Unwanted Commentary

…Knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, I just finished reading Hominids by Robert Sawyer. It was an interesting quick read about two parallel universes, one being ours and the other being one in which Neanderthals survived and we died out. Very enjoyable and I thought it brought up some interesting ideas and concepts that made me think. Unfortunately I felt the book wasn't that well written and the characters were a little too plastic.

The story is very creative. A Neanderthal from the parallel universe is accidentally transported into our world via a Quantum computer accident and finds himself in a world both familiar and wildly unfamiliar. There are lots of interesting bits about anthropology, history and religion, though I did find that the author used an overly idyllic Neanderthal society to point out our flaws. Evidently I'm not alone in this criticism as it was fairly common remark among reviewers on Amazon.

The author's writing style left something to be desired for me. I felt it was overly simplistic, verbose without adding any real detail or depth and totally lacked subtlety. In particular I felt a lot of the characters were just too one dimensional and in many cases the dialogue between them was an undisguised mode of dumping necessary story info. Everything in the book seemed rushed and condensed and as I finished it I was disappointed knowing this is first in a trilogy and what could have been one big book is chopped up into three for no other reason than to expand profitability. But I guess everyone has to make a buck and I was lent the book by a friend so I shouldn't complain.

In the end I really did like the book, it was a quick read; the benefit of the author's writing style is that the action keeps going and you don't get bogged down much. I do wish some of the plot lines had been re-thought…I just felt that this was a very interesting and creative story line and it deserved more, for lack of a better word, umpf!. Oh well, I still look forward to reading the second book when it comes out in paperback.

Posted by Jeff at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Evidently there are some knuckle-dragging Neanderthals working at my place of employment that find it amusing to spit out their gum in the stair well of the parking garage. To make this an even more aggravating scenario, there are trashcan on each level.

Posted by Jeff at 08:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have installed Mozilla Firefox on both my PC at home and work. I took the momentous step of making it the default browser. It seems that lately I've been running into too many instances where IE won't work on certain web pages for reasons that I can't fathom. Even after resetting all the options to default, clearing cache and cookies, and even rebooting it would still not work. I could even have two computers that are pretty much the same and it would work on one, but not the other.

I guess I'm either losing my passion or patience for Help Desk work, because I used to sit and try to figure these things out or go out on the Internet and look them up. Now, I'm more inclined to say, "I don't have time for this." And find a different way to do it. I've never been a Microsoft fanboy, but neither have I been a fanatical naysayer. I've just always went along and accepted, and appreciated, the fact that MS has made things work together…at least a lot better than when I first started doing all of this. I remember the days in the early 90's of three or four different OS's and quite frankly I didn't think it added anything to the industry.

So I've taken the small step of going to a non-MS browser, which I haven't done since Netscape 4.x. It doesn't feel defiant, but then since it looks almost exactly like IE I'm inclined to just go with it. I find it amusing and somewhat ironic that in order for alternative software to be successful it has to look like and function like what it's trying to replace. One day MS may loose it's god like status and Windows will fall behind Linux, but I have the feeling that it will be with us in spirit for a long, long time.

Posted by Jeff at 08:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)