According to the books I’ve put on Goodreads (which I’ve only been using for a few years), these are my all-time most read authors.

1. Terry Pratchett (40) 2. Isaac Asimov (7) 2. Michael Crichton (7) 4. Neal Stephenson (5) 4. Mark Waid (5) 4. Cory Doctorow (5) 4. Douglas Adams (5) 8. Alan Moore (4) 8. Brandon Graham (4) 10. Dean Koontz (3)

Just as with my music listening and how the top 15 artists usually are no more than 30% of the total listens for a quarter, I read a lot of one-off authors so the numbers very quickly tail off. Dean Koontz is #10 with 3 books and John Scalzi is #15 with 2.

Sometimes you can’t see something about yourself until you see it in someone else.

World-famous lawyer Lawrence Lessig on why we should be protesting like those in Hong Kong.

Havana Nocturne by T.J. English

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I knew that one of the things Castro prided himself on was ridding Cuba of the influence of the American Mob, but I had no idea just how entwined they were with the Batista government. It was also incredible what long-range planners the mobsters were. If younger Americans know anything about these events, it’s from the events of The Godfather, but that movie (or is it part 2?) places the mobster meeting the same week as the revolution. In reality it was decades earlier. In fact, Al Capone had dreamed of Cuba being a Gangster’s Paradise.

I heard an interesting theory today - not sure if it’s a causal or correlation relationship, but it goes as follows:

We know that genetics plays a role in how naturally fearful people are. If you’re more towards fearful on the spectrum, you’re not going to want to live in a big city full of lots of fear-causing agents. So you live in the country. Also, if you’re fearful, you’re going to be happier believing in a god that can protect you from all the things you fear. Finally, fearful people hate change. They’ll want things to remain the same - to be conserved. Conservative. It certainly explains the way conservatism manifests itself in the USA.  (although I’m sure because of the negative connotations, people would resent being called fearful) It also explains the return to conservatism when times are tough. But, doesn’t necessarily mean causation, maybe it just appears at the same time and there’s another explanation we haven’t found.

Hard drives are relatively cheap, especially nowadays. But I still want to stay within my budget as I setup my backups and system redundancies. So, ideally, for my backup RAID I’d take advantage of btrs’ ability to change RAID types on the fly and start off with one drive. Then I’d add another and go to RAID1. Then another and RAID5. Finally, the fourth drive and RAID6. At that point I’d have to be under some sort of Job-like God/Devil curse if all my drives failed at once, negating the point of the RAID. The best thinking right now is that you want to have backups, but want to try not to have to use them because of both offline time and the fact that a restore is never as clean as you hope it’ll be.

So, back when I started this project, I laid out that one of the reasons I wanted to use btrfs on my home directory (don’t think it’s ready for / just yet) is that with RAID1, btrfs is self-healing. Obviously, magic can’t be done, but a checksum is stored as part of the data’s metadata and if the file doesn’t match the checksum on one disk, but does on the other, the file can be fixed. This can help protect against bitrot, which is the biggest thing that’s going to keep our children’s digital photos from lasting as long as the ones printed on archival paper. So, like I did the first time, I’ll first be trying it out in a Fedora VM that mostly matches my version, kernel, and btrfs-progs version. So, I went and added another virtual hard drive of the same size to my VM.

Limbus, Inc. by Anne C. Petty

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The best way to describe what I just finished: a series of short stories in genres I may not have read as standalones but which combined into a highly enjoyable book. Not perfectly true as they all tended to have a bit of science fiction and a bit of detective fiction. But I do not think I would have sought many of these out.

Red Rising by Pierce Brown

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is a little Enders Game, a little Battle Royale, and a little 1984 with a dash of Harry Potter.

I don’t usually write such short reviews, but in some ways, while a lot happens in this book, not very much happens. Which is to say that it’s the first book of a trilogy so nothing huge can get resolved. It’s a lot of setup in 3 parts, each with their own beginning, middle, and end. That’s what Pierce Brown does so well and which keeps me from being TOO upset at the fact that at the end of this book, things are only beginning for the main character. Yet we have already seen him have 3 arcs. He’s grown so much in the approximately 2 years in which the book takes place and yet he also reminds somewhat blinded in simplicity by his goal.

Mother Fucking Flowers by Tammy L. Witzens

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Let me begin by saying that I enjoyed this book. I won it as part of Goodreads’ FirstReads program. The title looked insane and so did the description; the subject of many an Internet joke and comic strip: if you could go back in time, should you kill Hitler? The Aeon Flux-looking woman on the cover was interesting as well. Unfortunately, I was delayed by a couple weeks in getting the package because I had a business trip. When I did get the book, I was amazed at how thin the package is. Other than, perhaps, The God Engines, this is shortest book I’ve read in a long time.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book deserves all the praise that has been heaped upon it. Brooks does an excellent job putting together a history of both how the zombie virus became an epidemic and how the human race came on top. He gives each character their own voice and style. I really felt as if it were a real documentation of history. I also enjoyed the meta-story told through both the names of the countries/provinces and the introductions to each section.