It’s been sparse the past month or two. Sorry about that; not much free time. And to tell the truth, I seem to write more stuff when I need to vent, and things are going pretty well lately.
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I finished Fallout 3. What a blast. I rarely finish games — I think that Bioshock was the last one I ran all the way through — but Fallout 3 was a ton of fun once I “got it” maybe three hours of game play in.
The install-to-hard-disk option on the 360 is fantastic, by the way. I installed Oblivion, and installing it makes the experience a lot more pleasant. I might sink quite a few hours into Oblivion, assuming I can make it past closing the first portal without going nuts. (Bethesda fixed the “make a zillion potions” bug, which is keeping me honest).
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It turns out that I’ve been programming in C for longer than my new office mate has been alive.
One of the pleasures of being an old fart: I got to watch his expression when I introduced him to Duff’s Device.
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Niven and Pournelle return to first their vision of Hell, Inferno, 30 years later with the sequel Escape From Hell. I enjoyed it, but think that the last half was too much like the “chatty fluff” that Niven started writing after Ringworld Engineers — enemies are too logical and willing to listen to reason (“Oh, ultimate heat-death of the universe? Sure, I’ll set aside my weapons.”), and the plot gets into the weeds (“I know we have to escape from the Big Dumb Object, but first we have to figure out some side-mysteries involving ice cream and clergy…”).
More than I expected, and worth reading. But I miss stuff like The Mote in God’s Eye — there’s a class of book that I wish I could read for the first time again.