It Wasn't Syzygy

Michael Coney, whose Friends Come In Boxes book I read not long ago, died on November 4th.

I had barely heard of him, as I hadn't heard of most Canadian SF/fantasy authors, before ConText '89 in Edmonton, the written-SF-oriented con that marked the inauguration of what is now SF Canada, Canada's first speculative fiction writers' organization(and where I met my wife). But I remember vividly the "Lonely Cry Reader's Theatre" panel, where he, Eileen Kernaghan, Mary Choo, and Rhea Rose, possibly among others, read scenes from each other's novels, including them all putting on red pointy hats and reading from Coney's most recent novel, Fang The Gnome.

After ConText, Coney was added to the list of authors I looked for at used bookstores; as usual, it was years before I actually got around to reading most of them. Fang The Gnome itself proved to be a bizarre type of Arthurian novel, as indicated by its sequel, King of The Scepter'd Isle, but there were, in fact, gnomes. Most of his earlier work tended to be science fiction--and even the gnome books were part of a larger "Greataway" cycle, which was mostly SFnal.

My favourite book of his would likely to be the book I read as Rax, though apparently it was earlier published as Hello Summer, Goodbye and later as Pallahaxi Tide. It's a coming-of-age story set on an alien world with an eccentric orbit which is about to move into its long winter.

Shortly before his death he released three unpublished novels(one of them a sequel to Rax, apparently!)on his website. I should check them out sometime.

Silent Sorrow In Empty Boats

Somehow I never end up reading LJ on the weekend. I get caught up on Monday or Tuesday, then I try to keep up for a few days, maybe until Thursday or Friday, and then the weekend comes and I end up doing other things. Maybe it's the larger blocks of time that make me more inclined to play games or undertake larger projects, or work on the wiki, or whatever. And, of course, "Threshold" is on Friday nights, and "The West Wing" on Sundays, though neither of them seemed to be on this weekend.

It's hard to be sure, though, because TV Guide has been screwing with us. We started subscribing to it a few years ago, probably back when we actually had a bunch of cable channels--probably before Simon was born. I mean, I remember we started watching "The West Wing" because it was their pick of the new season--that long ago. But apparently they're in trouble, and haven't been able to afford to produce separate issues for their various locations. Instead, they munged them all together. Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and Winnipeg, at the very least, all jammed in there, multiple time zones, overlapping channel listings, four different types of shadings so that you can tell which city's channel you're looking at. It was a bit confusing, and annoying, but it worked.

Two weeks ago, though, they came out with their new edition. Still the same cities, but now all the times are in the Pacific time zone, and instead of having channel numbers, they've arranged them all alphabetically. This arrived around the same time as "Last chance to renew to avoid service interruption!" And I think that this time I am not going to renew. Send them a message to stop screwing around with us.

Of course, this means that we need a substitute. I've been going to canada.com, which has a "TVTimes" link--I can search the program grid and look at the listings for the next however many hours. It works fine, though it's downstairs and the TV isn't. Sometimes all we need is a sheet of paper with our regular shows and the usual times and channels they're on. It's nice to hear about the new shows, and a bit of the show gossip, but we've survived without it in the past. And let's face it, if we watch more than about five hours of TV a week, we feel like our computer time is being cut into, and as a result of that we don't pay for more than the basic channels. If we had Space Channel we'd never get anything done. Still, I don't want to miss the return of "Scrubs", assuming that they do bring it back on, and "24", and that stuff.

How do the rest of you find out about your TV schedules? Is there some nifty online site that lets you select your shows and lets you know when they're on, and when they're new episodes, and all that? That'd be the best, truly, but then again it may be overkill.

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What I did do this weekend was finally get around to backing up my computer. I started backing things up back in September, but never finished it. I had vague intentions of doing it this weekend, but it didn't actually crystallize until I was trying to figure out what to do on Saturday night after the kids were in bed...and I realized I could do my backup and read A Feast For Crows at the same time. So I did.

I had bought more CDs on Saturday, too, to help bolster my vague intentions. Unfortunately, the morons at "The Source At Circuit City", formerly Radio Shack, have now placed all of their CD-Rs and CD-RWs and DVD-Rs behind the counter, so I can't just walk up, grab the ones I want off the shelf, and take them to the till. Instead, I had to rely on the primate behind the counter to get them for me, and I was in a hurry, so I didn't check brands or anything. I usually get Verbatim, which have served me well enough. The CD-R's I got were Fujifilm, and they seem to be working okay, but the CD-RW's were Memorex 4x. My drive is a few years old, but it can burn CD-RW's at 10x, so these were glacial--21 minutes to fill them up. They claimed to be 700 MB, though, and the Verbatim ones are 650 MB, so I thought I'd try them. The first disc worked fine, but the second one kept giving me errors, and between that and Nero Burning Rom(always liked that name...)deciding that I was now burning the empty second disc of my multi-disc compilation, I got fed up.

So I went back to my last backup CD-RW's. I always backup onto CD-RW's when I can, so that I can reuse them. With my abortive September backup, I was trying very carefully to not erase a disc until I'd already backed up the updated versions of the same directories, in case of any mishap, but this time I said to hell with it and just stuck 'em in and started erasing and recopying. I also used a much easier system, instead of trying to find the best-fit of a number of disparately-sized directories, which reminds me of trying to back up my 40 MB hard drive onto 5.25" floppies. This time, I just picked a drive and started copying directories, splitting it into subdirectories if possible until the disc was full...and then pick up from there. I did a little bit of jockeying, trying not to split up too many directories, but it still worked fairly well. I imagine there's tools out there that just take 650 MB chunks of your filesystem and copy them, but I don't trust those quite as much.

I ended up not actually using more discs than I used for my last full backup, which I believe was in March. Despite the fact that I have nonetheless been decreasing the amount of free space on my hard drives, it's not that hard to account for. For one thing, I did take the opportunity to not actually back up stuff that was, say, installed from a CD and could be reinstalled from there. Most of the time, it's too much work to disentangle static program files from, e.g., saved game files, but if it means skipping 800 MB of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 graphics files, then I appreciate the savings. I also don't bother backing up my Cygwin installation--I can reinstall it, albeit slowly, from the net, and it's the content in my home directory that's more important. Also, a lot of new files have been MP3's that I've "backed up" by burning them into audio CDs.

But I'm done now--and finished A Feast For Crows, too. More on that later, perhaps. I can once again rest secure that my files are one step further away from oblivion, and also see if I can manage to move my Outlook Express mailboxes off of C: drive without risking losing their contents...