to read more.

And happily, I found Lois McMaster Bujold. I don't think I've read anything by her before, but picked up The Curse of Chalion and The Hallowed Hunt and read them very happily over the last couple of days.

Now I guess I'll have to go out and buy some more books by her to see if I was just lucky, or whether she just is consistently good.

And judging by reviews on Amazon, it wasn't just me being lucky in the two I picked up.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Reading

Genesis.

No, not that book, the other one: Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins by Robert Hazen.

Usually, I tend to read about genetics or similar (that is, when I read anything serious to begin with, which tends to be less than 10% of the time). This one is obviously related, but about the processes that came before it all began. And it also gives more of a look into the issues faced by somebody trying to do experiments in the area.

Me likee. It's a pretty easy read, and I liked the mix of talking about the theories and talking about the life of a scientist and the not-always-so-successful experiments.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

25 things about me

1. I get bored really easily

Saturday, February 7, 2009

Getting older...


Tove was cleaning out some random stuff, and came upon this Japanese model that I had bought years ago and never built up. So she told me to build it (with the perhaps implied threat that if I didn't, she'd throw it out).

So I did. That's an Aerobase 1:160 scale model of a Fokker Dr 1 in photo-etched metal. And a US quarter, just for scale. It came as this flat-packed thin sheet of copper, and building it involved bending and connecting all these really tiny pieces of thin brass.

Building that thing, I remembered how much I like model building (which was why I had bought it in the first place, of course), but even more than that, I noticed how my eyes really can't focus close enough to see the small details. Fitting it all together involves threading infinitesimally small pieces of metal through barely larger holes in same.

I'm getting old.

And yes, it looks a bit rickety, and I clearly also lack the manual dexterity required to not bend thin copper a bit out of shape while building it. But maybe it's just an extra-realistic scale model of a Fokker that had had a few crash-landings?