I’ve also been wondering if I’m turning into a grumpy old man. I’ve bought a lot of books lately and have been disappointed and pissed off with most of them.

I’ve bought a fair amount of nonfiction recently, which is quite rare as I generally think twice and then think for a third time before buying nonfiction books, in the main because they are more expensive than fiction, and I feel have a reduced re read factor (fiction authors must be bitches; having a higher cover price the nonfiction crew would be getting higher royalties). And I’ve found Penguin books in particular to be horrendously expensive. Doubly so in that they also produce a lot of public domain material where no royalties are paid and yet those books are still expensive.

I picked up How To Destroy The Universe and dipped in and out of it and it is pure mince. For a start the author (Paul Parsons) accepts Man Made Global Warming – particularly ironic as another chapter is How To Predict the Weather where he concludes we can’t because the system is so complex; but one tiny trace gas from us can overrule this complex system and cause global warming – the chapters bear little resemblance to the chapter headings and are short, both in length and content.

I was very intrigued by Empire State by Adam Christopher, and picked it up a few times in some shops before buying it from WH Smith. Unfortunately I couldn’t get past Chapter Two as in the first chapter the point of view kept appearing to flip back and forward between Rex and Jerome which made it feel confusing. Chapter Three also started on Rex and I’m thinking ‘where’s this Red Bradley that’s talked about on the blurb on the back?’ Does this author know nothing? Chapter three and the main character hasn’t been introduced yet? How did he get this published?

Year’s Best SF 16 was snaffled from Waterstone’s and I was looking forward to some good short stories. It was priced at £6.99 and was an American import. Unfortunately I was disappointed as it seems the art of short story writing has been lost. Meandering pish is the phrase that springs to mind most. Very few stories hooked me from the beginning, developed the story or idea and finished with a punch. David Langford’s story started off well and developed quite nicely but there was no payoff, and the ending was a bit of a let down (Sorry Dave). Terry Bisson’s story felt like it finished halfway through. Alastair Reynold’s story didn’t develop and I dropped it several pages in from boredom. There were a few I couldn’t get into right from the off. This is the best SF there is? The book is barely a year old and has a wide variety of authors, but as I said, the art of the short story seems to have been lost.

I also saw the remake of Conan The Barbarian (there are too many elements from the Arnie film for it not to be a remake) and was as disappointed as I thought I would be. Visually it was quite good, but as everyone says looks aren’t everything. The script was bad, the acting was bad and the fight scenes were too long. In the end it was the little things such as pronunciation that got to me. Hyrkania was repeatedly referred to as high re kania by the ‘pureblood.’ Archeron was pronounced asheron. I don’t know about anyone else but when I read Howard and that work came up it was pronounced in my head arkeron, as in arachnid. And I swear that after the slaves were freed the theme tune to the Old Grey Whistle Test was played. Conan was unrecognisable as a character from the Howard stories and the locations bore no resemblance to the world Howard created. Particularly irritating was the ‘I love you son’ bit from Hellboy and similar mushy stuff of the same ilk. Yeah, that’s how barbarians behave in the face of death, get all soppy.

There have been some good things. I bought City of Ruin by Mark Charan Newton and it was a joy to read. I don’t normally go in much for fantasy fiction or variants thereof (Bob Howard pretty much predates the genre and so doesn’t count) but the writing style and world building made it as enjoyable a read as I’ve had in a while. Plus I’ve got a couple of old Neal Asher books which have elbowed their way up my reading list, including Africa Zero, which a few weeks ago was impossible to find on the internet. A revised biography of R E Howard was ordered as soon as I knew it had been announced and with any luck will be with me by the end of the month.

I’ve bought a lot of books recently, including tomes from Rhys Hughes and Neal Asher(direct and signed by the author!) so I have a lot to read through. There have also been books bought in shops as I used up most of my points on my Waterstone’s card. Since they dropped the 3 for 2 it’s hardly worth browsing let alone buying. It’s a sad day when newsagents give better deals than dedicated bookshops.

Recently I bought some software from eBay and it turned out to be for the Mac and not PC (no response from the seller yet) so I installed a Mac emulator and used the software. That was very weird as I had a Mac emulator running inside an emulated PC. Emulation within emulation.

It’s been yonks since I used Macs; way back in the eighties when they looked much like the average PC – big monitor, box, keyboard – if not behaved like them.

I have some spare copies of old operating systems (PC ones) lying around so I thought I’d create some virtual machines while I was using Virtual PC. I got a shock when the cd for Windows NT 4 exploded in the drive. It broke into three pieces, spitting out one and dislodging the lip of the DVD drive. Luckily it didn’t harm the drive, which still reads CDs and DVDs, and the broken lip was easily clipped back into place. There must have been a crack in the CD or something, but it wasn’t noticeable before I put it in the drive: damn noticeable afterward.

I purchased Project:Messiah (bought three licenses actually) when they ran their Dare to Share promotion. It was a no brainer. A thousand dollar software program for $40 (about thirty odd quid after currency conversion). Duh.

It has tight integration with Lightwave and there are lots of video tutorials helping new users into the program. It is fantastic and I wish I could use it all day every day but my use is limited to a few hours here and there. It is the full animation package, lacking only a detailed modeller. It does setup, animation and rendering, which are very easy to do within the program, although rendering requires a lot of work to get things right. It started off as a plug-in for Lightwave but has since grown into a full package in its own right which is just as broad and varied as Lightwave.

I’ve been able to do a fair few things with Messiah. Although a lot of these same things can be done in Lightwave it seems easier and more pleasurable in Messiah. Morphs are a problem though. It’s tricky to get the facial expressions just right in Lightwave; it’s a lot easier in another program I have, Quidam, and I have considered purchasing an upgrade to Quidam as it does morphs in a new feature in the newest version but their web store is currently unavailable and I’m not able to upgrade at the moment.

I’m getting a bit fed up with Google Reader. Although it saves a lot of time and a lot of surfing it is annoying in that I can’t get rid of some blogs. A few of the blogs I follow either stopped or changed location – and feeds – so I make changes in Google Reader don’t I? The thing is Reader doesn’t want to accept those changes. The blogs I deleted turn up again. Then I move them to another folder and they turn up in the main list again. I’ve tried to get rid of them a few times now and in the end I just gave up. I ignore them whenever I log into Google.

I’m reading and enjoying the two R E Howard books that arrived recently; lots of good stories. I’m also reading a lot of non-fiction (another three for two at Waterstones’ which are building up points on the Waterstones’ card). I also bought Eye In The Sky by P K Dick. I’ve got buckets of his books but never got this one for some reason. Going through the list of books inside Eye in The Sky it seems there are still a few of his novels I still haven’t got or read. Also just got another Neal Asher book, a second hand copy of Cowl. I’ve just finished The Technician by Neal Asher and that was a great book; looking forward to Cowl. Also arrived fresh from the states – finally – is Up The bright River by Philip Jose Farmer.

And the books themselves are very impressive. Well produced, clean, crisp, and on very bright paper. These are wonderful books and well worth the money. Of course the content is going to be brilliant too – I’ve never read anything duff from Howard.

I’m really not too sure which one I’ll start reading first. They both have works from Howard I’ve not read yet, and they both have additional material which I’m sure will be illuminating.

Not sure if it’s easily seen in the above picture but I got number 139 for both volumes. They are already on second printings. The books can be bought here.

I’ve read quite a bit lately -  the books I’m expecting haven’t turned up yet; the Howard books are in the process of being shipped and the Farmer book hasn’t been published yet. I think Subterranean Press are doing a great job but it would be nice if they published books on time. All the books I’ve (pre) ordered from them have been late in being published.

I went on a Yurick binge. Sol Yurick is an American novelist probably most famous for The Warriors. I love the film of that book and years ago had a tatty paperback of that novel which has now disappeared; probably thrown out. He’s a very good writer and recently I thought I’d get a new edition of The Warriors. His books were so cheap on Amazon and Abe Books that I ended up getting practically his whole output – including a hardback edition of one of his books for one pence. Among others I’ve bought there’s been another 3 for 2 from Waterstone’s; two novels from Henning Mankell and a non fiction book. Menkell is famous for Wallander; the Swedish original TV series is quite good but the UK remake is pure drivel. I couldn’t get into the first of his books but ‘Italian Shoes’ is intriguing and interesting.

I’ve also switched back into old habits when it comes to reading. For the last few years I’ve been reading books exclusively; starting and finishing – or abandoning – a book before turning to another. Recently I’ve been going through more than one at a time. It’s pretty weird reading Neal Asher’s The Technician (a really strong book from this author) at the same time as The Histories by Herodotus, An Island Death by Sol Yurick and Menkell but it has been enjoyable. All these books were bought in the last week or so and I’m going through them at a pace. Maybe there’s something in reading more than one book at once.

I also ordered two Robert E. Howard books, and am very much looking forward to these, not least because they are pretty hefty books with a lot of content; some of which I haven’t read. But also because Howard is a very powerful writer and his stories are always worth the effort.

I bought an upgrade to Amiga Forever and have been using it quite a lot, particularly after I learned where and how to download the floppy discs from Magazines which had a lot of full programs on them. I bought a lot of the magazines when they first came out and, like PC magazines at the time, enjoyed the full software on the discs.

The Amiga (A600) fell out of use when I switched to PCs and was put away and forgotten. Later on I bought another 600 and a 1200 for £20. I swapped the mighty 20MB – yes twenty megabytes – hard drive from the 600 to the 1200. Recently I got them out again and they still work perfectly. I fired up the 1200 and used it for a few hours. The 20MB hard drive has several programs on it: Real 3D, KindWords 3, Bars & Pipes, Octamed 4 and a few games but the program that takes up most of the hard drive is the Dice C compiler. Back in the eighties I was into programming a little and C was the best of a bad lot. I didn’t like Pascal and Assembly was too obscure. C was comfortable.

I also got out a lot of floppy discs for the Amiga and went through them on the 1200. For being over 15 years old a lot of the discs still worked quite well, which was a surprise. I copied as much as I could from some discs to the hard drive in case I can’t access them in the future. (A lot of the PC floppies I have are unreadable.)

I tried creating a lha archive and copying them to a DOS formatted disc then getting them from a PC to my USB drive then I could load them in Amiga Forever but the DOS floppies were too badly damaged – add to this the fact they had to be low density floppies, which was superseded  by the High Density ones a few years later.

Plan B was initiated and I bought a serial cable to connect a PC to Amiga. Amiga Forever comes with software to connect the two computers and transfer files. The XP machine however doesn’t have a serial slot on it. So I turn to the old Windows 98 machine. Great; this one has a serial port I can slip the cable into.

I set everything up and then turn on the Amiga and PC. The PC doesn’t switch on. It hasn’t been used for a few years but it was working the last time I tried it. Bugger. The PC is only about eight or nine years old and it appears to have broken down. The Amigas from the early nineties are still going strong. Survival of the fittest indeed.

It was a brilliant machine though, and despite being known as a games machine had all sorts of software available for it: from compilers to databases, word processors to paint programs. A lot of TV graphics were done on early Amigas. They were very suitable for that environment having Gen Lock hardware that could do green screening and mixing of images.

I mention Amigas because I bought Amiga Forever, an Amiga emulator, a few years ago. Recently I have been using it quite a bit and even more recently I upgraded to the latest edition. Then I went on the net and downloaded a lot of programs for it.

The first Amiga magazine I bought was Amiga Computing, and I bought it on and off for a few years until it – like the Amiga – went bosoms up. Although I suppose Amiga Format was the magazine I bought most often: back then Amiga magazines were like the early PC magazines in that they would have full software on their cover discs. Half the time I was buying the magazine for the little bit of plastic on the front.

The Amiga I bought still works – or did the last time I tried it a few years ago – and the loft is littered with bags of the floppy discs, so it was nice to be able to download most of them from the net rather than try and find some sort of floppy disc drive to read them and copy them to a PC (Amiga Forever can read PC discs).

The best thing about them is that they are tiny: they were low density floppy discs – which meant around 800k of data. It’s amazing to think that they contained not only a full program but sometimes several full programs, and I’m not talking command line programs either but full WISYWIG GUI programs. I’ve downloaded buckets of them and they are still under about thirty megabytes on my USB drive.

I doubt if any program on Windows would be able to even fit into 30 MB let alone under 1 MB. And the A600 itself only came with 1MB of RAM. So, on a low density floppy with 1MB of RAM a fully multitasking Windowed OS would run quite happily. Nowadays a PC wouldn’t even boot with 1MB of RAM. The processor ran at 6Mhz. The later models of Amigas ran at such ridiculous speeds as 30 to 40 Mhz. It just shows how far computing has come; we’re only talking about twenty odd years here, not a couple of lifetimes. But twenty years in computing is several generations I suppose.

So I’m looking forward to trying out Amiga Forever 2011, which has been updated quite a bit since I bought it; it now looks something similar to Virtual PC. I’m also looking forward to exploring all those old programs too.

The bad weather seems to have rode off into the distance (fingers crossed) with rain now taking its place. Luckily the house scrapped through the cold and snow but there were some tricky times. It has certainly been the worst winter I can recall – temperature wise at least.

The credit card is weighed down this month, due to Christmas spending, and I’ve avoided any sales (which are year round now anyway and don’t end when January ends) while off work. Boredom can set in easily when off work and getting into the car and off into town centres is an easy option. Waterstone’s have a sale on at the moment with a lot of good bargains but I decided not to splash any cash.

I’m hoping that post hasn’t been lost over the Christmas break: I’m expecting an important document and a little unsure of how long to wait before phoning up about it.

I’ve got a new bookshop to investigate: I noticed a car while parking which was advertising the bookshop (probably belonged to the owner) and on doing some Google-Fu found out they’ve been going for years – established 2005. It might be worth the extra five or ten minutes to get to; I’ll find out next time I’m in Kirkcaldy. It should be worth a look at least.

The laptop is now starting to show signs of wear and tear. Two keys don’t work anymore. I don’t know when they stopped working but i noticed a week or so ago. The right shift button and the left arrow just underneath it don’t work anymore. But it doesn’t make the laptop unusable. I’m off work until the New Year so in theory I’ll be able to finish the posts I have that are three quarters done for the Bob Shaw blog and get some activity there again. But breath wont be held, particularly in this cold weather.

The snow has arrived early, and it hit us bad. We have at least 1 1/2 to 2 feet of snow. Today (Thursday) was the first time that I could use the car in anger. The roads have been pretty bad but the paths have been worse; un-walk able most of them, which meant walking on the roads most of the time. luckily there was little traffic. A lot of shops near here haven’t been getting deliveries, so milk bread and the like have been a bit thin on the ground, but stuff gets through eventually – except the papers one day last week. It has been bitterly cold and I’m dreading the heating bills which will arrive January/February time.

I ordered this by Philip Jose Farmer ages ago and it’s due to get sent out any day now, although with the weather supposedly getting bad in the UK next week again I might not get it until the New Year, if at all – an item from eBay hasn’t turned up yet.

I also treated myself to these from Robert E Howard. The prices are ok-ish for limited edition books but the postage was very steep.

I’m getting a little pissed of with Google Chrome. I have Firefox 2 on my USB stick but a lot of sites say it is unsupported now, and I get some trouble from some sites I visit using it. So I install Chrome, which is supposed to be slick and fast – it is neither. The amount of times I have seen ‘waiting for cache’ on the bottom left hand of the window. … It’s extremely slow. It seems to clog up memory and slow other programs too. If I was paranoid I’d say Google were piping traffic through their own servers to gather data. I wouldn’t put it past them but I suppose I shouldn’t be so suspicious either.