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Penguicon was a blast again this year. We saw the usual suspects. The network in the hotel wasn't as good as last years. A combination of that and ending up sort of volunteering for the con, I didn't get a chance to write any blog entries. I will be posting my photos sometime soon.
The Guest of Honor address Friday night was by Cory Doctorow, and was very good. Among other things, Cory has written a sci-fi novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom which he has provided for free download, and also published with Tor books. One of the formats is Palm OS .pdb file. Interestingly, .pdb files (standing for Palm DataBase) aren't really database files, and the extension doesn't really tell you what's in it. The files also have an internal file format, which is part of the meta-data attached to the file. This being a text file, it's internally a ".doc" document. There is a freeware document reader for Palm OS called cspotrun. So now I have his novel and a reader on my Palm Zire, and I can read it on the bus and other places.
One interesting thing that I noticed. It's no problem to read the text on the screen. It's the first book that I've read that way, and it's not a problem. "Turning" the next page by pushing the down arrow button is just as easy as turning the page. However, I absolutely hate the scrolling mode. That makes the text scroll by, presumably at the pace that you'd be reading it. Which in principle I can do, but it drives me nuts. I guess the part of my brain that reads is very finely tuned to read and travel down the page at the same time, and just doesn't react well to the text travelling up the page while this is going on. If I ever have occasion to read a teleprompter, I'll have to sort that out.
I'm in the basement writing this to spend some time with Ripley. Sitting in the papasan chair with my laptop on one leg and the cat on the other works out pretty well.
Just got back from seeing Le Mis' this evening. It was very cool. Towards the end of the first act, when Jean Valjean is asking Javert to give him three days, and they're conflicting on identity, I couldn't help comparing it to Neo and Agent Smith conflicting on Neo's identity. Seeing this reminded me of evenings in college listening to that soundtrack with my friend Chrissy. I'm glad I've seen it live on stage after all this time.