Ryan

Chaos levels against iTunes and the iPod the two beefs that every iPod/iTunes hater I've ever met has against them: they want to organize their own music by hand, and they want manage what goes onto their MP3 player themselves, manually, by hand. I am completely baffled by these criticisms. I don't understand them at all, because I am exactly the opposite. I love that I don't need to construct a folder hierarchy for my music, nor care about how my music is organized into folders. Drag music into iTunes. Drag music out of iTunes. Simple. I love that I don't need to manually manage what goes on my iPod. Plug iPod in. Music flows from computer to iPod. Simple. Thinking back to my own history in using digital music, I can see why my habits and preferences evolved the way they did. My first forays into digital music were made with Cassady and Greene's SoundJam, which Apple purchased and used as the basis for iTunes. The library/ID3-based management idiom makes such perfect sense to me because it is what I have always known. Likewise, my first MP3 player was a 4th-generation iPod, so I never experienced the joy of needing to manually manage the content on my MP3 player. Allow me to engage in the hubris of superimposing my own experience onto Eric's. I'm betting Eric started on WinAmp. He's always organized his music himself, and considers it no great hardship, so he sees no need for a tool that will take that control away from him. What is to me a liberating delegation of responsibility is to Eric a coercion into an undesirable workflow. So, I guess I understand where he's coming from. I'm still absolutely convinced that the iTunes model is better, but I can at least understand how we came to this divide. That is not at all to say that I find iTunes to be without fault. On the contrary, I find it more bloated than a week-old roadkilled deer. All I'm currently asking of it is that it play music, and for some reason it claims 170MB of RAM to accomplish that task. Should I load up the store, that will balloon to over 300MB - and stay there even after I switch back to my library. Every iteration adds more and more crap. Oh, and its video management features suck. I can't tell you how I'd love a return to a quick, low-footprint, playback-focused player. But in the meantime, iTunes is still the best solution for me.

My favorite thing about the movie is how they managed to portray Katniss's viewpoint. Her thoughts and emotions come through very clearly and strongly. And one of the tools they used to accomplish that was the shaky cam. So I actually enjoyed it this time. I usually do not.

You can add "ignorance of the Windows platform" to my list of reasons why I use Mac. Intuitive is probably the wrong word. Intuition is gained through knowledge of how a system works, or, in other words, by familiarity. There is nothing intuitive about either Mac or Windows to someone who wasn't born with a mouse in their hand. The word, then, is a difference in philosophy. Windows culture tries hard to accommodate a wide variety of tastes and strives to provide multiple redundant ways to accomplish any given task. Mac culture, on the other hand, strives to find the one best way to do something, and then implements that. It believes that redundant workflows add clutter, complexity, and confusion. It recognizes that you can't please everyone, so you may as well design things in the way that makes sense to you. I believe that every tool has a set of workflows that work best. I mean, you could hammer a screw into the wall, and it would work, but it would work far better if you used a drill.

I use Mac, for 3 reasons: First, and if I'm honest, most important: familiarity. I know the Mac OS inside and out. I can make it sing and dance to my tune. I can configure it, troubleshoot and fix it. Using Windows makes me feel like I have one hand tied behind my back, because of unfamiliarity. The second reason is a thousand little things that add up to a heap of happiness. It's impossible to remember these little things, much less enumerate them, in the context of a discussion, but I think it boils down to the following generalization. On Windows, "good enough" is good enough, but on the Mac, it has to be better, or nobody is going to use it. There are differences in philosophy, too. For example, Apple prioritizes user interface responsiveness, even at the expense of overall system performance; Microsoft seems to focus on raw performance first and UI responsiveness second. The result is that Windows and Linux destroy Mac OS X in server benchmarks, but the only thing that can reduce the responsiveness of my (4-year-old) Mac's UI is heavy swap usage. My computer is a workstation, not a server; I prefer Apple's approach. Third, OS X is a programmer's paradise. Want to program on Windows? Reach for that wallet, kids: Visual Studio is expensive. Or suffer through a cobbled-together chain of second-rate tools. (Linux programmers only have the latter option.) The Mac comes with a cadre of scripting language runtimes preinstalled, and Xcode is free for all. And speaking of Linux, I find its UX to be generally worse than that of Windows. It's a fantastic server OS, but I wouldn't want to make it my primary OS. The "thousand niceties" argument applies equally between Linux and Windows as it does between Windows and Mac. "It's not my powder keg; I just brought the match."

Oooh, I want to go to Colorado! I miss it. In other news, I'm now done with school. Except for the final for Brandon's writing class. Where by "final" I mean "pizza party".

BYU has no spring break. I'd kind of forgotten that was a thing. Anyway, I would like to announce that after I take one more final, I will be done with school forever. Forever! Also, I have a job lined up with a company called i.TV, doing web and iOS development. So, I got that going for me. Which is nice.

I know this is a necropost, but I asked Brandon about this recently, and he said that Tor wants Alcatraz 5. So, there's that.

She seems poised to fail in her relationship with Gawyn. And that, according to a viewing Min had, could be quite disastrous for her. She also looks about ready to fail by not throwing her whole support behind Rand in the last battle, just because he wants to break the seals before trying again to mend the Bore.

I have no intention of reading this until the series is complete. Maybe not even then. I'm not a huge fan of graphic sex and violence, y'know?

I've heard the same from others, which is why I've avoided reading anything else of Hobb's.

No to the first, and no to the second. The monk kid. I forget his name.

I don't expect her to duplicate the wild commercial success of Harry Potter. I do however expect her to produce books that are better than Harry Potter, because I think it's silly to assume that the writer who gave us Harry Potter is incapable of writing anything else. I've seen the sentiment expressed in many places by many people, and I'm not sure where it comes from. I can think of no other author whose fans expect her next book to suck. I am, however, a little afraid, on several counts. First, Rowling has no need to work for a living, and I have to wonder if, missing that fundamental drive, would her works have the same edge? Second, no editor is going to reject a book by J.K. Rowling. These two factors could combine to produce a weak offering. But as I said, I'm optimistic. I think she's shown the ability, and there's no reason why she shouldn't be able to apply it to anything she wants to write.

It was actually the Internet that ruined Sword of Truth for me. I read it when I was young and impressionable and not very widely read, and I loved every book up to book 4 (the last I read). Then I made the mistake of reading reviews on book 5 when it came out...and I realized that all of the haters were pretty much spot on, and it changed my perception of everything I had read, and now I won't touch them with a 29.5' pole. As for series that disappointed me...the Liveship Trilogy by Robin Hobb. It came very highly recommended by people whose opinions I trust, and it was well written I suppose, but I just didn't like any of the characters. Well, there was *one* character I liked, but that's not enough to carry a whole series. I finished the trilogy mostly because I was hoping things might get better, but they didn't.

I've been reading TSR. Like, a lot. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through. As I've said before (maybe not in this thread, but in another): TSR is my favorite book, and even though it's the longest, it reads like one of the shortest. Let's start with the beginning. TSR is odd in the series in that it's the only one that starts with chapter 1 and not a prologue. But, here's the funny thing: TSR's "chapter 1" reads exactly like every other prologue in the series (except perhaps the first, which is special). And the other funny thing: chapter 2 begins with the wind, but without context. You get the tail end of a wind scene that obviously got chopped off when it was decided not to have a prologue. It's not a very well-done edit. The seams where they cut and transplanted are still visible. I'm curious as to why it was done. Did the prologue fall out of favor in the publishing world for a bit? Anyway, the prologue chapter 1 is a solid reminder that the world is not divided into good people and darkfriends. Case in point: Elaida. Completely on the side of the light, and working very hard to ensure the Last Battle is won. But she's completely, monumentally, disastrously wrong about how this is to be done. Also: more than a little crazy. Or take Dain Bornhald. Putting aside that he's a whitecloak and thus, by definition, not quite right in the head: he wants good things (justice, the eradication of darkfriends). He's just tremendously misinformed and plain blind stupid. Moving on, the beginning of this book is quite slow. Dull, even. I think it had to be this way because of the book's structure. All of the characters had to decide to depart the Stone in three different directions, which means a lot of thinking and talking and not a lot of doing. Also, Jordan has to repeat his lengthy and detailed Setting of the Scene three times over. But the end result is worth it. Three stellar plotlines, far flung and far removed from each other, each with multiple climaxes of its own. The Shadow Rising is actually a lot like three books in one. What if Jordan had written them sequentially instead of cramming them together? Would that have been better? I want to say no, but I also kinda want to say yes too. Anyway, Rhuidean is epic as always, but surprisingly, it's Perrin's story that I have enjoyed most on this read through. Fail is an apocalyptic dingleberry, of course, but the Scouring of the Shire Two Rivers is such a deceptively complex bit of storytelling. You've got the Whitecloaks, and Padan Fain, and Slayer/Luc/Isam (Slucisam?), all with their own goals, and into it steps Perrin, reluctant leader, Wolfbrother, ta'veren; and he totally kicks everyone's butt. Even Fail's. The other character whose development I'm watching closely is Egwene. I am a little impatient with the Wise Ones' slow pace of instruction WRT tel'aran'rhiod. I mean, everyone says it's dangerous, but it's not often shown to be all that dangerous. The main characters blunder about in it all the time with no ill effects at all. And speaking of the wolf dream, Perrin thinks offhandedly to himself at one point that he might like to live there when he dies, like a wolf. Foreshadowing that he is going to be bound to the Wheel and the Horn? Man I hope so. Anyway, right now Trollocs are attacking Emond's Field. Gotta go read before I go to bed.

Start by learning how to count. Then go learn Python. Javascript is probably not a good place to start because its execution environment is so weird. It's hard to debug, hard to code any sort of user interaction, and its object system is strange and probably difficult for a novice to understand. Python, on the other hand, will give you a solid intro to object-oriented programming, and should be easy enough to pick up quickly.

Egwene suffers from Two Rivers Woman Syndrome. Two Rivers women, you see, are overbearing and ridiculous, and every single last one of them always knows best. Seriously, read the beginning of The Eye of the World again. Pay attention to how the women act. Fortunately, (IMO at least), Egwene gets mellowed out by the Aiel, overcomes her overbearing ridiculousness, and goes on to bring much awesome into the world. She does mistreat Gawyn, but that doesn't annoy me as much as it should, because Gawyn pisses me off in the middle books.

This. Whenever something bizarre happens with my code, the first thing I do is delete the build products and recompile. A lot of the time, it's just that, in the process of repeated incremental compiles, something is out of date, or things have gotten stuck together wrong. This is especially true of IDEs that compile the current file after every save, like Eclipse. In your case, (if you're using Eclipse), all retyping the code gained you was an expensive clean-and-recompile.

I'm with you for most of the books. But book 10...the very impatient reader may want to skip it. Here's the executive summary: Seriously. More happens in the prologue of book 11 than the whole of book 10.

I have finished the penultimate chapter of TDR. There's a lot of material that I have yet to comment on. That's in part because I haven't had much to say. So, this post will be a bit sparse. And mostly it will be full of griping. First, I will comment on the introduction of Fail. (There is no "e" on the end of her name. I don't know what you're talking about.) Fail is annoying. And while she is mostly good for Perrin, her disappearance in later books brings out the darkest parts of him. Mat is interesting. His transformation from an ignorant farmboy into a man of the world feels too rapid to me. And his prowess with the quarterstaff literally came out of nowhere. Where was *that* during the first book? And while I'm at it, I may as well comment on Perrin's mysteriously-acquired fighting prowess. It makes no sense that he would go from having no experience to being able to best a Myrddraal, or a dozen Whitecloaks, without ever practicing. Honestly, Rand's progression is the only one that makes any sense. He at least trained, and he is the only one that fights realistically based on the amount of experience he has. And speaking of mysteriously-acquired prowess, I'm not a fan of the "One Power Instinct". Nynaeve, Elayne, Egwene, and yes, Rand accomplish entirely too much on instinct alone. It's almost as if Jordan wants to have his inexperienced characters do awesome things that they have no right to, so he invented this concept of Power Instinct to explain it. In the case of fighting prowess, he doesn't even bother to try and justify it. The result is that the Aes Sedai who had to actually work for their abilities look incompetent. The Forsaken look incompetent. Shoot, Ishamael looks most incompetent of all. How could he possibly have failed to kill Rand? I mean, he only had three chances, and Rand has no experience. Ishamael has 3000 years of experience and access to the True Power. It is inconceivable that Rand should win against that, especially as easily as he does. Enough of that. A lot of characters get minimal introductions here that become later on. Every Aiel, I'm looking at you. Not to mention Juilin Sandar. I'm noticing that this is a theme in these books. It is impossible to say which incidental character will become important later, and which are just one-offs. My final frustration centers on Moiraine. She looks incompetent and hypocritical in this book. Hypocritical, because she demands that everyone tell her everything, which she picks and chooses what to tell others. Incompetent, because she can't keep up with the Pattern, but tries to pretend that she is in control anyway. That is, of course, a general failing of Aes Sedai: a refusal to acknowledge any failing on their part, resulting in them looking like a clown. I expect better from Moiraine. We get better, in later books. Perhaps she grows as a result of the events of this book? It's hard to see her growth because she gets no viewpoints, but looking closely, it is there. I'm excited to start The Shadow Rising. I love that book so much.

If you can push through TDR (which I admit is kinda weak; it's my least favorite of the early books), you will get to The Shadow Rising, which is my personal favorite book in the entire series. (Most people's favorite book is one of 4, 5, or 6.) Why do I love TSR so much? Well, there are three main arcs in this book. Each arc is long, full, and amazing. Each arc reveals a significant and astounding chunk of Jordan's worldbuilding. In each arc, all of the characters grow, change, progress, and mature. And each arc has its own climax that is at least as exciting as any ending climax in any book of the series. (Rand's arc has the actual ending climax. Yes, his arc has two climaxes.) Oh, and let's not forget: all three arcs get resolved. TSR is actually the last book in the series that resolves most of its plot threads. After that, the scope of the plot, in simultaneous threads and characters, grows too great. So, you'll get things happening like book 7 ending on a cliffhanger for Mat, and then Mat does not appear at all in book 8. Or something happening to Perrin at the end of book 8 that does not get resolved until book 11. Or a White Tower plot thread that begins in book 4 and does not get resolved until book 12. Stuff like this is infuriating if you have to wait years between book releases, but now that the entire series is nearly complete, it's not as big of a deal. At 390kwords, TSR is literally the longest book in the series. But it reads like one of the shortest. I guarantee that it will feel a lot shorter than Crossroads (book 10), which is actually 120kwords shorter than TSR, but reads like the longest because it's just. So. Dull. Know your TDR prologue Whitecloaks! Pedron Niall - Lord Captain Commander. He is the man at the top of the command chain. He runs the show. Geofram Bornhald - Lord Captain. One rank below Lord Captain Commander, a Lord Captain commands a legion. You may remember this Bornhald as the leader of the Whitecloaks who captured Perrin and Egwene in the first book. Geofram was killed by the Seanchan at the end of book 2. Dain Bornhald - I forget Dain's rank. Anyway, Dain is the son of Geofram. He's pissed that his father is dead, and blames it on all the wrong people, mostly because of the idiocy of... Child Byar - Second in command to the late Geofram Bornhald. Now second to Dain. He was sent away from the battle with the Seanchan by Geofram so that he could report the outcome to Pedron Niall. Jaichim Carridin - High-ranking Questioner (the branch of the Children dedicated to the interrogation and torture of suspected Darkfriends - think Spanish Inquisition). Carridin is a Darkfriend. You may recall him from the prologue of book 2, wherein he was known as the man who called himself Bors. His Ba'alzamon-mandated actions on Toman Head most likely lead to Geofram Bornhald's death. There you have it. Any questions?

I wouldn't worry too much. I plan to slow it down after I'm done with TSR. Don't want to finish too long before the release of AMoL, and there are plenty of other books that I want to read. (BTW, if this is your first read through, what are you doing in here? I'm spoiling stuff in the entire series here, not just the books I've read up to.) Anyway, I have been reading on "The Dragon Reborn". I pushed through the sucky beginning, with Perrin whining continuously about the superhuman senses and miraculous ability to communicate telepathically with wolves. Oh, and who flipped Rand's crazy switch? Between the end of TGH, where he was showing only the barest beginnings of a split personality, to the start of TDR, Rand became super moody. And what is with Moiraine? Her "guidance" amounts to "let's not do anything, because doing stuff is *scary*." Rather out of character for the woman with gonads of steel that we came to love in the first book. Getting through the beginning, we come to a long section of the girls in the Tower. And, well, I actually quite like the Tower training sequences. I always have. I find the "hunt" for the Black Ajah less enjoyable, if only because they fail so spectacularly to make any difference at all. They even fail to follow up on Sheriam's suspicious behavior WRT the Gray Man. Come on, Nynaeve even notes it, and then they never do anything else about it. She is actually Black Ajah! She was probably the one who took the crossbow bolt! *sigh* Then there's Lanfear, whose actions are quite baffling. I don't get what she's working towards, at all. We know she loves Lews Therin, and that she's marching to her own tune more than serving the Dark One's agenda, but beyond that she's still a mystery, even now. I think Lanfear is going to be especially important in the last book (due to the ending of TofM), so it's frustrating that I can't suss out This post has been reported for attempting to skirt the rules she's actually doing, even having read 13 books. At least we haven't had any other viewings and/or dreams that haven't yet come true. Egwene's Accepted test is interesting, in that all three scenarios were laid out as possibilities when Rand used the Portal stone in TGH. Egwene his wife; Egwene stabbing him with a knife, and him thanking her; Egwene the Amyrlin and gentling him. Only, instead of Egwene doing all these things, she refuses. Also, the resonance with the twisted stone ter'angreal pretty much proves that the test arches create scenarios in tel'aran'rhiod. There are also some references to things that did actually come to pass. The "great purge", for one, and that one is thanks to Verin. It was oddly...satisfying to watch Gawyn and Galad get beat down by a sickly Mat with a quarterstaff. They cause such irritation in later books. Beyond that, I will just comment that for a book titled "The Dragon Reborn", there has been, and will be, very little of Rand in the book until the very end. Maybe that's why I like it the least of the early books? There is a lot to like here. For one thing, Mat's first viewpoints, and a lot of cool Tower training. Very little Dragon Reborn, though.

Meh. He totally did it. Search your heart; you know it for true.

I just finished TGH. It's got one of my favorite ending climaxes in the series. Not necessarily Rand's showdown with Ishamael, which is a bit of a letdown, but his showdown with Turak, and Nynaeve awesomely rescuing Egwene (she had Min and Elayne, but she did all the work). It still hurts to watch Egwene be a damane, even my third time through. I gotta feel a little sorry for Rand at the end, when Moiraine tells him that basically everywhere he goes, he will cause upheaval just by being there. Thom's girlfriend Dena would not have died if he'd never showed up, which let to Thom killing the king, which led to the war of succession. And he literally didn't do anything except sit in an inn for a few days. I don't have much more to say besides that. Next I will start into my least favorite of the early books, The Dragon Reborn. I will have the awesomeness of The Shadow Rising to look forward to, and that will keep me going as a plod through it.

There are 7 Ages, you know...

More comment time! It's weird reading this book knowing who the darkfriends are. Knowing, for example, that Ingtar and Liandrin both were at the darkfest in the prologue. Or that Sheriam is a darkfriend. Or seeing Alviarin in passing on Egwene and Nynave's voyage to Tar Valon (I had no idea Alviarin was introduced so early). Or Verin! Especially Verin, considering she is actually something of a double agent. The crossbow bolt that grazes the Amyrlin is a bit of a mystery. As far as I recall, we never get any closure on that. Rand assumes it was intended for him, but that doesn't make a great deal of sense. Team Dark has a huge number of chances to kill Rand in this book, considering that he's riding with Ingtar, and spends a large amount of time in the company of Lanfear. Though, okay, Lanfear has her own agenda for Rand that has nothing to do with what the Dark One wants. I think it's pretty funny how Egwene worries about the rigors of novice life in the White Tower after witnessing Nynaeve's treatment at the hands of the Amyrlin, saying that if that's how things are, she didn't think she could make it. Hah. Poor Egwene gets put through more crap in these books than anyone besides Rand, what with being made damane, then training with Aiel, then being made a puppet Amyrlin in the rebel camp, then being tortured at Elaida's hands, culminating in her triumphant ascension to Amyrlin in truth. She weathers it all beautifully, and everything that doesn't kill her makes her stronger. She's almost superhumanly mentally resilient and strong of will. Nynaeve's test for Accepted is interesting. The way she alters things inside the ter'angreal points to tel'aran'rhiod (I *think* I spelled that right...maybe). That wouldn't explain why women who go in warded and channel get burned out, or how Nynaeve is able to beat the system (aside from her general awesomeness). We get three more Min viewings, and we know what all of them mean. Elayne is going to be one of Rand's 3 wives (and Rand will get his hand burnt off), Galad is a righteous prick, and Egwene will become the Amyrlin. Now, Cairhein and the Great Game. I quote from Isam's WoT summary, which is no longer with us, but is thankfully preserved in the wayback machine (http://web.archive.org/web/20080515201024/http://meikon.homeip.net/extras/Wheel_of_Time-Summaries/ ): This book is more complex than TEotW, with more plot threads happening in diverse parts of the world, but Jordan is still able to pull them all back together at the end. I think book 4 is the last book where that happens...