The Great Hunt

Having finished The Great Hunt, I now have a mere 12 books left in The Wheel of Time Series. Well this book did answer my questions from The Eye Of The World.

This one seemed a bit less LOTR like. Some similarity to Dune - the power that is primarily used by women, but on rare occasion can be used by men. It might turn out to be something different, but the whole connection to the multiverse through the stone tablets seems overdone (although this book does predate Stargate and Anathem so guess I can't blame it), and there do seem to be clues that something else is going on.

Anyway, good stuff.

A Walk In The Woods

I read A Walk In The Woods over winter break, but since I haven't felt like writing I'm just now posting about it.

It's a fairly funny story of a guy who decides to hike the appalachian trail. The author, Bill Bryson, was unprepared for the challenge and his hiking buddy was hilariously unprepared. So it is an interesting view of hiking and America through the eyes of someone who doesn't have backpacking experience. He did do some interesting research and include it in the book - such as he's very down on the national forest/parks services.

Overall if you're into hiking/backpacking it's a funny read.

Quick Avatar/Dollhouse

I've been meaning to blog about actual life events, like thanksgiving and skiing and new years and... but just haven't been in the writing mood lately.

But two quick items:

(Minor Avatar spoiler): When Jake is getting onto the back of the giant dragon thing, hiss thought is that it is the biggest thing in the sky and doesn't get attacked so it probably doesn't bother looking up. I really think that I've heard almost the exact same thing before, but can't seem to remember from where. Does anyone know what I'm thinking of?

(Minor Dollhouse spoiler): I'm 95% certain that the company I work for made an appearance in the last episode of Dollhouse. When Victor hands Tommy a piece of circuit board to burn, the main chip on that board has a big M on it, I'm pretty sure it's the logo of the company I work for (pausing on hulu is a bit too fuzzy for 100% certainty). My guess is that it was from a hard drive they had broken apart.

Motion Sensors

Remember that Better Off Ted episode where the company decides to control the whole building with motion sensors, but it turns out the sensors only see white people? Yeah, way to go hp.

I'm Telling You This Because I Want To Talk

Have you ever noticed that thing where when there is a group of people and a portion of the group is listening to one person while others are listening to another then all the attention shifts away from one of the speakers the audience-less speaker will just kind of stall while looking around for anyone to continue telling the story to, even if the new audience has no overlap with the old one. And there's that awkward bit of eye contact language as the story teller tries to drag people in and audience members try to avoid glances or get sucked in.

I find the whole eye contact communication fairly funny. But what I find especially amazing is how little it matters who gets sucked in to hear the rest of the story. If someone starts talking you can give the person the benefit of the doubt that she/he thinks there is information the audience would appreciate knowing (or would find amusing or...). Then when the audience is lost if the person only started again upon regaining the attention of the original audience it would be one thing. But as far as I can tell it rarely matters who gets sucked in by the eye contact game. Which I think eliminates pretty much any possibility other than the story teller is talking purely for his/her own sake. Not that this is such a terrible thing - telling others a story can be very therapeutic. But the instances of this scenario really make it seem like a huge portion of communication must be more for the sake of the speaker than listener. Yeah I know I'm far from the first person to come to this conclusion. And yes as I started writing this post I did realize the irony of writing about people who talk for their own sake without caring who is listening on my blog.