Aron 2 Blue

It almost went flawlessly. The default boot from the live CD gave me hashed squiggles all over the screen, so I rebooted and chose 'safe graphics'. Fine. Then I installed, and tried to resize the partition on my largest drive. I got an error saying the resize didn't work. So I booted to Windows and defragmented my drive. More free space at the end of the drive, and presto, this time the partition resize worked. So I take out the live CD, and boot, and I get: GRUB Loading stage 1.5. GRUB loading, please wait... Error 17 And it stops. What? and my PC won't boot! Yikes! Of course I'm actually a geek, so there are two other PCs and a wireless network in the house. Forums suggest checking whether all drives are accessible in the bios. They are, but the 300 Gb drive is showing up as 137 Gb in the bios. Hmm, very suspicious, because my new Ubuntu partition is in the last 70 Gb of that 300 Gb drive. Sigh. I look carefully at the bios, and discover I have an Intel motherboar...

I've rarely read two books that can comment directly on each other the way Creative Destruction by Tyler Cowen and Team Rodent by Carl Hiaasen do. Cowen argues in a relatively scholarly work that trade generally increases cultural benefits, instead of decreasing them. Hiaasen says that Disney is a blight, a destroyer, and a homogenizer of the worst sort - they are nice . I find it fascinating that Team Rodent directly illustrates many of Cowen's points. Disney moving into Orlando completely shook up the local culture, just as Americans moving into a foreign country often do. Disney World brings a huge amount of money to Orlando, mostly in the form of tourists - the equivalent of the population of California visits Disney World every year - which is targeted by tourist traps ringing the park. The people of Florida now have a much bigger economy, much more choice; and some of them, like Hiaasen, clearly resent the cultural change. The question is whether the change was worth it. ...

I believe this book was originally copyright 1934, and I got it on this recommendation from Marginal Revolution : "I reread Eric Ambler's Coffin for Dimitrios ; few people know this novel but it is one of the best spy/detective stories, period." Overall, a fun read. Pretty quick, some nice spy-suspense elements. It made me think what it would be like for an ordinary person, the novelist narrator, to stumble into the world of spies and killers. I found it mildly grating that the narrator had only a mild sense of danger, and didn't seem to take seriously protecting his own life. Info at PBSwap

wow. WOW. What a phenomenal book. This story is so far out, yet believably set just 20 years in the future. Not once was I brought up short thinking "nah, that couldn't happen." I was completely sucked in, and I'm left with an ache trying to decide whether I want it to happen, or whether I should work to stop it from happening! Info at PBSwap .