Here’s a nice collection of short stories by Susanna Clarke who wrote “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell” which won the Hugo for best novel in 2005. Like “Strange…” it’s written a pseudo-19th century style that was great fun. It was also illustrated by Charles Vess which is always a treat.

Presented as a collection of historical faery tales, each one was a treat and I poured through the book in no time. I broke down and bought the hardback. It has nice heavy paper with cut edges and is a book I just like to hold.

I’ve really enjoyed John Scalzi’s series. It was recommended to me by someone who said it would be something a Heinlein fan would like, and he was right. This is the third in the series with John Perry and Jane Sagan settled on a new colony planet only to be uprooted by a request to lead a new colony. Unfortunately things aren’t always what they seem.

I thought it amusing that the same day I read the end of the book, in which Scalzi explained he was done with this universe for a while, it was leaked that he working on a fourth book, Zoe’s Tale. I don’t care, as a long as their good.

We saw a great show last night, Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm opening.

Folk-Geek-Pop, I’m not sure how to explain it, but it’s great. Coulton has a real knack for songwriting. Creepy Doll and Re Your Brains have been stuck in my head all day. It’s fascinating how he started posting songs to his website for free and developed a following.

I’ve never heard Paul and Storm before but did a great job, wonderful harmonies.

Tired of trolling used bookstores I broke down and ordered the last Holmes pastiche by Nicholas Meyer’s. told from Holmes’ retirement as a bee-keeper, this details one of his adventures after the events of “The Adventure of the Final Problem” (and “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution”) and his return in “The Adventure of the Empty House”. He finds a position at the Paris Opera playing violin under the conductor Gaston Leroux when he realizes the mysterious ghost of the opera may be more than a myth.

I enjoyed this one much more than “The West End Horror”, Holmes is out of his element but quickly rebounds. It occurs to me I’ve never read “The Phantom of the Opera”, perhaps is time for another Project Gutenberg book.

I originally became a fan of Nicholas Meyer because he directed Start Trek: The Wrath of Khan and then I went digging for his older movies like Time After Time and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution based on his book of the same name.

This one is another Holmes pastiche like The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. I found it in the used section at Murder by the Book as it’s been out of print for years. Of course, right after I found I realized Meyer’s Holmes books have been re-released.

Somebody is killing members of the London Theater world including a girl in Gilbert and Sullivan’s chorus and Holmes and Watson are on the case. This was a quick read, Meyer does a great job capturing the spirit of the Holmes stories, but I didn’t quite enjoy it as much as his first.

I really enjoyed “The Anubis Gates” a while back and when I was purchasing my $50 worth of free ebooks for my Sony Reader I made sure to pick a book by Tim Powers. I was disappointed.

Set around the time of WWII, “Declare” follows Andrew Hale who signs up with a British secret service agency inside the secret service. Running through Europe, the Middle-East, and Turkey, Hale tries to find out what the Russians are searching for, what’s the secret of their power, and what’s living on top of Mount Ararat.

I loved this book, Powers had me hooked on the first page. He bounces around in time and location but I was always able to follow the story. He did a great job weaving an alternate history around actual events and actual spies. I was sorry when the book was done. Luckily he’s written a half dozen or so that I haven’t read yet.

This was also the first book I read on my Reader. After the first few pages I didn’t even notice it was a real book. It was a bit annoying when I wanted to skip back a few pages to review something, but otherwise it was a great experience.

Two major updates, one by choice and one by necessity.

Laptop

Although I was able to revive my laptop from the previous hiccup, this time true-death came upon it when the extern brick stopped charging the battery. I found a new one for $75 but decided I didn’t want to put any more money into a seven year old laptop.

I played around with the idea of getting a MacBook, and came close, but I’m cheap and decided I really didn’t need to spend $1500, so instead I did some digging to find a good Linux compatible model and settled on a Lenovo 3000 N100 which buy.com had one sale; $704 with shipping. It arrived on Tuesday after ordering it on a Thursday, before the shipping e-mail was sent.

I backed up the Vista installation kit and put Ubuntu Feisty on it. I was impressed, the only tweak it needs was a manual build of alsa which was clearly documented on the Unbuntu wiki site. So far I’m really happy with it, it even sleeps, hibernates, and shows my battery life!

Server

Given my string of good luck with the laptop I decided it was time for a long overdue upgrade of my server. I was still running a much hacked four year old instance of Debian Woody that had been through two servers and many hard drive upgrades.

I bought three 320GB PATA drives from Fry’s ($70 a piece!) and a 320GB external Seagate drive to backup my current server onto. Unfortunately, I only had three IDE compatible power cables in my Dell SC420 box and rather than wait I decided to stick with two 320GB drives in a RAID1 array rather than the RAID5 configuration I had originally intended.

I found an article on upgrading a RAID1 array to RAID5, so if and when I run out of space I may give that a try. I installed Debian etch and so far everything is running great. USB is even working on my server which it never did with the 2.4 Linux kernel. I have a few more settings to tweak and I’ll be done.