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.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I recently finished off Tolkien's, The Two Towers a week or so ago and decided to once again take a small genre break in between books and read something different. Rummaging through some boxes in the garage I came across the book entitled, Blade Runner. Blade Runner was a 1982 movie based on Philip K. Dick's, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

According to Dick's web site the plot summary goes like this,

By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep... They even built humans.

Emigrees to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in.

Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results.

The story paints a bleak future in a post-apocalyptic society which raises questions about humanity and feelings of empathy, love and loneliness. For the main character, Rick Deckard, a moral dilemma arises when he realizes that the differences between humans and androids are not as clear cut as he once believed.

I finished the book around 1:45 a.m. this morning and went to bed with it on my mind and awoke this morning still contemplating different aspects of its message. It is a thought provoking book if not a little dark and disturbing.

Back to Return of the King; let's hunt some orc.