Ambivalent Tuesday
May. 24th, 2005 09:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annathepiper+/-0: Pulling a muscle in your leg sucks, but Tiger Balm does not. Liberal application of that last night made my leg feel a lot better.
+/-1: I'm testing media stuff on Win98SE and WinME of all things. This is annoyingly complicated, since all of our automation is geared to work on Windows 2000 or later AND since none of the Win98 or WinME boxes can talk directly to the company network. So I have to kludge stuff to make the automation actually run on the test servers. The biggest kludge of all involves having to port out every single one of my player tests into standalone VB files to run one at a time on the Win98 client--because I can't actually use the automation harness because #1, it won't run on Win98, and #2, if I run the harness on another box, e.g., XP, I can't enlist the stupid client as an agent due to the "not really on the intranet" problem. So it's faster than manual testing, but only slightly.
On the other hand, it's kind of cool that I'm actually doing weird stuff like this, where most of the rest of the time is just chugging through the standard tests being run on XP and Longhorn. It means I've got enough experience that they can trust me to deal with the weird stuff!
+/-2: Today, I leave early from work. This would be cool, except that I have to go to a doctor's appointment. It's a followup ultrasound to make sure all is well with what's left of my thyroid, and that the little nodules in there still remaining aren't trying to grow into large mutant nodules that will turn me into a plant crea--ahem. Er, sorry, watching a lot of Lost in Space lately. ;)
It will be kind of nice, at least, to get a bit of a different bus ride for once. And I've got Sharon Shinn's Summers at Castle Auburn with me in case of boredom, as well as my handheld with which I can write. Also, as medical procedures go, ultrasounds on the neck aren't annoying.
+/-3: And speaking of reading, I have now finished Julie Czerneda's Survival. Picoreview: good work by Ms. Czerneda as always, and boy do I want to be her when it comes to writing SF. I do, however, have some nitpicks.
The two biggest nitpicks are things that I saw mentioned in reader comments on Amazon.com, and with which I agree. One is that the ending is kind of abrupt, and the other is how Ms. Czerneda kept showing us the thoughts of Mac, her protagonist. She italicized them--as many writers do--but she also had a lot of them in past tense. This was rather distracting! As a reader, I'm conditioned to thinking of italicized thoughts as simply dialogue that's thought rather than spoken. The greater problem, too, was that her treatment of this was not consistent. Occasionally Mac's italicized thoughts were actually in present tense, which is what one would expect!
This is not like Ms. Czerneda, either; it doesn't happen in any of her other works. So I have to wonder what happened--if this was her fault or the fault of her copyeditor.
There are other quibbles I have with the story, but these are lesser ones... things like "so what was the point of taking this particular scientist and putting her in the thick of things? Why are her skills so crucial?" However, I'm willing to cut slack on this specifically because this is the first of a series--and unlike her previous series, which are genuine trilogies in which each book is a standalone story, this looks like it's going to be one big story. So I can deal with not having all the questions answered yet.
And, all this said, I did definitely enjoy the story. Mac was a likeable reluctant heroine, and I found her distinct lack of interest in affairs off Earth a bit of a refreshing switch--in fact, up until the story really gets underway, she hasn't even ever left the planet. This isn't something I'm accustomed to seeing in SF novels I read. :)
I really liked Brymn, who was the latest in Ms. Czerneda's colorful array of alien characters. And I sniffled at his eventual fate at the end of the book. Speaking of which, the ending definitely did pull a surprising fast one, because I just was not expecting that Brymn's race was actually responsible for the death and destruction! She did an extremely good job of making you THINK that the race that seems to be the bad guys are in fact trying to stop what's going on--and once that's revealed, there's also a good sense that even though Brymn's race is causing all these things, it's not because they're evil. They just have an extremely dangerous biological imperative going on, and the leaders of the Dhryn have been hiding their own history from their people. You get some small heads-up that this is coming, what with the reader finding out that among the Dhryn, biology and archaeology and even medicine--disciplines that would let the race at large have a clearer understanding of what's going on--are forbidden practices.
Nice little touches of technology all throughout the book, too.
All in all, though not up to the standards of A Thousand Words for Stranger, a very fun read. Definitely looking forward to Book 2 hitting paperback.
Monday miles: 1.0
Miles out of Hobbiton: 119.91
Miles to Rivendell: 338.09
+/-1: I'm testing media stuff on Win98SE and WinME of all things. This is annoyingly complicated, since all of our automation is geared to work on Windows 2000 or later AND since none of the Win98 or WinME boxes can talk directly to the company network. So I have to kludge stuff to make the automation actually run on the test servers. The biggest kludge of all involves having to port out every single one of my player tests into standalone VB files to run one at a time on the Win98 client--because I can't actually use the automation harness because #1, it won't run on Win98, and #2, if I run the harness on another box, e.g., XP, I can't enlist the stupid client as an agent due to the "not really on the intranet" problem. So it's faster than manual testing, but only slightly.
On the other hand, it's kind of cool that I'm actually doing weird stuff like this, where most of the rest of the time is just chugging through the standard tests being run on XP and Longhorn. It means I've got enough experience that they can trust me to deal with the weird stuff!
+/-2: Today, I leave early from work. This would be cool, except that I have to go to a doctor's appointment. It's a followup ultrasound to make sure all is well with what's left of my thyroid, and that the little nodules in there still remaining aren't trying to grow into large mutant nodules that will turn me into a plant crea--ahem. Er, sorry, watching a lot of Lost in Space lately. ;)
It will be kind of nice, at least, to get a bit of a different bus ride for once. And I've got Sharon Shinn's Summers at Castle Auburn with me in case of boredom, as well as my handheld with which I can write. Also, as medical procedures go, ultrasounds on the neck aren't annoying.
+/-3: And speaking of reading, I have now finished Julie Czerneda's Survival. Picoreview: good work by Ms. Czerneda as always, and boy do I want to be her when it comes to writing SF. I do, however, have some nitpicks.
The two biggest nitpicks are things that I saw mentioned in reader comments on Amazon.com, and with which I agree. One is that the ending is kind of abrupt, and the other is how Ms. Czerneda kept showing us the thoughts of Mac, her protagonist. She italicized them--as many writers do--but she also had a lot of them in past tense. This was rather distracting! As a reader, I'm conditioned to thinking of italicized thoughts as simply dialogue that's thought rather than spoken. The greater problem, too, was that her treatment of this was not consistent. Occasionally Mac's italicized thoughts were actually in present tense, which is what one would expect!
This is not like Ms. Czerneda, either; it doesn't happen in any of her other works. So I have to wonder what happened--if this was her fault or the fault of her copyeditor.
There are other quibbles I have with the story, but these are lesser ones... things like "so what was the point of taking this particular scientist and putting her in the thick of things? Why are her skills so crucial?" However, I'm willing to cut slack on this specifically because this is the first of a series--and unlike her previous series, which are genuine trilogies in which each book is a standalone story, this looks like it's going to be one big story. So I can deal with not having all the questions answered yet.
And, all this said, I did definitely enjoy the story. Mac was a likeable reluctant heroine, and I found her distinct lack of interest in affairs off Earth a bit of a refreshing switch--in fact, up until the story really gets underway, she hasn't even ever left the planet. This isn't something I'm accustomed to seeing in SF novels I read. :)
I really liked Brymn, who was the latest in Ms. Czerneda's colorful array of alien characters. And I sniffled at his eventual fate at the end of the book. Speaking of which, the ending definitely did pull a surprising fast one, because I just was not expecting that Brymn's race was actually responsible for the death and destruction! She did an extremely good job of making you THINK that the race that seems to be the bad guys are in fact trying to stop what's going on--and once that's revealed, there's also a good sense that even though Brymn's race is causing all these things, it's not because they're evil. They just have an extremely dangerous biological imperative going on, and the leaders of the Dhryn have been hiding their own history from their people. You get some small heads-up that this is coming, what with the reader finding out that among the Dhryn, biology and archaeology and even medicine--disciplines that would let the race at large have a clearer understanding of what's going on--are forbidden practices.
Nice little touches of technology all throughout the book, too.
All in all, though not up to the standards of A Thousand Words for Stranger, a very fun read. Definitely looking forward to Book 2 hitting paperback.
Monday miles: 1.0
Miles out of Hobbiton: 119.91
Miles to Rivendell: 338.09
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no subject
Date: 2005-05-24 05:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-24 07:12 pm (UTC)The fun part of this entire exercise is going to be documenting what I've done, just so that the next time this comes up, somebody besides me can do this!
no subject
Date: 2005-05-24 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-24 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-24 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-24 07:01 pm (UTC)