Spies Moves

However, I'm still having trouble with the emacs on the new system. It doesn't seem to like the mode hook 'turn-on-auto-fill (also known as 'auto-fill-mode), and whenever I turn it on and hit the spacebar after I've typed a paragraph longer than a line, emacs complains that it "can't find file 'kinsoku'", whatever the heck that means. It's really quite annoying; if anyone out there has seen this before and knows how to fix it, I'd really appreciate some advice.

By the way, if you have any links to my Web pages which directly reference the site surfin.spies.com, you should now change it to www.spies.com, to be safe.

And the new machine sure is fast!

I went jogging each day from Sunday through Wednesday, the longest stretch of consecutive-days' jogging I've yet done. Each day definitely was a little harder than the day before, and my legs - especially my shins - were a little more sore. So I finally took today off. But I feel pretty happy with the accomplishment and hope to continue the trend. I have been juggling around my weight lifting to accommodate this, since right now I want to focus more on aerobic workouts than weight training. So I've cut way back on the leg exercises (which are the hardest and most time-consuming anyway), and divided up the upper-body exercises.

I did have a nice experience on one jogging outing; shortly after I stopped to catch my breath, I saw a flock of about 12 birds, all of them a tree-leaf green and about the size of a pigeon, flying overhead among several trees I was walking beneath. I don't know enough about birds to know what they were, but they sure were pretty. They were also chirping away like mad. Definitely worth the exercise, to see that.

Last weekend I read Lois McMaster Bujold's novel Falling Free, which takes place in the universe of her Miles Vorkosigan series, but about 200 years earlier, and is almost entirely disconnected from the Miles books.

An interstellar corporation has genetically engineered 100 humans to have two extra arms in place of their legs, and to better survive the conditions of zero gravity, figuring that they'll be the ideal engineers in space. Engineer Leo Graf arrives on their space station to train the first batch of the "Quaddies", who are in their early 20s. While there, he discovers that the Quaddies are often treated like lab animals without many human rights. And then, the announcement that artificial gravity generation has been invented endangers the future of the Quaddies altogether.

Falling Free is about Graf and the Quaddies fighting to save the subspecies, and it's Bujold's usual exiting adventure story. However, it's a pretty sketchy work, as it doesn't really deal with issues like what it means to be this sort of person and to really look forward to - or experience - a life in an independent society. The book ends rather abruptly and it seems like there's an awful lot of story left to tell to make the novel really satisfying. It's a quick read, but it's far from Bujold's best book.

Yesterday I ordered a USB PCI card for my Macintosh (I have one of the last pre-USB Macs), and a scanner to go along with it. I'm looking forward to scanning a few older photos for this journal, including some photos from my trip out here last summer. I also want to scan some comic books so I can put them up for sale on eBay, since hits to my comics for sale page has dwindled down to nearly nothing.

The hardware was supposed to arrive today, but I was frustrated to fail to see it show up. Grr. Well, hopefully it will arrive tomorrow and I can play with it over the weekend.

A large crop of comics came out yesterday. Here's the scoop on some of them:

• Astro City #20, by Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson, Willie Blyberg, and Alex Ross (Homage): The conclusion to the Steeljack storyline at last. This lengthy story involves a career super-crook who gets out of prison and tries to go straight, but gets dragged in to investigating the murders of a number of other small-time crooks. It had some good stuff early in the arc with the lives of these off-beat villains, but the overall arc was disappointing, with the expected catharsis for Steeljack, but a less-than-grand revelation of what was going on. (I found the true villain's motivations rather hard to swallow.)

• Avengers #23, by Kurt Busiek, George Perez, and Al Vey (Marvel): One of the most realistic hero-vs.-hero confrontations in superhero comics. Wonder Man was a villain who died and became a hero, while The Vision is an android whose mind was based on Wonder Man's brain patterns. The Vision married The Scarlet Witch, but they broke up during a period after he'd been dismantled and his mind wiped clean. Then she got involved with Wonder Man. Got that?

  Well, this story involves The Vision's insecurity over being an artificial copy of a real human, and Wonder Man's attitude towards his brother based on his own less-than-lily-white past. It's mostly talking, not fighting, and Busiek expertly weaves these two characters' backgrounds as originally told by many diverse authors together into a powerful whole. It's really a remarkable piece of storytelling, and I look forward to see where it all goes from here.

• Earth X #9, by Jim Krueger, Alex Ross, John Paul Leon, and Bill Reinhold (Marvel): The Ross-conceived future of the Marvel Universe limps on, revealing at last the driving forces behind the peculiar future world portrayed here. The script is almost entirely narrative and gets tiresome very quickly. Leon has some real talent as a penciller, but a lot of it is hidden beneath the dark and dreary style he affects. I've heard they're already planning a sequel to this series, and I for one plan to pass on it.

• Flashpoint #2, by Pat McGreal and Norm Breyfogle (DC): I raved about the first issue of this series last month, and this issue is only slightly less rewarding, moving the story forward, but not giving many clues as to where it's going. But, hopefully there will be a big, exciting finish next month, because this is a good one.

• X-Men: The Hidden Years #2, by John Byrne and Tom Palmer (Marvel): Boy, Byrne sure does prefer to move stories along oh-so-slowly these days. This isn't a bad story, but I do wish he'd pick up the pace. The X-Men are still in the Savage Land, slowly moving towards their destination. That's about it.