Stepping Forth!!!

Ok, this is the sort of book that I had in mind when I was reading Lords of the Bow by Iggulden a couple of months ago. Cornwell is a master at writing the sort of prose that puts you right at the scene:

Then all, suddenly, was quiet.

Not really quiet, of course. The river hissed where it ran through the bridge, small waves slapped on the boat hulls, the guttering torches on the house wall crackled and I could hear my men’s footsteps as they clambered ashore. Shields and spear butts thumped on ships’ timbers, dogs barked in the city and somewhere a gander was giving its harsh call, but it seemed quiet.

Sword Song is the fourth book in the saga of Uhtred, a Saxon with a dangerous affection for the Danes who have invaded England during the time of Alfred. Unfortunately for Uhtred, he’s sworn to support Alfred and is therefore forced to do things that he’d rather not. Such as helping Alfred, tolerating Christianity, seizing London for his evil cousin, and fighting against friends.

This is probably one of the best books that Cornwell has written, the character is engaging and the scenes/events are very well played out. There’s even a romance in it which is not something that you’d really expect. Definitely looking forward to the next bit to come along.

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Well, I was very pleasantly surprised to get my hands on this book after really enjoying the first one, Medicus. This time around, we follow our hapless doctor/sleuth as he generously takes his slave/housekeeper/girlfriend up to the northern reaches of the Empire to revisit her familial homeland. Unfortunately, some of said homeland happens to be inhabited by tribes hostile to Rome and its minions of which our hero is one.

This time around, our story has branched way out from the earlier one where our doctor seems to be battling more the medical bureaucracy than crime. He’s now not only dealing with a gruesome murder but also backstabbing Romans, indifferent superiors, rebellious tribes, and conniving businessmen. He also has to work through his feelings for a slave girl who seems to care little for what he thinks and just does what she wants. (Sell her, you fool!)

It’s a bit of a meander through all of this but it’s still quite pleasant. Enough so that you tend to forget that a crime has been committed and you’re more engrossed in the day-to-day grittiness of survival on the frontier.

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The news that Sam’s Club in Canada was closing down was a bit abrupt but not a surprise to me. I’ve been a member off and on since 2005 and the signs were plain that the venture was in trouble. They never expanded beyond the first six stores and there were never any lineups at the checkout. The selection was ok as was the pricing but nothing like Costco or Club Price.

So, given that I had a $25 gift card in my wallet and a hankering for savings, S and I drove over there this morning to see what there was to see. There was also that feeling of anticipation and excitement that you get when you go to a closing-down sale; what will be there…what sort of bargain…how many other people will I have to beat out and so on? Mmmmm…

Frankly, there was not much beyond the usual assortment of products and the pricing was about the same. S went gaga over a couple of items and I loaded up on chips, Spam meat, and a couple of other odds and ends. The real surprise that made the trip worthwhile was the fact that they gave me back my entire membership fee in the form of another gift card! Cha-ching! Totally taken by surprise. I had expected a pro-rated amount to cover the time left on my membership which I calculated at just enough to do my laundry for next week.

S has vowed to go back in about a week when the real liquidation sale starts and I guess I will be tagging along. I just hope that I don’t end up with $47 worth of Spam.

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Years ago, I had read one of Goodwin’s earlier works - Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire - and was surprised to see that he’d come out with a mystery book of all things. Yes, there was that book about walking from England to Istanbul which I didn’t particularly like and, subsequently, never finished but I never really expected that he’d be able to pull off a good historical mystery.

And he does pull it off very well as Goodwin brings us to early 19th-century Istanbul and its stew of simmering tensions between the old, possibly disloyal Greek population, the newer but flagging Ottomans, the brash and fresh Europeans and, mixed in, a seasoning of religious and commercial rivalries. It’s an interesting look at how the Ottoman Empire might have looked like as it slowly begins its fade away from the world stage and is increasingly eclipsed by the Western Powers.

And we see it all through the eyes of one of its more unique symbols, a eunuch at the Ottoman court. More precisely, an epicurean, bibliophile of a eunuch who spends more of his time shopping, cooking and chatting up friends than he does at Topkapi let alone guarding the harem. Through one of his friends he is thrown into a mystery that involves all of the players mentioned above along with a hunt for archaeological treasure and dealing with the consequences of the Greeks’ fight for independence.

An excellent book for those of us who relish historical mysteries that move along quickly and are informative to boot.

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It’s rare for me to come across a book solely dealing with the Mongol conquests, with the last two being Gabriel’s Genghis Khan’s Greatest General in 2007 and an old book (translated from a French author?) based on The Secret History of the Mongols back in the ’80s. So, a fictional account from the perspective of Genghis himself seemed a bit interesting.

A bit interesting might be the best way to describe this book. I don’t know if it is just me but Iggulden’s work seems leaden. Leaden as in his Genghis character doesn’t have as much heart or feeling as in, let’s say, Cornwell’s Sharpe; leaden as in his battle scenes lack excitement whereas a good author can make you think that you’re standing there in the line of battle. It’s the sort of book that you can skim and, admittedly, I did skim about ten to twenty pages and I felt as if I didn’t really miss anything.

It’s not a bad book but it’s not a great book. It should be a basic primer for anyone interested in the early Mongol conquests but don’t expect to be any more wowed by it than if you’d picked up a good history book.

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Oh man! I never really thought that I would write those words. For well over an hour this morning, I’ve been trying to print to the old LaserJet 4M+ from this MBP. No go. I kept getting a

“Attempting to connect to host 192.168.1.104 for printer
Network host ‘192.168.1.104′ is busy; will retry in 30 seconds”

message. It seems that this is a common problem or it’s a recurring problem because I’ve found through Google numerous posts about this going back years!

I’ve tried resetting the printing system in OS X a couple of times, pausing and deleting printer jobs, trying different apps and so on. Nothing worked. And I certainly was not going to buy a new printer just because Apple couldn’t get its act together regarding network printing. So, I remembered a site that I used a couple of years back called iFelix and which I had posted about and fired up a WinXP machine. The instructions are meant for 10.4 but there seem to be less steps with 10.5 which is a good thing. So, I am now once again printing through SAMBA.

It’s not the best solution but it’s better than alternatives such as buying a new printer, upgrading the firmware on the router to handle AppleTalk, etc.

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As a followup to the New Year’s post and stirred by a friend’s sister’s “deliverance” from what was feared to be terminal cancer, I’d like to post that as of last week, my injured wrist is now deemed to be almost healed! There is still some stiffness and some minor pain but both the physiotherapist and the fracture specialist at St. Mike’s believe that I am good to go. I’ll still need to work it on occasion throughout the day but I really don’t have to see either one of them again.

For those of you who need a good chiropractor/physiotherapist, you can give Dr. Minh Hao of Old Cabbagetown Physiotherapy in downtown Toronto (in Cabbagetown where else?) a call at (416) 972-9997. He’s very well-trained, knowledgeable, and personable. Just make sure that he writes down your progress in terms of measurements both before and after a visit because once or twice we had to guess or had to run back to the filing cabinet. It’s a minor detail but annoying when you can only see him once a week. It’s nothing if you see him every second day.

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A little late but better than never. Best wishes to everyone for the New Year, I realize that in today’s uncertain economic world that everyone is concerned about their finances but I know of friends such as G and K who have undergone episodes of poor health and they are the ones who make me realize how important it is that your health should always come first. Without your health, you can never take care of your finances.

So, I’m hoping that you’ll all concentrate more on being healthy rather than rich in the coming year. Cheers!

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Very recently it came to my attention, via Fusion’s warning that it could not do any more backups due to a lack of disk space, that my MBP’s 250 gig hard drive was quickly running out of room. How could this be? I rarely download torrents and I could not see where I could be generating so many files in so short a period. After a bit of searching, along with the use of a program called GrandPerspective, it became clear that it was Fusion that was taking up a huge amount of room to the tune of 58 gigs!

As an aside, GrandPerspective is very easy to use and uses a colour-coded map to show groupings of files and folders and how much space they use.

58 gigs was obviously very shocking since I had thought that I only allocated 40 gigs to Fusion and that it was a hard limit. Good thing I had earlier purchased a Take Control ebook from Tidbits Publishing called Take Control of VMware Fusion 2. It’s an excellent book that’s easy to read with good explanations of what does what and why certain actions should be taken. In it, Kissel talks about how to shrink a virtual disk which is where virtual machines store their data. It turns out that every time I save a file, delete a file, save a game, delete a game, and Fusion does a “snapshot” of itself, the virtual disk grows bigger. Obviously, major shrinkage will have to now occur or else Fusion’s virtual disk will take over the whole system.

So, the steps are:

1. (This is recommended) First, go into the WinXP environment and defrag the hard drive.
2. Shut down (don’t suspend) the Windows by choosing Virtual Machine -> Shut Down Guest.
3. Delete all snapshots by choosing Virtual Machine -> Snapshots and this includes not only the ones done by yourself but by Fusion too. You cannot delete the “running” state snapshot but that’s ok.
4. Go to Virtual Machine -> Settings and select Hard Disks.
5. Select the hard disk that you want to shrink and click on Clean Up Disk.

Ok, the steps may sound pretty easy but I encountered a couple of problems which are probably my fault. First, the defragging of the hard drive process encountered a problem when Fusion ran a backup. I don’t know what happened but it then could not continue with the defragging process because it could not find a certain file. This became a nightmare of trying to shut down the virtual machine and restarting it and finally I had to use the rollback function to go back to an early snapshot of the system and start again.

I never did do a complete HD defrag as I continued with the deleting snapshot step. Each snapshot can take up to a gig of space and Fusion takes quite a while to first delete and then clean up files. I’ve found that Fusion took a long time with the later snapshots but speeded up quite nicely with the earliest ones. I suspect that this may have to do with the size of the snapshots with the later ones being much larger. In all, this process took about four hours as I periodically came back to the MBP to check.

The last step of shrinking the virtual disk took Fusion about an hour and was a lot simpler. It’s a good idea not to become alarmed if Fusion seems to hang or take a long time doing something. It’s only when you do a Option+Open Apple+Esc and find that it’s no longer responding that it’s time to force-quit Fusion, which I had to do a few times. So, after several hours, Fusion is now 30 gigs smaller in size in a process that Kissel recommends being done every couple of months.

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It may be telling about the service that I am posting this a day AFTER using VIA Rail’s Wi-Fi service on the train that brought me to Montreal. I’ve heard about the service years ago when it was first being set up but never tried it since it was initially offered only to VIA1 passengers. When booking this latest trip, I found out that it was now generally available to everyone but for those who are not VIA1 passengers there is a fee involved.

At first, I was intrigued since I did not want to pay $8.95 for a day’s usage but, in the end, the attractions of keeping in touch with people, email, online music, catching up on articles, etc. was too much and I sprung for the service. Once on board, it was very simple to log on and we were on our way…both the train and the service.

Things got rocky first for the train as it had to slow down here and there. Ended up late by about half an hour which is about par for VIA. The Internet service quickly followed suit when I found out that streaming online music was simply not possible. The iTunes program kept buffering every few seconds and Youtube videos could only stutter.

Programs such as instant messaging, email and browsing forums and online articles fared better since they were “bursty” in terms of data traffic. That did not save them once the service started disconnecting itself. A bit of the disconnecting was my fault since I did not realize that the log-in window provided should not be shut down and that the service does try to keep the connection going for a bit as the router or server on board the train does “cache” before uploading via the satellite link. When it gives up, it will tell you.

I had originally thought that the service was using some sort of CDMA or GPRS or whatever technology it is when cell towers are used for transmitting data packets. I don’t think we have 3G in Canada just yet. Anyways, it is a satellite service because one of the error messages that came up said satellite upload. Pretty clear there!

That may also explain why the service was so slow and intermittent; I believe that clouds have a way of interfering with the satellite signal and yesterday was very cloudy. In the end, I gave up just sitting there trying to reconnect and read a magazine.

After that experience, I would say that I would NOT use the VIA Rail Internet service unless I know that the sky is clear all the way though the trip, even then I would have to be extremely desperate or have too much time on my hands.

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