a-cubed.info

I’ve known Charlie Stross since about 1990. Steve Glover introduced us. When I first met him, I think he’d had one short story published in Interzone. He was struggling to become a fiction writer. A decade later and he’d made it into print numerous times in the major SF magazines (particularly Asimov’s) and finally got a book contract. I kept meaning to read some of his stuff, which we chatted about when we met at cons and elsewhere. When I went up to Edinburgh for the Computer Law World Conference last September, I met up with Charlie and his spouse Feorag. When I mentioned to Charlie that I really did intend to read some of his stuff real soon now (he’d sent me a copy of Accelerando in electronic form and asked me to see if I could spot any techno-gotchas, but I hadn’t had time) he very kindly supplied me with a full set of his books. I raced through them before Christmas and was mostly very impressed. His most recent SF (he also publishes a pseudo-fantasy series and a horror-detective series with different publishers) was Glasshouse, set in the same universe as Accelerando, which suffered as a novel from being a fix up of nine short stories in three groups of three. When it appeared on the short list for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel, I figured I’d actually buy a copy of one of his books, and I ordered a copy from Amazon. I just read it. Read on for a review.

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The internet connection at the Guest House has been a bit flaky since I got here. It seems to have four states:

1. Working
2. Occasionally failures to resolve DNS queries or connect, defeated by reloading in a web browser and ignorable for most other net work. Oddly, once a connection is created it generally continues to run if it’s a dynamic keep-alive connection. Multiple connections sometimes lead to missing graphics or, worse, non-loading of CSS files for web pages.
3. Mostly down. If I try hard I can sometimes get a web page to load by trying 20 or so “reloads”. Mail comes in when an IMAP connection establishes for a little while. Outgoing mail is very awkward and often doesn’t get out for hours or until it comes back up.
4. Completely down.

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Yet again an ambulance just used their siren/voice alarm at 12:45am. I’ve mentioned this annoyance in Japan before. In the UK it’s illegal to use your car horn after 11pm and before 7am. I’m fairly sure it’s either illegal, or at least severely frowned upon, to use sirens after 11pm, and certainly after midnight they’re rare. In Japan, the ambulance drivers in particular seem to be all like Bill Cosby in Mother, Jugs and Speed. This one used their sirens and the recorded voice that (I assume – I can’t hear well enough even to try and translate) tells people to get out of the way, then it stopped. About thirty second later it started up again. Since I’m sitting at the computer I pulled up the blind and watched them drive off quite slowly and with absolutely no other vehicular traffic in sight. They then proceeded down the “road” along next to the canalised river bed. It’s fairly narrow but it’s got good visibility and very few vehicles, mostly pedestrians. I’m sure that the ordinary lights would be enough to get people out of the way, and if people were in the way THEN they could have switched the siren/voice on. But, no, if they’re moving and on a call they have the noise going.

At least now the elections are over the loudspeaker vans have gone. There’s still a delivery van that beeps everywhere it goes, though. Makes me long for the once a week (alternating garbage and recycling) collection vans at 7:30am at home.
Japan has a serious problem with noise spam (spaudium?) .

After a Nippon 2007 meeting today at the site in Yokohama, the staff attending split up into smaller groups and went to check out various restaurants. There are a lot of different restaurants in the Queens Square and Landmark Tower Malls near the Pacifico Yokohama conference centre. They’re not badly priced, either. Certainly I recommend the short walk across to the Queens Square (you go through that to get to the Landmark Tower Mall, about ten to fifteen minutes walk – longer for slowcoaches) rather than eating in the Intercontinental (small portions and extortionate prices).

So, along with Inoue Hiroaki-san, Inoue Tamie-san, Trevor Knudsen (what name for a Westerner living in Japan, try getting Japanese people to pronounce it from the written form), Rodrigo Juri and a couple of the other Japanese, we went in search of something that would fit me (picky beggar, mostly vegetarian) and Rodrigo (on a tight budget). Tamie-san suggested we try an okonomiyaki place (she remembered there was at least one in the Landmark Tower Mall).We went to the Yokohama Landmark Plaza Botejyu (okonomiyaki is food from the Osaka region and this is a chain that started in Osaka).

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The UK ID Card and Database

There are many objectionable aspects to the UK government’s ID Cards bill. Some of them are philosophical and fundamental, some are political and some are practical. Both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties in the UK have policy commitments against the ID card policy and have stated that if they come to power after the next general election (due by mid-2009 at the latest) that they will repeal the act and scrap the cards and the underlying database. Here are some of the arguments against the UK ID card system and database:

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Wired had a fun short article this month. The best quotes preceeding an apocalypse.

As a university lecturer, I get asked by quite a few students to act as a personal referee for them in applying for jobs, further study etc. It goes with the territory and I’m generally happy to do it. What I’m less happy with is the standard of the people asking for references. I’m getting really tired of receiving a reference request with questions like “What are they like dealing with co-workers?”; “How is their time-keeping?”; “Would you re-employ them (if company policy allows)?”. That is, references which assume that the referand was employed. Now, when the reference is for something like a temp agency, that’s a little more understandable, but when I get these things from regular graduate employers, it really ticks me off. I got another one like this today. I try to be polite, since I don’t want to mess up my students’ chances of getting a job, but I do get a little short in my notes pointing out that I could fill in the form, but it would consist of lots of N/As and would they like to send me an appropriate form or would they like a free-form reference as a letter.

As many of you know, I’m mostly vegetarian. This is fairly hard to do in Japan. One of the delegates I met at the Ethicomp conference recently, who was just finishing a five month stint in Japan, had been a strict (moral) vegetarian when he arrived and had recently been told by his doctor that he had to start eating meat because his health had suffered so badly. Of course, he was eating out in traditional Japanese restaurants much of the time. The fare in these places is very very meat-heavy. Typically variants of yakitori (chicken kebabs mostly) and lots of other dishes with meat. The best you can do for non-meat dishes are green salads (very over-dressed for my taste) and a barbecue-it-yourself selection of vegetables. The barbecue-it-yourself selection gets very boring after a few tries, particularly if (like me) you don’t like the vinegar-based dressing that comes with the veggies. Luckily for me, I’m OK with chicken meat. I do specify chicken meat there, because it would appear that the Japanese eat every part of a chicken except the feathers: chicken skin (both on the meat and separately); chicken entrails; deep-fried chicken tendon; chicken feet (not many witches in Japan because the peasants eat up the feet); processed chicken bone (it’s processed in some way to soften it up). I’ve not seen it, but I’ve been told that some places even serve “chicken nose”.

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While I’m in Japan, I’ve been ordering books from Amazon.co.jp. They do have an English language site, although it doesn’t cover all of the elements, which can be a bit annoying. I had to get one of the caretakers here at the Guest House to help me decipher the page to report a problem with an external seller order (Amazon were hassling me for feedback and it hadn’t arrived – they hadn’t shipped it yet nor updated the shipping estimate on Amazon’s site – they got modest feedback for that when it did arrive).

It did strike me that this is now a global marketplace for small businesses when I got a book today. I ordered it on Amazon.co.jp from an outfit called “UK Books and Music” (with web address Paperbackshop.co.uk) and it arrived posted from an address in Illinois in the US.

I’m really glad there is the Akismet spam filter for Word Press. So far, it’s caught almost 1500 spam comment to this blog, and not one seems to have been a legitimate comment. It’s catching better than 99% of the spam as well. I only have to manually mark a couple a week as spam. Of course, I’m not getting many comments, so maybe there’d be more false positives if there were more to make the mistake on.