Words, words, words

I’m so set for reading material for the next few weeks — it’s great!

Prairie just got me started reading an old series from Marion Zimmer Bradley, and I just finished the first book — The Inheritor — this morning. Unfortunately, I won’t have anything else in the series until this weekend.

No worries, though. Amazon just delivered Neil Gaiman’s newest work, Endless Nights, his return to the Sandman series.

And, on top of that, I picked up the latest book from Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver, the first book of a planned trilogy called The Baroque Cycle.

So if my posts are a little less frequent than they sometimes are for a bit…at least you know why. ;)

Neal Stephenson: Quicksilver

The newest book from one of my favorite modern authors, Neal Stephenson, is now available for pre-order at Amazon: Quicksilver: Volume One of the Baroque Cycle.

In this wonderfully inventive follow-up to his bestseller Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson brings to life a cast of unforgettable characters in a time of breathtaking genius and discovery, men and women whose exploits defined an age known as the Baroque.

Daniel Waterhouse possesses a brilliant scientific mind — and yet knows that his genius is dwarfed by that of his friends Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Robert Hooke. He rejects the arcane tradition of alchemy, even as it is giving birth to new ways of understanding the world.

Jack Shaftoe began his life as a London street urchin and is now a reckless wanderer in search of great fortune. The intrepid exploits of Half-Cocked Jack, King of the Vagabonds, are quickly becoming the stuff of legend throughout Europe.

Eliza is a young woman whose ingenuity is all that keeps her alive after being set adrift from the Turkish harem in which she has been imprisoned since she was a child.

Daniel, Jack, and Eliza will traverse a landscape populated by mad alchemists, Barbary pirates, and bawdy courtiers, as well as historical figures including Samuel Pepys, Ben Franklin, and other great minds of the age. Traveling from the infant American colonies to the Tower of London to the glittering courts of Louis XIV, and all manner of places in between, this magnificent historical epic brings to vivid life a time like no other, and establishes its author as one of the preeminent talents of our own age.

(via Atrios)

Nano-nano!

Just something that I find all sorts of nifty. According to an article in today’s Seattle P-I, Washington is going to house the hub of one of the centers for nanotechnology research. Nanotech has been one of the recent sci-fi concepts to really spark my imagination, especially after reading Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.

Stephenson burst upon the sci-fi scene with his second book, Snow Crash, which I babbled about a couple weeks ago when I was re-reading it. In The Diamond Age, Stephenson does for nanotechnology what he did for the internet and virtual reality in Snow Crash — takes today’s best existing ideas and theories and extrapolates them forward into the future to explore where the technologies can take us. It’s a fascinating read, and with the current apparent stagnation of the space program and George Bush’s restrictions on genetic research, nanotech seems to be one of the few sci-fi concepts with near-future possibilities. Going to be a lot of fun to see where all this could lead in the next 10 to 20 years.

Books and movies

Not much of an update today…things have been pretty slow this weekend. Spent just about all day Saturday at home, doing a lot of reading. Finished Snow Crash, burned right through Mindplayers, by Pat Cadigan, and just got started today on Sophie’s World, by Jostein Gaarder.

I did hit Blockbuster video and picked up three movies I hadn’t seen before. I went with Scary Movie (figured I might as well finally watch the thing — I think I was better off beforehand, though), Cherry Falls (about as entertaining as a silly little modern cheeseball teen-horror flick can get), and The Contender (by far the best of the three, a nice political drama). Of the three, the only one really worth watching was The Contender.

At the moment, I’m just pretty bored…looking forward to the day when I can get my ‘puters to my apartment. Ah, well. Tomorrow morning’s the second interview for the job I’m working on getting…hopefully all will go well.

Job details, more books, and monkeys

First off — as far as I can tell, I think the interview this morning went great! :) Here’s the details I’ve got on the job I may be getting hired for.

Turns out that the place I interviewed at today was a temp staffing agency called Todays. I’d actually applied for a data entry position through Monster.com, but when they saw my resume, they felt I was better qualified for a posting that wasn’t quite official yet. Should I get this spot, I’ll be working (pay attention now, this gets slightly tricky) at a local firm who’s name I can’t remember for Xerox as an employee of Todays. Got that?

See, Xerox has a service where they send trained operators out to various firms to run their equipment — Xerox knows that people who know what they’re doing are touching their equipment, and the firm doesn’t have to spend its own personnel resources on keeping the copiers going — works well for all parties involved. I’d end up getting dropped in the middle of this — officially a Today’s employee, temping with Xerox, but working at this firm.

But, there’s even a little more to it than this. As it turns out, this firm had a special request with this posting. They have an employee working in this area with ‘special needs’ — exactly what that means hasn’t been specified — and they wanted to see if they could get someone with at least some management/leadership experience. They don’t need a manager, but they did want someone who would be more able to and comfortable with working with this employee; able to give help when needed, act as something of a liason between this employee and others, and the like. Given the supervisorial (is that a word?) experience I have on my resume, Today’s felt that I would be a good pick, and apparently that impression held true during the interview today, as they seemed highly confident that I’d be called in on this job posting. So…now I just cross my fingers, but at least from where I’m standing, things look really good. Woohoo!

In other news….

Yeah, I’m a voracious reader. I posted yesterday that I’d just started re-reading Cliff Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg. Welp…that’s done with. Next up on the dock is Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, one of (if not the single) seminal works of “cyberpunk” fiction, and an acknowledged source of inspiration for many of today’s top computer/VR developers. Great stuff.

As for the monkeys. My parents were kind enough to drop me a bit of money to help me out until I start getting paychecks and get up and on my feet. So, me being the fine, upstanding, and responsible young man I am — I took the opportunity today after my job interview to go see a movie! Erm…hey, it was a whopping five bucks for the matinee, and I was in a good mood after the interview. So sue me. Anyway…went out to see Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, one of the big films I’d been waiting to see this summer. So how was it? Horrid — the end result was it’s a matinee at best…quite possibly only a rental. Much as it pains me to say that about a Tim Burton film, it’s true.