Terry Pratchett book list

I have to credit Douglas Adams with starting me reading as a teenager, I became a fan of his 5-part trilogy in 1985/6. I then started a brief drift into serious fantasy (Stephen Donaldson et al.) and found my first carpet-people book a year later. I tend to read in binges, completing a book in a matter of days (I used to read a book in a day, but I'm not that fit anymore.) The binge lasts for a few book, and then dries up for a whole season.

Try search in google for "terry pratchett book list" - and you get a really cool looking 'list' of books above all the regular search-engine marketing and results. It looks pretty cool:



Give it a try in google.
OK, so here is my list (in approximate order of publishing or reading) ones in RED have been read, green ones are still to be eaten.
The Colour of Magic
Truckers
Diggers
Wings
The Carpet People
The Light Fantastic
Equal Rites
Mort
Sourcery
Wyrd Sisters
Guards! Guards!
Pyramids
Eric
Moving Pictures
Reaper Man
Witches Abroad
Lords and Ladies
Small Gods
Men at Arms
Interesting Times
Soul Music
Maskerade
Feet of Clay
Hogfather
Jingo
Carpe Jugulum
The Last Continent
The Fifth Elephant
The Truth
The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents
The Last Hero
Thief of Time
Night Watch
Monstrous Regiment
The Wee Free Men
A Hat Full of Sky
Going Postal
Thud!
Wintersmith
Making Money
Unseen Academicals
I Shall Wear Midnight
Snuff
Dodger

Stamp collectors, Please Please

…send me a postcard/letter with A POST STAMP from South Africa, here is my address

Jacek Kubacki

12 Monkfield Lane

CB23 6AJ Cambourne

Cambs

UK

How to identify stuff

I found this cool website, where you can post pics of stuff you dont' know the name or function of. Requires just a Wordpress account, which you probably have if you read me anyway. I can never remember my wordpress password, I have written it down on a sticker under my desk-drawer.

I hope to identify this apparently electronic in nature do-hickey using reckonthatis.com . Happy surfing.

Update: A better link here http://reckonthatis.com/?p=245 I also added it to the flickr electronics porn group.

Glorious weekends

To say that life just goes on is the understatement of anyone who has lived through a single British summer. Having grown up closer to the tropics ,the length of the diurnal cycle is just mind bending. So yes, still alive, and yes still plugging away to at those buttons on the keyboard, mostly in frustration. Mostly looking forward to a holiday in RSA, will be back home for the first time in 6 years. Sweet.

Goodbye Lego Universe :-(

It's all over now, even the book is closing. I am just more than a bit torn up, that LU had to close their doors. At least we signed on soon after it launched, and had a great time and played and created, adventured and were kept safe. Is there life after Lego universe?

Green space panorama

Since I managed to make a pretty good panorama inside a small space, I also made one near my house in a very nice conservation zone. Besides being a conservation area, the location hints at it's early history as well.

taken here:
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&ll=52.29161,0.123956&spn=0.002825,0.004823&t=h&z=18
Please excuse the lack of editing the border. The stitched image size is reduced to about 30% of original, from 42 pics taken on my mobile phone. The trick to getting started is to stand in one spot and turn on your heel, taking pictures with about 30% overlap. Hold the camera at the same height all the while, and rotate as if you were a tripod. In a small space the camera actually needs to rotate on a small axis- but for this one I sat on a tree-stump and just wiggled around keeping my but on the same spot. So the camera's travel arc was a radius of about 1 foot. Even if a full 360 is not your thing, you can still crop it later on. Taking the pictures is really the hardest part - remember, you will need light, and preferably no shadows caused by a camera-flash.

If you have a yuppie phone, there is an 'app' for this, but for the rest of us.... to see how it's done, click http://softcircuitry.blogspot.com/2012/01/myshed-free-image-composite-editor.html

Time machine: (Hitches, but happy)

What you are about to read occured in the past - I believe it was 1999/2000. Flashbacks are normal for new-years.

It looks like the homeloan/bond money is going to take some time longer than expected to come through. Not really a problem, because I am hitting the highs again. I just got my Ancestry visa application all together and submitted, so now I can get on with more of my life, still have to sell the 2 cars, and find homes for the 2 dogs,


Home alone, and working
Been home-alone for a bit this week, means I got some work done on the contract, it is hard going, an unfamiliar environment like linux does slow you a little, but it is so cool when you realize what you were doing wrong, and discover a shortcut to do what you wanted to in a much simpler way. What I find so kinky is that it (linux SUSE) really does use less RAM. It is a great developer platform to work on, because most things work faster (except the help-system, which works on-line actually) because I have limited conenctivity it does hurt. Once in the UK I hope to corry on linux-ing and get totally broadband. I am still contemplating mail-bombing my buddies back in RSA the day I get fully connected. But that is all in the future, so much to get done before that time.


Oh, plug! I am building a TCP/IP gateway for Radio Transmission Services http://www.rtse.co.za/, the project is basically a small linux-box (about 7 inches across) with only one purpose, run a lightweight SUSE kernel and some realtime patches to do very precise modem-control in order to communicate back out to a very long customized RS485 network, and expose all the data via a modbus TCP/IP (open-mbus) over LAN.
I rarely dof my salesmans hat, but now I will pause to return myself to normal me.


signing off, Z

sorry, missing image.

I think this old picture was one of the first I took once I got here. Location: Hillingdon
To find what I was doing around that time, scroll back to mid 2006