August, 30, 2004 archives

now here’s an experience i can relate to from my homepage.com days (it was a second-generation geocities-like service) — i just happened to stumble upon a large series of blogspot.com sites (a few hundred) that were all just a bunch of repeated links to another site. (which looks like a personal site, which is even more odd.)

now i just eliminated all of the blogs with the similar names from the blo.gs database (it was a couple of characters followed by a number), but if they had been clever enough to give each account truly distinct names, this is the sort of mess that would have been difficult to clean up. (for me — presumably blogger could simply nuke all of the blogspot.com sites that had repeated links to the sites to which these blogs were linking.)

so i was not even called for a jury panel during my day at the court house. there was one group i was very glad to not be called in: the group of about five people called to report to the court in hollywood. (which i guess would not have been too bad, since it is near the hollywood and vine red line station, but still less convenient than downtown).

lucifer’s hammer by larry niven and jerry pournelle was a book that someone recommended after i read earth abides (or recommended in relation to someone else mentioning it). it was what i polished off while sitting in the jury assembly room. on top of being another end-of-the-world book (this time caused by the impact of a comet), it was even more fun because most of the characters experience the impact in and around the los angeles area.

like a lot of science fiction, it suffers from mediocre characters (particularly the bad guys in the last part of the story) and almost too many liberties taken with events and circumstances to make the plot work. i think the book works best as an apocalyptic tale, and the post-apocalyptic story is disappointingly conventional in comparison.