Last night I finished Juliet, Naked, the latest book from Nick Hornby.

Hornby is the author of High Fidelity and About A Boy, both books that were adapted for movies. I read both books before their counterpart movies and while there were significant changes from novel to screen, the movies didn't diminish the novels. Hornby also wrote Fever Pitch, which while enjoyable as a book didn't translate well to screen.

The last book I tried to read from Hornby was A Long Way Down, a wandering book about commiting suicide by jumping off roofs. I didn't make it that far before I gave up. There was a missing spark to the story. None of the characters were very likable or relatable. Because of this I was a little apprehensive of Juliet, Naked.

Some spoilers follow...

Juliet, Naked started off interesting, but it lost me toward the halfway point. In the book, "Juliet" was the last album of a 1980s musical solo artist named Tucker Crowe. Crowe mysteriously disappeared after the album, never to record another album. In pDuncan, a music aficionado and big fan of the album, creates a website to discuss Crowe and interpret the lyrics from his albums. Duncan has spent the last 20 years obsessed with Crowe. His girlfriend of 15 years, Annie, goes along with the obsession, but at the same time is starting to wonder if she is the third person in the relationship. They are both in their 40s, unmarried, childless.

All of the conflict in the story starts to occur when Duncan gets an advanced copy of Crowe's demos of acoustic versions of Juliet, which is to be released as the album "Juliet, Naked". Duncan publishes to his website a review of the new album and Annie has the opposite view. Both reviews of the album get published on Duncan's website. Because of the reviews, Duncan and Annie both start to analyze their long relationship with each other.

About halfway through the book, you start to discover what happened to Tucker and as expected the reality of his disappearance is nowhere near what theories came about on Duncan's website. Tucker's thread starts to weave with Annie's thread, but by the end there is no clear resolution to almost anything.

Overall for a Nick Hornby book I am a little disappointed. Fever Pitch, About A Boy, and High Fidelity were interesting, relatable, funny, and timely. I can't say the same for this book. It was funny in parts and interesting in the beginning, but it really went south after the midpoint.

I give it 2 out of 4 stars.

For the past several weeks I have been opening the Sunday paper and trying my hand at the two crossword puzzles in my local newspaper. One is a relatively easy puzzle, the other is the re-published NY Times Crossword. Without saying, I have been failing miserably at the NY Times one.

Over the weeks, I have noticed that the crossword designers have been getting a lot more interesting in their puzzle design. One of the puzzles last weekend actually had a bingo card in the middle of the puzzle. And then 9 or 10 of the clues throughout the puzzle it just said Mark your bingo card. For those clues you had to go to the bingo card and spell out in letters what was on the card. For example the card had B-15. One of the answers was BFIFTEEN. O-55 fit another clue OFIFTYFIVE. I thought it was a pretty interesting twist. You had to figure out just enough letters in the surrounding clues to find out which bingo combination worked for that clue.

On Tuesday when I was out I went to the local book store and picked up a crossword puzzle book. Previous to that I did some free crossword puzzles on-line and even downloaded an iPhone app, but for some reason it is not the same thrill as doing it on a piece of paper.

I took advantage of my company's product releasing to keep all of the computer's off this past weekend. About the only surfing that I did was on the iPhone.

I basically just did a bunch of family stuff this weekend. We finished Dirty Dancing. We spent some time getting outside walking around the neighborhood. And we actually made it out to a sit down restaurant. On Sunday, I took my daughter out to the book store so I could give my wife at least a little bit of a break.

I found out late last week that I will be traveling to what I consider the home office next month. That should be fun. It has been a long while since I have been out there. I am thinking it has been almost a year and a half. I am a little anxious having to travel around the start of flu season, but I guess there is not much I can do about that except get a flu shot.

Even though the product I was working on shipped, I am actually looking forward to what I am going to do next. My next project I get to double team it with a co-worker. Usually most of my work I can work independently so I am liking the fact that I can work on it with someone else, especially someone who has been a Mac developer way longer than I have been. In our first design meetings last week, he has already brought up a number of ways to implement the product that I would have never thought of. That's the fun of programming a project together.

In memory of Patrick Swayze, my wife and I started watching Dirty Dancing tonight from the FauxVo. She's seen it a bunch of times and considers it one of her favorite movies. Until today I probably would have told you that I had at least seen it once, but that would have been a total confabulation. I guess I had seen the clips so many times that I filled in the rest.

In the same way that my wife got to see me watching Fight Club, I am getting the same kind of enjoyment on how she reacts to seeing Dirty Dancing again. As much as I am not that big of a fan of dancing flicks it is great to watch a movie through the lens of your spouse. It was even a sharing moment when I filled her in on all the ruckus that happened when Jennifer Grey got the nose job in the late 90s that made all those waves. In retrospect it is pretty laughable considering how many women have fake noses and boobs on TV nowadays.

The movie I will most remember Patrick Swayze for is Point Break. Swayze's role as Bodhi was incandescent at a time in my life when the zen culture of surfing appealed to how I wanted to see the world and live my life. That scene where he is standing at the doorway of the plane and falls away is pretty much burned into my brain and was probably the reason about a year later that I did my first sky dive.

Like all movies and TV shows recently, it will probably take us a couple days to make it through the movie.

This interview segment of Neil deGrasse Tyson (who like Michio Kaku seems to be involved in almost every science TV documentary ever made) pretty much sums up how I want my kids to see the world when they are adults:

Awesome blog entry briefly describing the history of cryptology/encryption as well as the details of AES encryption.

Last week my hard drive on my development machine started to die. Today I got the new drive in and finally back up to speed. What is great is about how much time it took me to get functional again. Within 2 hours of installing the hard drive I pretty much had the OS, user accounts, email (accounts and mail), development, IM, and my suite of everyday applications installed and working. You could never say that about an MS box (at least pre-Windows 7). What facilitated the ease was Time Machine. I just pointed the Snow Leopard at my Time Machine partition and it sucked all my user account and various settings on to the box (~/Library). All I had to do was install the latest applications, which took 15 minutes tops. It was awesome.

Since I was starting from scratch I knew I wanted to load Snow Leopard on the machine, but I wasn't sure how I wanted to do it. I talked to a buddy at work who runs both Snow Leopard and Leopard off the same drive and so I got some pointers from him. The drive is 1.0 TB, so I partitioned it 900 GB for Snow Leopard and 100 GB for Leopard. I have a feeling I probably overestimated the Leopard volume, but better to have more than not enough.

I generally love photos from space, but these almost seem painted. That's how beautiful they are.

I am really on a roll with reading. I finished another book last night. That's 3 books in a little over a week. I am not sure if it counts though because I have read it before.

I got a book at the library on Thursday. I read 10 pages and it was horrible. I usually give a book 50-100 pages just in case, but this book was just lame. From the book jacket it seemed interesting. It was a story about a guy who lost his girlfriend and through her death he becomes a Zombie. Part of the problem was this book was a sequel (I didn't read book 1) and the author didn't do a really good job of introducing the characters.

So anyway, Thursday night I didn't have anything to read so I went over to my little library and tried to find something I haven't read in a while. I bumped into one of my favorite books ever published and knew I had to read it again. The book is The Light Of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. The book is great in that it deal with worm holes from a scientific perspective, but it doesn't get bogged down in Quantum Theory/Mechanics. I've read a number of other books by Stephen Baxter, but only books where he collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke can I stomach (The Time Odyssey series is also pretty good).

What I like about The Light of Other Days is that it talks about a future technology that changes the world in the same way that Radio, TV, and the Internet changed life. The book is set mostly in the 2030s where man harnesses the ability to open small worm holes. First the technology is used for practicality. Transmitting video signals from one side of the earth to the other gets bogged down in data transmission lag caused by the constant of the speed of light. Hiram Patterson, a wealthy tycoon who runs the media company Our World, wants to do transmissions with no delay. Worm holes get around the delay. The technology evolves for other useful applications and that is where the story really gets interesting.

The book was published in 2000 and you can really see the influence of the emerging Internet in the scope of the emerging technology. There is even a reference to the "Internet Gold Rush" at the turn of the century. Where the authors took the story though makes the Internet really an afterthought. People in this world have implants and wearable tech that's Net connected. They can just say "Search Engine: foo" and the expert systems can tell by the context that you are making a query about foo. This kind of technology is probably doable in these times, but in this future world it is commonplace.

For anybody who is any bit technically inclined, I totally recommend the novel.

It is probably redundant to say, but I give the book 4 our of 4 stars.

Life is sucking right now. I am bogged down in trying to get most of my important files off the root drive of my Mac Pro.

It all started late last week when I started to notice beach balls every so often. This week it just got worse to the point of un-usability. I ran the Apple Hardware Tools on Wednesday and I ended up getting this error:

Alert! Apple Hardware Test has detected an error. 4HDDD/11/40000000: SATA(0,0)

Doing a quick web search I discovered this at the Apple forums.

Luckily my company really helped me out and by yesterday (Thursday) I had a new drive ordered from New Egg. UPS should be bringing the new drive by Monday. Now it is just a matter of snooping every nook and cranny of my file system to make sure I can get everything off to an external drive. What makes it long and drawn out is that the beach balls are getting closer and closer together. And I can't copy more than about 50 MBs without the progress bar stalling. I am also getting frequent "Can not read or write from this file: -file.ext-". Fortunately none of the files it chokes on so far is an important file.