I just finished up Agyar, by Steven Brust. This was a nice piece of
modern day Gothic horror. Our hero, Jack Agyar, is gradually revealed
as the monster. Through a combination of elision and selective
narration, the details are only revealed slowly through the
story. Within the story, the narrative is being written by Jack on a
typewriter he finds in the house where is residing. The device allows
for a significant amount of self-reflection and musing on the nature
of writing and remembering, which none-the-less does not get in the
way of the plot.


Brust's solid descriptions of late-winter nights in a University town in
Ohio are magnificent, and help ground the wild fantasy of conversing
with the century-old ghost of a ex-slave, who haunts the house where
Agyar has taken up residence. The ghost, Jim, acts as a foil and
confidant for Jack, allowing us to discover Jacks background through
the narrative, rather than having the information dumped on us.

Brust follows all of the coventions of a modern Vampire story, but
never bothers to explain them, trusting the reader to be aware of them
and identify them from being shown their effects. He starts by never
permitting Agyar to enter a building except when invited. He slowly
introduces other aspects of Vampire lore, while never using the word
at all.

I'm glad this book is back in print. I discovered Brust only a few
years ago, and have only a few books left to discover in his back
catalog. I remember passing "Brokedown Palace" and "Jhereg" by in the
mid-80's. That was a mistake then, and one I'm gladly correcting now.

My primary computer is my IBM T20 thinkpad, running Debian unstable. It's hooked up to the rest of my home network through a wireless connection. Last week, every thing went south.

First, because my wife has been having a lot of trouble getting a good connection to the wireless network from her computer, I upgraded the access port (after futzing around with antennas for a day or so). I put in a new Linksys WAP. One of the cool ones, with Linux inside.

And, I took the opportunity to get a 802.11g PCMCIA card for my laptop.

First mistake.

No Drivers.

I ended up building ndiswrapper against 2.6.8.1, and using the Windows driver. I'm not thrilled about that, but I do like the increased bandwidth to the real computers upstairs.

Then, I did a apt-get dist-upgrade. And got upgraded to kernel 2.6.8.1-3.

Which won't suspend properly.

The magick keys don't even register, much less do anything. Turns out I'm not the first person to have this problem, so, I have some hope it will get fixed.

I took a stab at upgrading my BIOS to the most recent cut, hoping ACPI would work. It did a little bit, as long as I disabled X DPMS, and was willing to suspend only once before rebooting.

I usually leave the laptop running for weeks.

So I down graded back to 2.6.7.

And realized that I don't have support for the new network card there.



Windows 2000, on an identical laptop, had been up for 253 days, before I rebooted it to pull the floppy drive to do the BIOS upgrade on this machine.

I suppose that's what I get for running unstable.

What's worse? It's been _fun_.

I'd blown my budget when this was out in hardcover, so I bought it as soon as it was out in trade. I'm hoping this is as good as Snowcrash.

Sequel to Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio. Waiting for me to be in a softer, less belicose mood, to read.

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Another Hugo award winner (1965) I never got to before.

Zelazny near the height of his power, before Amber took over. OK, I liked the first few, and they were nearly as good as, "This Immortal", or "Creatures of Light and Darkness", but not nearly as good as "Lord of Light" or his shorter works, collected, in "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth"

I have high hopes, but we'll see how soon it gets to the top of the To Be Read stack.

This is a two in one. "Conjure Wife" and "Our Lady of Darkness".

I know I've got Conjure Wife somewhere, in an old edition, but I don't have any chance of getting Our Lady of Darkness. I've liked pretty much everything he's written, so I picked this one up, also.

This is pretty far away in style from Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, but that's not a bad thing, as much as I loved those books.

Steven Brust is one my favorite authors that I've started reading recently. That's a mixed blessing for me. It means I've got a backlist to read, but I wish I'd had him to read during some dry spells. This one is from his back list. Read the first few pages at the bookstore, but only because I couldn't resist, I knew I was buying it as soon as I saw it.

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Bought this one at the same time as Inversions. Look to Windward impressed me.