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.

Bookmark to:

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.

Bookmark to:

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.

Bookmark to:

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.

Bookmark to:

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.

Bookmark to:

“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.

Bookmark to:

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.

Bookmark to:

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

Bookmark to:

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.

Bookmark to: