Fading Memories

Just a quick notice, because I've still got three books by DLS to write about and a Wodehouse, and because this was a book I finished in under an hour.

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Apart from vi vs. emacs (or rather XEmacs!), there's nothing that can make passions fly high as a good, old-fashioned language debate I've got a book published by Baen that collects the first few years of Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor columns for Byte. And those are already stiff with language debate: byte-code (then called p-code) vs. natively compiled code. Easy basic vs. manly Fortran...

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This time about two years ago I finished the first draft of my first complete novel. I had written maybe a dozen, maybe two dozen short stories before that, all in Dutch, a novella and an enormous amount of fictional non-fiction, rpg write-ups and a book on GUI programming with Python and Qt. The novel was my first bit of fiction in English, and I was pretty proud. So I spent a few month polishing, sent it off to a publisher, and started on the next novel.

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Or seedlings, or whatever the correct term is. The first bright day of february, the urge came upon me, and I dug out the little window-sill greenhouses.

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Today's Trouw contained three very interesting articles on the separation between Church and State. Now this is a topic that is bound to make passions flame up and overheat arguments. Which is probably because most people don't know what 'separation of church and state means'. These Trouw articles did a good job explaining; I'll just summarize.

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As I noted before, I have been trying to figure out how to paint a lemon like it should be painted. I think, however, that I should admit to defeat. The result of the exercise is not bad, perhaps even commendable, given my lack of experience with the materials, but it falls short of the mark by a wide margin.

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Usability is hot -- especially usability for Linux Desktop Environments. After all, we (that's the lde (Linux Desktop Environments) developers) want the misguides Windows-using masses to switch, and join us, and be enlightened, now don't we?

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Corrie de Groot

A little book, illustrated with fine, well-executed pencil drawings on that perennial subject -- women's undies.

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You know, when you search for "big money" on Amazon, you get 90.975 results, and only one of those is for this paperback... What are people thinking of, nowadays? Anyway, the paperback Gutenberg offers is one of those nasty 1991 vintage Penguins with horrible ragged right margins and bad covers. I've got a nice Ionicus Penguin, which show Lord Biskerton to his best advantage...

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Summer Moonshine, a novel outside any of the famous Wodehouse saga's has never been, despite the presence of several memorable characters, like the Princess Dwornitzchek and her stepson Joe, one of my favourite Wodehouse novels.

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My copy of this perfectly formed Jeeves and Wooster story has a very nice cover of Ian Carmichael and Dennis Price in the B.B.C. T.V. series "The World of Wooster", or so it claims. I've never seen the television series -- but the cover certainly is evocative, even though I rather think that Bertie Wooster -- despite complaints about no longer revelling in the clubs like a cub -- is a little younger.

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There's now a mailing list for people interested in using or hacking Kura: Kura Mailing List. It's quite quiet right now -- so don't hesitate to subscribe...

Katherine Blake (Dorothy J. Heydt)

The Interior Life is a rather strange book, in many respects. It tells the story of a supposedly ordinary American housewife, a none-too-bright stay-at-home mom who married her high-school sweetheart. She has three children, a front and a back lawn, and, when the story starts, a very dirty house.

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Well, really, I mean. It's not just George van Driem who maintains, with some justification, that Dutch is a Low-German dialect. (We do have a navy, after all -- even though I don't know what it's good for. The North Sea is a Mare Nostrum seen from the POV of the NATO anyway, and we had better get rid of the Dutch Antilles, the populace of which insists on electing certified corrupt separatist politicians.) But take a look at Dutch in past two or three centuries...

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