Booked Between the Eyes

Well, tonight I finished one of those rare books that manages to be so throughly absorbing, so full of neat ideas and characters and interactions and things, that it somehow manages to leave your brain feel like it's crammed to overflowing with the story you've just finished. In this case, that book was Lord of Emperors, the second book in the Sarantine Mosaic duology. (Yeesh, "duology"...what a word. Even the spellchecker in this thing doesn't recognize it.) It's a truly amazing piece of work, and one of the best fantasy novels I've read in a very long time.

In other news, this is my first ever journal entry using Xjournal, one of three OS X clients for Livejournal. My new laptop did indeed come yesterday, and after a bit of panic, I managed to get the memory upgraded and OS X installed. It's a little tricky to type on this thing, as I severely dislike keyboards with a flat keyboard-level thing just beneath them...it affects how I place my hands. But I'm getting by. One might even say I'm coming to enjoy it. As I type this, I'm sitting on a chair on my porch/doorstep thingie, with earphones plugged into the jack listening to some tunes. This whole wireless thing is awesome.

OS X is taking some getting used to...but the funny thing is, it really does combine some of the best features of Unix with the best features of a windowing OS. I can use pure, genuine ssh to connect to my Linux box indoors. There are a lot of things I don't have set up quite the way I want them, but I expect I can thrash them out this weekend.

Think I'll go inside and put this thing on a table and stop straining my neck.