Awake.

So, I seem to be awake again. Doing the usual 'morning' things: Drinking coffee, reading LJ, pickling my head, checking my email, etc, etc.

Still don't have much to say these days. *shrug*

Baaaa - Meme Sheepage

( Cut because its a boring meme. )

Free Books.

Everyone by now should know about Project Gutenberg by now, the group that is publishing freely downloadable public domain works. Most of these works are quite old; old enough that the copyrights have lapsed.

However, there are other sites out there like The Assayer and Textbook Revolution that are working to bring freely downloadable contemporary books to the internet. The first site caters to books of all types, and tries to select them based on quality (there's a lot of free junk out there -- even in book form) while the second site concentrates on textbooks for folks who can't afford textbooks. Check them out!

Deep Deep Drilling.

The Japanese are trying to drill down to get the first ever sample of the Earth's mantle. To do that, they've built a deep-sea submersible deep-drilling rig.

The Algebraist.

I just finished reading The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks. Its one of his non-culture science fiction works. It was pretty good, but I did have some troubles with it. Namely

1. The description of the main aliens of the novel left out some crucial information making it hard to figure out what they looked like. (They are dumbell shaped, but I could never consistently figure if they were axis vertical, or axis horizontal)
2. The book is about a search for a secret. A secret that I missed because the correct answer was one of my first assumptions which I then abandoned after being told that the entire galaxy had been working on solving the riddle for the last two million years. I mean, COME ON!
3. The secret is the exact same one that I plan to spring on some players in a Role Playing game scenario I've been working on for some time. Its not an important secret (it never occured to me to be a big secret) just an interesting surprise. So, once again I feel less original than I might.

The Sleep Plan

I couldn't sleep last night, so I went looking for a nightcap to help. I had planned to have a brown cow, but it turned out we were almost out of cream, so I did without a drink. Today, we have wine, and I'm now on my fourth glass. It seems to be working, because I'm getting quite sleepy. Although my coordination is going, I still seem to be able to touch type at a reasonable rate though...