Well Blow Me Down
Finished the class yesterday at work, and was glad to be done with it. It was an okay class - although the first one was much better - but I was just exhausted after a week of class, and two classes in a month. Whew! Went back to my office and put it back together, since it had been disassembled so maintenance (or whoever) could mess around with my desk configuration. I have more useable desk surface now, which is what I wanted.
In the evening I went to a nearby coffee house ("Orchard Valley Coffee") to check it out. It's actually less than a mile away, and is therefore walkable. Unfortunately, I wasn't too impressed; the coffee was kind of watery (not what I expect from a caffe mocha), and the place is a huge room with sparsely-distributed tables and chairs - note exactly the cozy atmosphere I've come to expect from such places. So I may try it again just to be sure, but more likely I'll seek out a better venue.
Anyway, last night I also finished Vernor Vinge's new novel, A Deepness in the Sky. As I've said, it's not as good as A Fire Upon the Deep; basically, Vinge is doing space opera sort of story within the confines of slower-than-light space travel, and the setup places specific limits on the technology his characters can work with and his civilizations can achieve. There are some neat things in it, and his writing continues to get more sophisticated in the plotting and characterizations, but it lacks the "gosh-wow" factor of Fire or of Marooned in Realtime.
Also, the civilization which produces the nominal "villains" in the story is not much more than a plot device, and it and its main representatives are fairly flat. This sort of approach worked in Fire where the villains tended to be beyond our heroes' comprehension (turning it into a far-future horror story in some ways), but is not so successful here. I think Vinge did genuinely try to make the heavies complex characters, but ultimately I don't think he pulled it off, which drags the book down a bit.
I can, however, see that the book might appeal to some people more than to me. There's some interesting social and political stuff in here, which is something of a departure for Vinge. But overall I'd say I was disappointed in the book.
Well, Vinge has still written two of my favorite books, and how many authors can truly say that? (Okay, H. Beam Piper and George R. R. Martin, that's how many!)
Traffic lights were working erratically in the area; sometimes they were doing the blinky thing, and sometimes they were entirely dark. Mostly they were working okay, but it still played havoc with the traffic patterns. At one intersection I passed was the remnants of a really bad two-car collision. Yuck!
It calmed down later in the afternoon, though.
My main errand for the day was to find a new bicycle, but I didn't have much success and quickly got sidetracked anyway. The two closest bike shops to here were about 95% mountain bikes, and I want to get a road bike (aka a "racing bike", although I want a low-end thing that would really be actually used for serious racing). I will probably have to head to bigger bike stores in larger cities to find what I want.
On the plus side, I hit a couple of nearby used book stores, bought some eye stuff (saline solution, etc.), and discovered that there's a well-hidden Home Depot very close to here (you wouldn't think something that large could be 'well-hidden", but...).
Kept cleaning up my desk, paying some bills and balancing my checkbook. Also received my paycheck stub from yesterday; my direct deposit request went through, faster than I'd expected. Overall, the study is getting quite useable, and most of the crap is off the floor.
Tonight I went to dinner with Julie and Bill, to a pretty good middle eastern place up in Mountain View, and stuffed myself. I also unloaded a whole bunch of empty boxes on a friend of their who is moving herself soon. She says my boxes are some of the better ones she's gotten hold of, which makes sense since they're all good book boxes, and she's another fan.
Also got to show off my nearly-unpacked apartment to Bill and Julie; Bill had been here before, but Julie hadn't. And the cats were fairly friendly to them, as well, although the cats are a bit reticent about letting themselves be petted. But they can be nominally social when they want to be.
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