Paul's Down-Home Page

A disappointment. When I found this, I was hoping that Swanwick had extended the punch and range of his short story “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur” to a novel. Wrong. Oh, don’t get me wrong; it’s an interesting story, full of time travel and a great deal (too much, in fact) detail about dinosaurs of various kinds. Swanwick tells it well, but the fact that his main character is the biggest narcissist since Narcissus makes it hard to swallow. Recommended only if you have a dinosaur fetish or are stuck in an airport.

Arlene got me a SPOT watch for Christmas, and I picked it up yesterday at CompUSA. Here are some of my impressions from a day’s use– but first, a primer on SPOT technology. Microsoft’s trying to build objects like watches, alarm clock, etc. that deliver useful information at the point of use. This watch is a good example: it can give me local weather information for wherever I am, along with other preprogrammed channels. You can send calendar events from Outlook to it, and MSN Messenger users can send messages to it.
The watch was $129, plus $59/year for the MSN Direct service. There are other, more expensive, watches from Fossil and Suunto, but they don’t add any functionality, just nicer cases and bands. The watch itself is relatively large, but it feels lighter than my Citizen Titanium even though it’s quite a bit bigger. Included in the box is a little inductive charging stand; you put the watch on it every few days to charge its battery. This is a little weird, since most of us don’t have to recharge watches, but I’ll just set up the charger next to my cellphone charger and start a volt farm.
The watch display is clear and bright, but there’s an included backlight for low-light situations. This is one of the things I missed most on my previous watch; since it was unlit, it was impossible to tell the time in a darkened area. There are five buttons: two small ones on the left side for activating various modes, and two small ones and a large one on the right side.
The service itself works very well. The watch has multiple “channels”: one for the time, one for news, one for stock information, and so on. You go to the MSN Direct website to customize which channels your individual watch gets; this includes telling MSN where you live so that you can get local weather information, You can also specify a list of cities (in the US and worldwide) to get weather information for them. After I activated the watch, it only took an hour or so to get a full load of channels. When the watch is on the “glance” channel, it sequences through content from all the channels you get, including stocks, headlines, and weather. A travel feature allows you to specify where you’re going to be, and when; this is required so that your personal information (like IMs and calendar events) can be broadcast only in the area where you are. There are still some things I have to check out, like whether I can send calendar events from more than one Outlook profile and whether there’s any way to develop my own custom channels. Overall, though, it’s a neat gadget, and I’m excited about its future potential and about its current capability.

I accidentally discovered Lee Child when I bought Echo Burning at Sam’s, and since then I’ve been a big fan. Without Fail is another of Child’s Jack Reacher mysteries. Reacher is much like Robert Parker’s Hawk: a man of few words, great physical power, and a supremely calm and confident demeanor. In this installment, Reacher is hired to help the Secret Service figure out how to protect the Vice President-elect after he starts getting death threats. I can’t say much about the plot lest I spoil it; one thing I can say is that I don’t think the villians would have had the necessary technical skills to pull off their crimes in the manner Child depicts. Apart from that, though, this is a quick read– I powered through it on the flight between Cincinatti and Seattle and still had time for a (bad) dinner and a (good, but short) nap. Recommended.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of military history, and when I saw this book I decided to give it a try. I’m really glad I did. As a Marine, I was familiar with the outline of what happened on Wake in December 1941, but I had no idea how tenacious and brave the defenders were, what kind of odds they faced, or what kind of obstacles they had to overcome. Sloan’s account is riveting; unlike Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers, there’s more emphasis on the actual battle than on the personalities involved. Having said that, it’s clear that Sloan spent a great deal of time interviewing survivors, because the book’s liberally sprinkled with quotes and anecdotes that help drive home just how bravely the Marines, sailors, and civilians (!) who were on Wake fought. Stirring and highly recommended.