Roast Mutton
I am sure this is a common lament of most bloggers, however, I will say it as well; I wish I had more time to blog.
It has been an interesting last couple of weeks. The hard drive in my notebook died. In its last moments the drive head made several vain read attempts in what sounded like a minature trap machine expelling clay pigeons into the digital beyond. Shortly after that I witnessed my drive unmount its numerous partitions and display a stream of I/O errors in response to any keyboard input. Nice. A trip to eBay, $100 debited from my bank account and a week later I had a new 40GB drive with Linux installed. Back in business.
I turned 37. Enough said.
I finished reading Carl Sagan's, Contact. I personally do not subscribe to Sagan's religious views, however, it was a good read with lots of depth to it. I also finished reading Steven Levy's Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government--Saving Privacy in the Digital Age. It was a fascinating read about the beginnings of encryption and how each cryptological advance was met with increasing legislative and judicial resistance from the National Security Agency (NSA). I started and failed to finish Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. I made it to page 184 and simply lost interest. The book itself is over 1000 pages in total and combines three intertwined stories. It comes highly recommended, however, I am going to have another go at it later as I am currently not motivated.
I was looking for something fun to read and paid a visit to the library. I picked up a copy of Tolkien's, The Annotated Hobbit. As I thumbed through the pages I reflected that the last time I had read it was in grade 10 during Christmas break in Regina, Saskatchewan. Hard to believe that was over twenty years ago.
