Sometimes, Progress is Just Boring
- This was kind of a blah day. For one thing, although I was quite tired when I went to bed last night, I only slept about 7-1/2 hours. Maybe I wasn't as tired as I thought, but I'd sort of relished the idea of sleeping in.
Anyway, I went to the post office in the morning because I wanted to try getting a postal money order to send for that eBay auction I won yesterday. But when I got there, I learned that they'll only accept cash or a debit card (a.k.a. check card) as payment for a money order. I'd thought that since I brought my checkbook and my credit card along, I'd be covered, but no-o-o-o. So I decided "screw it", and just wrote a check. Money orders: What a big honking waste of time.
Also got my car washed, bought some new clothes, and bought groceries.
Oh, and the most important thing! I went by Half Price Books and stumbled onto a used copy of Vernor Vinge's short story collection Threats and Other Promises! This book is impossible to find; I've been looking for it since 1997, including my trip to Worldcon that year, and had had no luck at all. I was delighted to find it, as Vinge is one of my favorite authors.
The mercury got up to around 40 degrees today, and on the drive home I reflect that with the sun, the near-cloudless sky, and the pools of water rolling down the streets from the melting snow on the curbs, that it felt a lot like an early spring. It was kind of nice, except, of course, that all the trees are still brown and won't bud for months.
From there, I was able to easily get the script to do what I wanted - accept data from a form and send it to an address by e-mail - and finished it up pretty quickly. Gosh it's nice to be able to teach myself technical principles in a few hours. I hope my new bosses at Apple will be as impressed.
I actually find near-future SF to be kind of tedious; all this gallavanting around in tin cans and dealing with the nuts and bolts of in-system space flight. Snooze. So the book starts very slowly for me, especially since the characters are pretty sketchy for much of that time. (Stith tries to flesh them out with little bits of backstory about them, but it's all done in side-exposition, which only slows the story down further.)
It gets better once the ship arrives, although then it starts feeling more like Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. But since I'm only 1/3 of the way through the book, I have high hopes that it will head in a meatier direction.
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