William Gibson: Spook Country
Tuesday, September 25
Festival Room, SCH
7:00 PM

Author William Gibson speaks on his new novel, Spook Country. Book signing to follow. This is a free event, everyone is welcome.

In Spook Country, William Gibson, author of eight critically acclaimed previous novels, picks up the thread that began in his most recent bestseller Pattern Recognition, continuing to probe cultural changes in the U.S. since 9/11 and the space where politics and paranoia intersect. Like Pattern Recognition, this latest Gibson novel takes place in a contemporary setting and carries into our new century his perceptions of technology, globalization, and terrorism.

Of course, relaying this news on my blog has a potential backfiring effect of having more people show up causing an even larger queue, but whatever. I enjoyed Neuromancer and Count Zero even if I can’t really remember what happened in either of those two books. I do have Pattern Recognition although I don’t think I’m even thirty pages in on that book.

Anyway, I’m likely going to go to this and am going to try and find out how many books he’s going to be signing. If someone wants me to pick up a copy of Spook Country for him and also get it signed (since I’ll be in the queue), I can do that (assuming he’s going to sign more than one copy per person), just let me know. I’m probably going to contact Mr. Bittle and see if he wants in on this.

I’m going to be watching Stardust again tomorrow. Apparently, Kitty wanted to check it out after Sam showed her the trailer. I didn’t blog about it after I watched it last month but I really enjoyed it actually. I was originally planning to see it again but that never ended happening. I think I got swamped by work or something. It doesn’t really matter anymore as it seems that fate has managed to steer me to it for a second go. :)

I woke up today with an uncomfortable back pain. I’m not sure what the cause is (since I’m no doctor), but I’m going to guess that it’s the cause of the beach chair that Sam lent me to use. I don’t actually have a desk chair so he’s lending me that to use. A beach chair isn’t exactly the best replacement for a real desk chair, if it can even be thought of as a potential replacement.

I’ll see how I do for the next day or two. However, I think that I’m probably just going to suck it up and go buy a proper chair even if it’s just a lame folding chair. Not being able to sit with your back (reasonably) straight sucks.

Well, I laid down my order for a 24″ Dell monitor yesterday. Rest assured that I will have photos up of my desk once I get it up and running. In the meantime, I’m going to have to start hunting for a 1920×1200 wallpaper. ;)

I was going down the aisles towards the express lanes at Loblaws today when I spotted an issue of ELLE Canada sporting the lovely Cate Blanchett. Those of you that have known me for a while know that I’m absolutely crazy about her. So after gazing in awe for about five seconds or so, I picked one up and proceeded to the cash register.

Incidentally, it was a female serving the register which probably made her giggle on the inside but I guess at the end of the day, whether that person was male or female, seeing a guy pick up a copy of ELLE probably is a little strange, if not downright disturbing. I think my public image here in Kanata, Ottawa has probably been ruined as a result. However, since I’m leaving on Saturday, I guess it’s not really that big of a deal. Today was probably my last trip to the grocery store here anyway so I shouldn’t have to worry about getting strange looks from anyone. ;)

Since this new blog’s inception, when it stopped being named ‘Sigil of Hope’, the title banner was not clickable because unlike ‘Sigil of Hope’ that actually had the text there to route the reader back to the main page, I hid the ‘Hantsuki’ text and only used an image instead. Thus, there were no <a> tags to be had. As the image was being rendered by CSS, it was not immediately obvious to me as to how I would go about implementing a hyperlink.

This issue actually bothered me quite a bit but it wasn’t until Sam complained to me directly recently that I decided to investigate the matter a little more. With the help of some googling, I was able to track down an onclick attribute that can be embedded within a <div> tag. You can do the same by embedding onclick="location.href='www.yourblog.com';" style="cursor: pointer;" into your own <div> tag, enjoy!

Well, I finally went ahead and have placed down my order for a ThinkPad T61 notebook. Jen said that she got her notebook from Lenovo within the week’s end. So since I’ve placed this order today on Monday, I suppose that I should be getting my notebook before Friday. More to come then when the notebook is actually in my hands.

Stardust, a novel by famed author Neil Gaiman, will have its movie adaptation premiere tomorrow. I would’ve opted in on watching it tomorrow after work but have chosen not to due to other obligations. Watching it on Saturday has a pro in and of itself since catching a movie before noontime brings the standard student price down from ten dollars to a mere five. I’ve never read the book although I have read Gaiman’s American Gods and Neverwhere, both of which were fine novels, so I presume this shouldn’t disappoint. And when you consider the fact that Gaiman himself is one of the producers, they just can’t possibly screw this up.

Wow, the new site sure looks a lot more professional than the old one. Navigation’s also a lot easier now without having to constantly go back and forth just to switch sections. The discography section itself is much improved now that everything is all laid out instead of waiting for that box to scroll, that old way sure was annoying.

I can now also finally read the news. I’m not sure if this is a Linux issue or not since I’m pretty sure I tried to browse it from Sam’s computer when he had booted into Windows, but the fact of the matter is that the Japanese text is now being rendering properly despite it being embedded in Flash. Woohoo!

Well, I’m back from my camping trip with a lot of bug bites but at least I’m alive. On the blogging front, I intend to devote a detailed entry to the event in the near future. With this entry I just might get Gallery going on my website…but, probably not. I’ll also be writing up an entry for the twelfth episode of sola which I just finished watching minutes ago. I also have a few uncategorized entries planned but as they are (shockingly) “generic” and really serves no purpose for my readers, I’m not going to enumerate them here.

This next week’s going to be rather action-packed since it’ll be my team’s last work week before we present a somewhat-workable demo to our mentors on July 4th (although let it be known that we are way behind schedule, regrettably). We’ll be having a “Future Blue Day” event in the Ottawa lab on Tuesday which is some kind of a student-oriented…thing, at IBM, losing a whole work day right there, yikes. On Wednesday there’s a golf tournament thing in the afternoon-evening-ish time range which I now realize is actually in direct conflict with my intent of watching Live Free or Die Hard on its opening day. Dang, I really dropped the bomb this time by accepting to go on this stupid tournament.