Sunday, January 11, 2009
posted 7:09pm
"The Engines of God"
Well this weekend I finished up The Engines of God, a great book written by Jack McDevitt.
In it, the Earth is over populated, weather is erratic, and the very salvation for the
human race is finding another planet to inhabit. Quraqua has been selected, but it’s going
to take 60 years to terraform, and a team of scientists are exploring the long abandoned
ruins of a previous civilization trying to unlock a dead language, while asking themselves
why the Monument-Makers carved the strange city of “Oz” into the moon orbiting this world.
The book is a classic mystery that asks, who are the Monument-Makers, why did they build so many Monuments across the galaxy, and why did they die? It’s told through the eyes of Priscilla “Hutch” Hutchins, a pilot for the World Academy For Science And Technology that flies the scientists to the archaeological sites as they begin to unravel the mystery behind the Monument-Makers.
The book is also filled with a lot of interesting characters like Richard Wald, Henry Jaconi, Melanie Truscott, Maggie Tufu, Janet Allegri, George Hackett, and Frank Carson; and you begin to get a pretty good idea of who these people are, through not only their interaction, but with diary entries, excerpts from books they would go on to write, or archived library entries from the future. It a great form of storytelling that gives you the bigger picture of who these people are, and the work they’re doing.
I found this to be a great read that has mystery, action, loss, and suspense. McDevitt weaves a tale that takes place over a vast amount of space and time, spanning the galaxy, with civilizations rising and falling only to do it again. He’s a great author, with a number of novels under his belt, and I look forward to reading another one.
- D
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
posted 12:32pm
"Happy New Year"
I hope everybody’s New Year started off well, and they all seem to start with some sort
of resolution; mine this year is to focus my energy and get things done. Well, the
converting of the website, and updating of the navigation bar, so it all works with
Microsoft’s I.E. and Mozilla’s Firefox has been completed. The blog had to be reworked,
along with the Video cover page, Numerology report, Sound Wav pages, and some of the
Interactive Fiction pages. Also, all the broadband videos had to be re-encoded to work
properly with Firefox. Good thing about the video conversion is, they’re all optimized for
their pages and I saved a gigabyte of storage, plus they stream faster.
Now that the conversion is behind me I’d like to crank out the second release of Across The Stars. I’m pretty close to finishing it up, and if I could get one more gamma tester I could bust out the site during the few days it would be in testing. So hopefully by the end of the month this project will be done and the archive will have another game to host.
On top of all of that, I’d like to write a review for Fallout 3, and maybe a few other games I picked up after Christmas. They all would make nice additions to the reviews page, and even if it takes a bit, I have to make some time to do it.
All of this hasn’t left me a lot of time for reading, which really sucks. I keep saying that once I’m done I won’t have to do it again and I can get back to some of the finer things in life. I know that I’m right, and all of this will get done, it just can’t get done fast enough.
But, at least we seem to be getting off on the right foot.
- D
Now that the conversion is behind me I’d like to crank out the second release of Across The Stars. I’m pretty close to finishing it up, and if I could get one more gamma tester I could bust out the site during the few days it would be in testing. So hopefully by the end of the month this project will be done and the archive will have another game to host.
On top of all of that, I’d like to write a review for Fallout 3, and maybe a few other games I picked up after Christmas. They all would make nice additions to the reviews page, and even if it takes a bit, I have to make some time to do it.
All of this hasn’t left me a lot of time for reading, which really sucks. I keep saying that once I’m done I won’t have to do it again and I can get back to some of the finer things in life. I know that I’m right, and all of this will get done, it just can’t get done fast enough.
But, at least we seem to be getting off on the right foot.
- D