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| Posted: 13 Jun 2009 09:56 PM PDT  If you know me, you know I’m a huge Brandon Sanderson fan. Ok, if you know me, you probably don’t know that. I feel bad for anyone who tries to keep track of what books I read and my opinions of them. That’s why I don’t talk about books in the absence of the kind of implicit trust you’d need to hand someone your AmEx card. But the Internet is different so I get a white card for discussing it here: Mary: “Omg, did you read My Sister’s Keeper?” Jamie: There is no graceful way to extradite myself from this situation. “No, how was it?” Mary: “Oh, it’s really good. They’re making it into a movie.” Jamie: “Oh, cool.” Mary: “It has Alec Baldwin so you know it’s gonna be good. Why is your face all scrunchy?” Jamie: “It takes a lot of effort to not judge you.” In any event, I’m a huge Brandon Sanderson fan. I bought a hardcover copy of Elantris, which inexplicably vanished during a cleaning binge. I then bought a paperback Elantris and then a signed copy as a birthday present to myself. I own the Mistborn/Final Empire trilogy, including a signed third volume and a paperback third volume. I also own Warbreaker and now the only question is if I want to buy a numbered, signed copy. I have never been disappointed with Brandon Sanderson. He’s the writer whose been unctioned to finish the Wheel of Time series. There is simply no analogy I can draw that captures the immense honor and Herculean difficulty of that task. It would be like being the painter to finish The Athenaeum, if The Athenaeum depicted the Last Supper instead of George Washington. And if it wasn’t painted by Stuart but by Michelangelo in fresco of a Frank Lloyd Wright building applianced by Faberge. So, in an effort to build up his reputation as a class-A writer, which he is, somehow he published Warbreaker while finishing A Memory of Light. Now he has two stand-alone epics and one epic trilogy, in addition to a children’s series. This is particularly interesting, since you can read a draft of Warbreaker for free, on Mr. Sanderson’s website. I could gush for a while, and discuss the absolute imperative of reading Elantris if you have ever, in your life, used your imagination. However, I just wanted to help spread the word, since I have a vested interest to make sure Mr. Sanderson keeps producing fantastic novels for me to read. When it’s over, which might take a long time, I’ll post a review of it here. If you’re in a hurry to read a review, check the reviews for Mr. Sanderson’s The Way of Kings. If I remember the story correctly, the publisher sent out some mixed signals about whether or not this book was in the pipeline, and Amazon picked it up. Some very devoted fans noticed and that’s the result. |
| Posted: 13 Jun 2009 07:49 PM PDT Amazingly, and against my every expectation, my upgrade from Wordpress 2.7.1 to Wordpress 2.8 went smoothly. My theme works, and my database is uncorrupted. I was a little suspicious because my WP instance has this . . . fun feature . . . where it can’t handle plugin upgrades automatically. Again, you wordpress.com users don’t know what you’re missing. However, things went swimingly. I can’t speak to the speed increases or super-widget handling yet, but I don’t distrust them. In other words, I became very frustrated when I learned MediaWiki’s extension for WYSIWYG editing is WYSIWYG in any color you like, so long as you like black. Right now, some wiki tweak is pulling his hair out and screaming “You’re doing it wrong!” Wiki software is supposed to represent the simplest database that can possibly work . . . ergo why we shouldn’t incorporate very useful features. (I’m making light of this. I know the dangers of code bloat and I don’t want Mediawiki to turn into, say, Microsoft Access. However no one was hurt by making something run more like HyperCard.) But darnitall, I’ve been using color to organize my writing notes since I got my first 64-pack of Crayolas. So I want it. I binged and tried to get twiki, fosswiki, and moinmoin running on my host. No luck. Each has a unique set of reasons why I’m not using it. Long story short: I could install Mediawiki. I’ll make do. So I’m stuck doing <span style:color=> for every little but I want to highlight. No, scratch that, Mediawiki only recogizes that syntax every other time (I don’t know why). So I’m using <font color=> instead. I don’t care if it’s deprecated, it’s just proof that the W3C needs more English majors. >> “Font is too vague. We’re going to mark it deprecated.” << “Um, what do I do if I want to change my font?” >> “Simple. Use spans, classes, divs, and cascading sheets.” But I march on with my experiment . . . maybe. There is one more option: using Wordpress itself with the Wordpress Wiki plugin. You wordpress.com users don’t know what you’re missing But that’s a big maybe. |
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