At the rate I'm going, I may be lucky to push out one new blog post per month. I remember when prior to my enrollment in the MTS program, I would look at some of the students' web sites to get a feel for what goes on. I was always frustrated by the lack of updates. It appears that I've become one of those people...
The last month's been exceptionally busy, so putting together a comprehensive and coherent recap is a bit difficult for me. Classwork and research has kept me quite busy and all of the obligations in between. I've been making progress on my research, and classes haven't worn me completely out. Thus, despite five days of courses a week, I'm keeping up and taking care of business.
On the recreation front, I've been enjoying the Sony Reader (PRS-505) that I acquired over Christmas. I've read a number of books on it, including Stephen King's "The Mist" and a variety of Lovecraft stories that I missed reading over the last few years. I don't want to get too geeky, but I've really been enjoying HPL's Dream Cycle stories that center on the adventures of one Randolph Carter in the land beyond waking. I've also been surprised that the recent "Terminator" series has been much better than I expected.
I haven't been making as much progress on Books as I would like due to a lack of time and coding energy. (You need a special kind of energy to program, and my classes and research have eaten it all up.) I've cut back on my comic book purchases for the time being due to a tight budget. (The current prevailing rule is "no back issues".)
As far as my Lovecraft research, I've been mainly compiling a full set of electronic texts suitable for reading on the Sony Reader. I plan on using this corpus as an initial testing set for the next version of Books. Despite my lack of recent progress, I have booked a flight to Providence next month (during Spring Break) to visit Brown University's collections and to search for some documents in the Rhode Island probate court. The purpose of this trip is twofold: to get me out of Chicago for some needed relaxation and mental rebooting, and to move my copyright project further. I'm interested investigating the current Lovecraft estate and determining what claims they make on the HPL materials. (The gritty details are alluded to in the coda of my most recent paper.)
I'm sure that I'm leaving something out, but this is about it for me. Once the weather warms up a bit, I'm looking forward to taking some more photos during my morning walks. I'll probably blog a bit once I make it out to Providence, but don't be surprised if you don't see anything before then.
I've become one of those people, remember?
My apologies for the lack of non-work-related postings to this blog over the past couple of months. I was hoping to post some more during the new year, but that obviously didn't happen. I've been running at almost full capacity with respect to my work and play, and that hasn't left too many idle moments suitable for blogging. I didn't really realize how much time I've been putting into things until Thursday evening, when I decided to take an evening off to let my mind decompress and do some much needed mental defragmenting before I jumped back into the fray again.
As my immediately prior posts indicate, I've been quite busy working on writing software. Over the past several months, my stable of actively-developed applications grew from one or two (Books and Shion) to at least four (Books, Shion, Genkanban, and Cidney). Keeping these apps up to date, squashing bugs, and documenting them have kept me quite busy in addition to my usual obligations of coursework, mentoring, system administration, and so on. So, on Thursday, it was nice to flip the to-do list the bird and selfishly take some time for myself. That said, it appears that Thursday's break has extended into Saturday morning, so I'm going to have to buckle down again and submit to the wishes of the Almighty To Do List.
However, I before my resubmission commences, I wanted to share a few things that I've been up to.
Earlier this month, I began reading Donald Tyson's additions to the Lovecraft mythology. Tyson began by creating a version of Lovecraft's oft-mentioned Necronomicon. Lovecraft used the book as an occult resource that was often abused by his characters to summon the big nasties from across the gulf of space and time. The book was mentioned so extensively by Lovecraft and his contemporaries that there still exists pockets of people who think that it is real.
Tyson's work involved painstakingly combing through Lovecraft's stories and cataloging everything that one would expect to find in this tome. He then crafted his version around these nuggets and produced a compelling and quite entertaining version of the dreaded tome. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and encourage other Lovecraft enthusiasts to pick up a copy.
However, with the Necronomicon, Tyson wasn't finished adding on to the Lovecraft universe. In that mythology, the Necronomicon was written by the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred, who wandered throughout the Middle East and Egypt discovering the bits of wisdom and lore that would become his book. Tyson took the Necronomicon idea a step further and wrote a travelogue / biography of the Mad Arab and his journey from Yemen to Damascus. It's a very violent and graphic book, but it does a suitable job of showing the back story of Alhazred and what the poor guy went through to be able to write the book in the first place. A warning to potential readers, Alhazred is somewhat of a deranged fellow, but Tyson's storytelling almost forces you into a sympathetic view of the character. (The protagonist is probably in the same class of dementia as Hannibal Lecter.) However, if you have a strong stomach and are interested in an extended tale (600+ pages), I highly recommend the book.
For those curious about the book on my bookshelf, I'm reading The Sign and the Seal, a work purporting to be a historical account of the Ark of the Convenant and it's recent discovery in Ethopia. I haven't made it past the first couple of chapters, but I'll try to post updates as warranted.
On the movie front, I've seen Cloverfield twice in the last month and I quite enjoyed it. I took Willie the last time and he was of the opinion that it was going to give him nightmares because he couldn't look downtown without thinking of the monster. I liked it precisely for that reason, and I hope that JJ Abrams and crew follow it up with another "sequel" that shows the events from another perspective.
So, that's the wrap up for now.
