Bookshelf:

Recently Read & Reviewed:

• Will Carroll, Saving the Pitcher

• Charles Stross, Singularity Sky

• Paul Cornell, Something More

Currently Reading:

• Charles Stross, Iron Sunrise

Next Up:

1. Margery Allingham, The Case of the Late Pig
2. Margery Allingham, The Fashion in Shrouds
3. Sean McMullen, Voyage of the Shadowmoon
4. Daniel Keys Moran, The Long Run
5. Margery Allingham, The Return of Mr. Campion

Express Myself!

All-in-all, a reasonably successful week back at work.

Debbi's out of town this weekend, at her best friend's bachelorette party (insert geeky mutterings about the bizarre term "bachelorette" here), so that combined with being back from vacation is giving me the chance to catch up on some stuff around the house, and continue to get my new computer set up.

Though I have a few items I actually need, my first purchase was a toy: An Airport Express base station. Though extending the range of my wireless network is handy, I mainly bought it for a frivolous reason: To be able to play the music on my desktop Mac through my stereo downstairs. It turns out that setting up wireless networks is not quite as trivial as many things you might want to do with Apple equipment. This page has a pretty good description of some of the pitfalls. Beyond that, I had trouble getting my desktop machine to see the AE station to play music through it. I spent an hour or so tinkering with it and finally got it to work - I think I had to turn off encryption to make it work, but I'm not sure that was the magic step. Maybe making it a "remote" rather than a "relay" base station was the key. I dunno. In any event, it does work now, and I've been happily listening to my progressive rock both upstairs and downstairs today.

I'm still shopping for a scanner and a printer (the former is more important than the latter, since I need to scan things to put them on eBay [hmm, spending money to make money, how typical]). And then I'm going to look into finally redesigning my whole Web site - including the journal. The main Web pages have had the same lame-o format for 7 years, and it's time for a new lame-o format. I need to think about what I want the journal to look like, and I might finally rename it, too. Haven't decided yet!

Anyway, once I have all the new hardware I want, then I get to dispose of my old hardware. My old G3 Mac will go out on loan to my friend Syd, who wants to borrow it to get data off of some floppy disks he still has. Joy!

As you can see in the sidebar I've gotten caught up on reviews of books I read on my vacation. Still one entry I'd like to write (and backdate) for the trip, but I haven't gotten to it yet.

Too busy geeking out over loading album cover art into my iTunes music library...