whining about stuff no one cares about
The other day I finally saw the doctor about my rather persistent cough, and it looks like allergies are the culprit. I got a prescription for heavy-duty cough medicine (the little gel-pills that limit the coughing reflex), generic Claritin, and antibiotics just in case, and with the allergy medicine I don't really need the cough medicine. Springtime has steadily gotten more difficult for me over the years, and this is about the worst it's ever been. It doesn't help at all that there's a certain flowering shrub (searching on Google I think it's called white star jasmine) that companies in the area love to put all over the place that I'm very allergic to. Even with the allergy medicine I've still got a sore throat and such. OTOH compared to some of the other things that can cause a persistent cough, allergies are pretty trivial, and at the very least it'll go away once the pollen count goes down.
I finished two audiobooks recently. A Canticle For Leibowitz is a very interesting post-apocalyptic tale put out in 1960. It reflects the nuclear fears of the time while incorporating a powerful religious element based on real-life monastic traditions. My only complaint is that in a sense it feels like the author had three interlinked stories and just wrote the bits of them he thought were interesting. It tells of wastelands with hideous mutant tribes, monks preserving technical documents as Memorabilia, and a new empire rising up from the ashes of a nuclear holocaust. Little Brother is a very different novel, but thought-provoking to say the least. A high school kid who does a little hacking here and there is in San Francisco when a terrorist attack puts the kind of paranoia we've been subjected to since the "War on Terror" began goes into overdrive and turns the city into a surveillance state. It's a very politically-charged story, strongly reflecting the matters that Cory Doctorow so passionately blogs and speaks about, but it's also full of fascinating real-life stuff (cryptography is a genuinely fascinating subject, to say nothing of the protest movements of the 60s and 70s) and more importantly a compelling coming-of-age story.
I finished two audiobooks recently. A Canticle For Leibowitz is a very interesting post-apocalyptic tale put out in 1960. It reflects the nuclear fears of the time while incorporating a powerful religious element based on real-life monastic traditions. My only complaint is that in a sense it feels like the author had three interlinked stories and just wrote the bits of them he thought were interesting. It tells of wastelands with hideous mutant tribes, monks preserving technical documents as Memorabilia, and a new empire rising up from the ashes of a nuclear holocaust. Little Brother is a very different novel, but thought-provoking to say the least. A high school kid who does a little hacking here and there is in San Francisco when a terrorist attack puts the kind of paranoia we've been subjected to since the "War on Terror" began goes into overdrive and turns the city into a surveillance state. It's a very politically-charged story, strongly reflecting the matters that Cory Doctorow so passionately blogs and speaks about, but it's also full of fascinating real-life stuff (cryptography is a genuinely fascinating subject, to say nothing of the protest movements of the 60s and 70s) and more importantly a compelling coming-of-age story.