I always thought of the wayback machine as the internet archive, but having recently stumbled across archive.org I much prefer this. And I can rock out with the live music archive and, in particular, warren zevon, but there are so many bands listed here that I’ll have a hard time working through them all.
But this is a great archive with lectures aplenty, and books that you’d struggle to find anywhere.
A great site.
And so my obsession with the destroyer novels has come to an end. A great series of novels originally written by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir about an ex-cop trained as an assassin to work for a secret US government sponsored agency. 149 books in total - although I only read 135.
I loved the first 107 books.
Collecting Destroyer novels provided endless excitement. Trawling through cardboard boxes of old paperbacks looking for those elusive missing numbers - and the excitement of finding a missing book. ebay has put an end to all of that now.
The publisher managed to ruin it for my by changing the writer although some of the later writers seemed OK, but my enthusiasm for the series had waned.
But I have finally finished all the Destroyers that I own and I don’t think I’ll buy any more.
The new Destroyer series never really took off for me - despite having Jim Mullaney as writer (Jim, Murphy, Sapir and Murray wrote the best destroyers).
So bye bye Remo and Chiun - I’ll miss you.
… until of course I learn to read French and then start collecting l’implacable.
And there I stood thinking I had found a bargain picking up 3 Dan Streib Hawk books at knock down give away prices.
Much though I love pulp fiction I could find nothing to endear me towards Hawk.
For some reason the author would never consistently refer to him by one name. One sentence we call him Hawk, the next we say Mike, then we say Hawk, then we say Mike. Bah humbug. That alone ruined the books for me. Sometimes we even say Michael, or Michael Hawk.
I used to watch the Tarzan films as a kid - great.
I used to read the Tarzan comics as a kid - fab.
I think I read one Tarzan book as a kid - illiterate slob.
But now I have built up my Tarzan book collection and have decided to work through them in sequence. Boy have I enjoyed this ride so far.
Boy did Hollywood mess Tarzan up.
A long time ago when I owned an Atari ST, I considered the mighty Protext my favourite word processor. Every so often I do a search to see what happened to it, thinking it might one day move into Freeware territory. And lo, on my last search it has. And so I eagerly downloaded it and tried it.
Sadly it didn’t seem as fast and funky as I remembered, but it does work well on my EEE - which I want to run it on.
And then I stumbled upon Q10.
I bought my Asus EEE with Linux pre-installed. And after 4 months with it - I’ve almost got subversion working with my Windows repository (but not quite). I’ve spent a lot of time fiddling with Linux to get ‘expert’ mode working and move icons onto the display. I upgraded the memory and had to identify new kernels to actually use the memory (and failed). I installed UbuntuEEE and fiddled with drivers but still didn’t get Skype working properly. I had too many fsck events to make shutting down and booting up anything less than paranoia inducing.
Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle, fiddle. (no work)
So I installed XP - aaaah. Out of the box working.
So many of the apps I use are portable ones anyway that it was easy for me to get most of the apps I need installed on an SD card really quickly.
I’ve actually been productive on this thing for the first time in months.
I guess I’m not ready for Linux yet.
I’ve been getting sick of the Thunderbird spam filter - too much seems to get through. So I’ve moved over to gmail. What a great spam filter it has.
So now gmail goes off to my pop3 accounts. And I access gmail through imap in Thunderbird.
Any email worth keeping goes off to the local thunderbird folders. Anything deleted gets deleted. And I can use gmail tagging for temporary conversations that I’m having.
I can’t imagine getting anywhere close to the 7gig of storage gmail gives me, since I can’t imagine being able to track that much stuff.
If you haven’t got a gmail account - check it out.
I was looking up at the moon last night.
The moon was full and very bright.
And I wondered what would make it glow
Because there’s nothing up there to make it so.
It has stones and rocks and rubble,
It has dust as well, but nothing shineable
But maybe that’s just what scientists say
maybe the truth is some other way
Maybe the moon is full of glittery stuff
diamonds and pearls would shine enough
but how would they travel all that way?
Ill have a think, "hmmmmmm…" I say.
Maybe if I drop my watch and leave it,
Something would see it, steal it, move it
And it would end up way up there
Up on the moon, and would I care?
Because all night long it would glow,
And I would, at long last know
How the moon is so very bright
each and every single night
…like any journey, with an argument.
"What’s that?"
"What?"
"That?"
"This?"
"Yes!"
"That’s my key."
"Key? What’s it the key to?"
I have far too many blogs, and I haven’t been very good at trimming out all the comment spam, but I thought I’d boost my diligence quota and get in there and mark the spam.
I thought Akismet was supposed to catch this…oh, it wasn’t active.
<sigh>
Mental note - perform this comment spam trimming much more regularly.
And switch on Akismet.
<Kick myself>
<Kick myself>