Mini-Mini-Review: A Canticle for Leibowitz

Title: A Canticle for Leibowitz
Author: Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Awards: 1961 Hugo

When I picked up the book, I looked at the editorial reviews on the outside that acclaimed it as “one of the most significant literary works of our time.” At first, I dismissed it as purely being editorial drivel. I didn’t remember seeing it on any reading lists in the past, and I’m not sure I had even heard of it before picking it up from the library.Experiencing it over the course of today [yes, I started and finished the book in one day], I found my initial reaction to be… well, wrong.

The story is about a post-apocalyptic Earth and the ongoing history of a religious order dedicated to Issac Leibowitz. Among other things, the book goes into conflicts between religion and science and the world in general. It’s also a generally good science-fiction novel. Over the course of the three acts, one cannot help but pick up the allusions to the history of the West as we know it, with the final act closely approximating today’s Earth. While I won’t reveal how the end of the book happens, it’s interesting to see how Miller lays out the ideas of history being cyclical.

In one sense, I wish I had taken more time to read the book. It’s not often that I pick up a book and find myself addicted not only by the plot stories, but by the philosophical questions it poses. One of the reasons I read books is to gain a better understanding of the world from them, and this book has caused me to rethink a few religious items. It is in all of these senses that I find this book one of the most intriguing ones I’ve ever read, and one certainly worthy of its accolades. I just wish more people would read the book.

Synopsis: Highly recommended as a read, especially if you’re a fan of post-apocalyptic anything, philosophy, the conflict between religion and the world around it, religion vs. science, and so on.

Snow and Tylenol… a not-so-nice mix

Last night, I checked the forecast and saw that we were supposed to be getting maybe an inch of snow. Let’s just say that the weathermen were off… by a lot. Between 7 and 8, the airport got 2 inches of snow, and we ended up with about 3.8″ in total, not to mention the blowing-and-drifting of the new snow / last week’s.

After struggling on the roads around the noon hour on my way to and from a lunch meetup with a friend, I got back to find an email from my boss telling it us was ok to leave early and/or work from home if you can. I decided it was a good thing to do so, especially if the blowing snow would cause any more issues. (Most of the interstates were closed this morning, and I-69 had multiple crashes involving multiple cars with multiple fatalities…) Surprisingly, my drive home was nice and easy, other than the bit of snow in the complex’s parking lot.

After working for a while, I started developing a pretty bad headache and a bit of a fever. I went searching through my bathroom and found a bottle of Tylenol. This is where the fun began… the bottle wasn’t all that difficult; just a twist lid with a arrow on the lid and one on the container. Allegedly, you match up the arrows and push up on the lid. However, this bottle refused to do it. I tried for a while in the aligned position, then tried twisting it all over the place, including putting it 180 degrees away from it. Nothing worked.

Then I looked at the bottle, saw the expiration date from last month, and said “Screw it.” The bottle is now sitting in the trash still not opened, and my headache has gotten a bit better without the help of Tylenol.

Movie Mini-Review: THX-1138

Last week while I was at the library, I was browsing the DVD section trying to see if there was something exciting to watch. I came across THX-1138, and knew I had to watch it. I knew it was George Lucas’s first directing work, so my expectations weren’t very high. However, watching it was important to me so I could see how Lucas has grown over the years, and to finally get some of the references to THX and 1138 that have been made in Lucasfilm / Lucasarts products over the last 30 years.

I’m not really sure what to say about the movie; it’s a futuristic story of a dystopia full of drug-controlled people living in a enclosed city. It’s not really my favorite genre of movie, and there were times that it was just too artsy for me. [The austere sets, though, allowed me to visualize parts of Brave New World for the first time.] Also, I’m not sure that George Lucas has really grown at all in his love scene writing skills over the past 40 years, even after he recut the film (I watched the Director’s Cut, which is the only form available on DVD at the moment.) That being said, it’s still interesting to watch as a way to see how George Lucas started off. Believe me, you could pick plenty of worse films to watch.

The 25 Secrets Meme

Over the past week or so, the 25 Secrets meme has been spreading through Facebook like wildfire. I’ve seen several them move through Facebook in the past few years, but never quite as much as this one. Basically, you’re supposed to list 25 secrets about yourself, then tag 25 other people to do it. I figured it would be worthwhile for me to re-post up on here, especially as a way of introducing myself more to you all. List after the jump.

Programming Languages… what to choose next?

One of my ongoing goals over the last few months has been to learn some additional programming languages. At school, I used a lot of Java and C, with a very small smattering of C++ thrown in. I dabbled in Python and bash scripts, although this was more due to me needing to edit / support other people’s scripts than me writing things on my own.

At my internship during school, I got a chance to work on a lot of various pieces of Java. In my current job, I’m working with a fair amount of C# and Javascript (along with a few ASP .NET pieces). However, due to the web nature of the product, I have only touched just a small capacity of the .NET Framework.

I realize that I need to keep working on developing my skills, especially to save my butt in the economy today if my current job doesn’t pan out for whatever reason (I don’t suspect it will, but neither did employees of a lot of other companies). One thought is to continue working on other parts of C#, but I’m not sure if I want to run under Mono or not (at home, I have a MacBook Pro, and I’m not sure I want to run Visual Studio in a virtual machine, or boot up into Windows strictly for programming). I’ve also strongly considered picking up Objective-C (in conjunction with Cocoa), Python, Perl, and Lisp at one point or another. There’s plenty of more esoteric languages out there that I can try out too.

At this point, I’m not sure what I want to go with. I think I’m going to stick with a well-known language, but which one I don’t know. Once I figure it out, though, I’ll try to blog my experiences.