The semi-official description of Dope Stars Inc. is that they are an Italian industrial rock band. Personally I’m not exactly sure what I would categorise them under – at least the Italian part is accurate.
From a self published author to a very much published author with Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan. Another one of the books Jonas has been trying to get me to read for years now, Altered Carbon is the first of the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy.
Set in the distant future Altered Carbon introduces Kovacs, a former elite soldier now taking mercenary work. While that setup is not particularly enticing the world Kovacs inhabits is. Based on the passing of humanity into a meta human civilisation Kovacs‘ world is one of people having their minds “re-sleeved“ in another, possibly genetically enhanced, body for a variety of reasons.
I have been a bit lax with updating these last couple of weeks. Of course now that means that I have quite a few books to cover…
First up is “Dead Dwarves Don’t Dance“ by Derek J. Canyon. You have probably never heard of Dead Dwarves or Mr Canyon. That would be down to Dead Dwarves being a self published title.
Self published work typically has a very uneven quality level. Without the filter of a publisher a reader is left unshielded from the authors ego. Luckily, unlike some other recent examples, Mr. Canyon is not deluding himself as to the quality of what he can produce.
While trawling the interwebs when I couldn’t sleep the other day I discovered a cool Russian/Ukrainian blog post with pictures of graffiti found in Pripyat.
Quite a haunting place, and it is made even more so by some of the graffiti that has appeared there. Thanks to Alex Cheban for the pictures.
Alex Cheban’s Pripyat blog post
One of my failures (according to Karin) as a legend in my own lifetime is that I rarely throw away empty toilet rolls. Sadly Karin wasn’t around during my first year at Uni when I made a whole installation out of toilet rolls in our shared bathroom (pure genius, even if I do say so myself!), so I thought that she didn’t appreciate the finer points of toilet roll art.
I was wrong!
Over the last few days at home the toilet rolls have been developing faces (and obvious personalities)…
This is great! Now I do not have to throw any away ever again and there is always a chance I can sell them all to the Tate Modern in the future!
Easter ’11 at Tyresö, a set on Flickr.
Karin and I had a great Easter weekend in Tyresö at Karin’s family summer house. Summer is definitely on it’s way 
No doubt this will not be very interesting for anyone but me. It’s a list of all the books I’ve read since getting my Kindle and getting back into reading “properly”. I’ll be updating this list as I go. Maybe I’ll even try to arrange this in chronological order sometime… Read More…
For a good few years now I have been in a position where I am either responsible or have some opinion on new hires. Because of this I have seen many, many job applications, CVs and cover letters.
Given that a job application is a) Your first contact with your prospective employer and b) Something you can spend time on, I am constantly amazed by some of the applications I have received.
Some people obviously need advice here and in the interests of making my life a little bit easier in the future here are some tips for applying for technical jobs…
I’m a bit slow with the technical posts because after work and any programming I do at home I usually have little enthusiasm left for writing about technical matters. However, to get the ball rolling I’ll start easy. Below I have put together a short list of development related programs that I find useful on a day to day basis.
Read More…
I made short work of Hood and my early impressions held through. As I mentioned before the fact that everyone will have prior knowledge of the outline of the story provides and interesting part of a readers experience of the book. Lawhead even plays on this fact by introducing a legend from before Hoods time into the story that one character believes Hood (the character) will follow. This gives the feeling that Hood (or Bran as he is named) is both pushed from the past (via the prior legend) and pulled by the future (via the legend we all know) into fulfilling his destiny.
Since everything I read these days seems to be part of a series or trilogy I decided not to immediately follow Hood with it’s sequels Scarlet and Tuck. Instead I returned to another series that I am already invested in: The Honor Harrington novels by David Weber.
The first four Honor Harrington books. Yeah, I mention the cover art below...
