Bookshelf:

Recently Read:

• Wil McCarthy, The Collapsium

Currently Reading:

• Margery Allingham, Police at the Funeral

Next Up:

1. Tim Powers, Dinner at Deviant's Palace
2. Pat Cadigan, Synners
3. Margery Allingham, The Fear Sign
4. Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month
5. Bill Willingham, Beowulf: The Monster Maker

My Other Collection

Another lively and speedy week. Seems like every week I'm thinking, "I can't believe it's Thursday already!" Am I just getting old?

Monday I got together with Trish for dinner. Hadn't seen her since my birthday party, which is quite a while, really. She's been gearing up to go back to school to get a CS degree. That oughta keep her out of trouble for a bit! She ended up making me get geeky on her and contrast memory management policies in different programming languages (C, Objective-C, Java). The things I do for my friends. :-)

Wednesday was gaming, and we played India Rails. Unlike last week, Subrata completely crushed us this time around. Chad had repeated blasts of bad luck, and I stalled out somewhere in the middle for various little reasons. Fun, but it took a while to play.

Otherwise, I've been eating the leftovers of the Indian dish I cooked on Sunday for dinner all week, as well as finishing the cheesecake Debbi baked. And preparing for fantasy baseball season, which starts a week from Sunday. As always, I don't feel prepared. But, I'll get there somehow.

Actual baseball season started on Sunday, and I've been paying some attention, but not a lot yet. Just too darned busy lately! I plan to change that soon.

In the wake of the weekend's 80-degree weather, it cooled right down into the low 60s and has been raining off-and-on. Brr. No bicycling for me this week. On the other hand, my "diet" has seen me lose a few pounds since my visit to the doctor. Basically I've just been cutting out cookies and pastries at work (and - mostly - mochas at the coffee bar). Otherwise I've been eating about the same amount of other food as before. I could probably do even better, but as long as I'm making some progress, that's good for now.

I finished reading Wil McCarthy's novel The Collapsium, which I would describe as "okay", and maybe "cute". McCarthy has a writing style very reminiscent of Isaac Asimov at his most whimsical, but unfortunately this also means that the characters are not very deep and that you sometimes wonder whether you're reading a contemporary novel or something from the 1950s.

The book is full of lots of speculative tech: Semisafe collapsed matter, programmable matter, artificial mini-planets, stored minds and bodies, etc. But it often feels like it's a story hung on a bunch of Neat Ideas. Not a bad book, but not one to go out of your way to read.

Speaking of Asimov, have you ever noticed how Asimov's ideas still feel exotic even today? Even when they've been debunked? Psychohistory is still such a cool concept, even if it's been reduced to fantasy rather than pseudoscience. Donald Kingsbury got a whole book out of it a couple of years back. Asimov's definition of robot behavior is still the gold standard for such a thing. Asimov wasn't SF"s greatest writer, but he had more going for him than his clear writing style.

Back in high school I did some informal coin collecting. I saved all of the "wheat pennies" I acquired, as well as Bicentennial quarters, half-dollars, and some foreign coins. It's a small collection, but not bad considering everything I have came to me in regular circulation. (I'm also collecting the state quarters as I find them.)

Syd is actually a coin collector and I showed some of my more interesting coins to him. It's no surprise that they're not worth much; some of the pennies are worth ten cents, or maybe even 25, but big deal. It was fun to run them through a coin value database, though.

My two most interesting items are a 1953 $5 bill, which I guess is a "silver certificate". It's not in great condition, but it's better than many '80s and '90s bills I've seen. And then I have a 1924 penny, which is also not great, but it survived 60 years before I collected it! I also have several pennies from 1940-49 (the 1940 one is quite black), and then many from 1950 on. And then I have a 1941 mercury dime (from before FDR's picture was put on it), though it's pretty grimy. And a few Canadian pennies from the 60s.

As Syd said, no one really gets rich collecting pennies. In keeping with that, all of mine are sitting in a Mardi Gras cut in a drawer. But I've enjoyed taking them out and looking at them.