Last weekend the Dutch weather stoke back at us. Planned 2 months in advance cycling trip around Hilversum was put in grave danger by a rain. Rain is the only condition, which could make cycling unbearable. Even the nicest parts of ‘t-Gooi looked like this:
We’ve made 54 km with 2 beer-stops in the middle and called it a day.
The second part of the Horus Heresy – False Gods was written by another writer – Graham McNeill (honestly, I’ve never heard of him before). Secretary of Aggression of 40.000 years old Imperium of Man, Horus is joining the Dark Side and plotting against his boss – The Emperor of Man. The first time some mystic elements appear in otherwise pure technical world.
May be the Emperor is a little bit of god. May be the creations of Chaos are a little bit demons. Officially the government is pure materialistic. But what could you do if mechanical devices start to register demonic activities and there are really measured consequences of miracles.
This book talks a bit more about normal mortal people, surrounding immortal Astartes and Primarchs. They also started to play their roles in the story. Althogh in case of any inconvenience they’re slaughtered by the warrior-beings without second thought.
With regret I have to say that Richard Morgan is most probably not the Gibson of 21-st century. “Woken Furies”, the third book of Takeshi Kovacs series is following the downhill from “Altered Carbon” to “Broken Angels“. This time the ex-super soldier returns to his homeworld and tries to resolve some horrible conflicts there.
The third time the same elaborate sex-scenes with all the female heroines in the book, the same envoy-conditioning fights (with all male heroes of the book), the same science-fiction discoveries. Doesn’t work as good as the first time. May be Richard is even “one book writer”. Anyway, I’m switching to Warhammer completely.
PS. Funny thing, the actor, who was narrating this audiobook didn’t read the first one at all. This is from “Altered Carbon”:
‘So much for training.’ It was a hard, male voice, the sort that habitually hangs around justice facilities. ‘What did they teach you in the Envoys anyway, Kovacs?’ That was when I had it. On Harlan’s World, Kovacs is quite a common name. Everyone knows how to pronounce it. This guy didn’t. He was speaking a stretched form of the Amanglic they use on the World, but even allowing for that he was mangling the name badly, and the ending came out with a hard ‘k’ instead of the slavic ‘ch’.
Apparently the narrator of the third book is obviously not from the Harlan’s world, because he doesn’t know, how to read “Kovacs” correctly.
Yesterday at 23:30 PM I’ve shut down a number of web-services, I’ve created in the last 4 years. A big part of my wor- life is finished. A bit frustrating that I can not even write about it properly. The company I’ve made it for is still in dispute with another company and only lawyers can say what they want in public about the case.
Anyway, I’ll try to continue and expand in the same field as before – e-commerce applications.
Meanwhile I’m trying to master a very hardcore old-school RPG - Demon’s Souls. I haven’t seen such hardcore games sinds Might and Magic 6 or 7. None of those console-style user-friendly features like auto-heal, auto-save, fast level-ups, fast gearing, etc. Just a lot of farming and munching. Very very hard stuff, I like it a lot.
And the third time I’m importing the same database over and over again. On step 3 of 5 I found some inconsistencies. It looks like we have a lot of contact details with missing data.
The biggest problems is that people don’t want to fill the information. They don’t care about internal structure (well, it’s not their structure, after all, it’s just mine).
So even if you set up some fields as “mandatory” in the forms, people will come with huge XLS-sheets of data to import. Where, of course, there will be no structure and a lot of data missing. You have to implement nazi-style policies in order to keep the information available for analysis
Well, the good thing is that after the migration the data will be clean after all.
Today I’ve started another migration of company data from one CRM to another. Last time I did it from Goldmine 6.0 to MS CRM 3.0. This time the task is much easier: from CRM 4.0 to CRM 4.0.
List of Things to migrate:
It’s almost always easier to break all the old data to small pieces and combine them into the new structure. At the same moment you can delete garbage and old data and even analyze, which parts of the CRM structure were more useful than another.
After already 3rd generation of the same business model I can see that some of the features of CRM are used by sales people and which aren’t. The most important for them by far are contact details and notes. Sales love notes, it allows them to store information without thinking about business intelligence models. Of course, sometimes they ask questions like “which resellers perform better in 2009, than in 2008″. For such questions you should have all order history stored in a neat structured way. Even if nobody is enjoying it every day.
Last two days were spend in futile attempts to merge a PC, PlayStation 3, LED TV, AV-receiver and 5 speakers into a working system. I think I finally got the Dolby sound working at the end, although without sub-woofer there isn’t much difference comparing to the TV stereo speakers.
I still need additional small table for all 3 big remote controls and I have to select the movies with a Sony game-pad. Universal remote solutions like Logitech Harmony don’t support PS3, it looks I have to wait for HTPC.
Also I’ve downloaded demo versions of best-of-the-best PlayStation 3 games:
The first question after buying a TV was: what exactly am I supposed to watch? I’ve never actually watched any broadcast TV-channels in by life. Of course, I love TV-shows and movies, I just don’t like the channels itself. Too many commercials, not enough choice. I prefer to get the content via the Internet.
This makes the problem a bit easier : how to transfer different audio/video content from a hard disk of a desktop to a TV?
There is, of course, technology, especially created for that – HTPC – Home Theater Personal Computer. It’s a Wintel-based computer, sitting next to the TV and using the TV as a big monitor. Only HTPC guaranties, that all the movies with different codecs and subtitles could be watched without glitches or delays. But it jas a disadvantage - you need a separate device.
However, the TV itself and, for example, a game console like Sony PlayStation have a possibility to play audio-video content via DLNA protocol directly from a PC. At least you get this solution for free. You must be able to install the DLNA-server and connect it to your TV. The Media Player on Windows 7 actually could do it, but I was not able to install it properly. Free solutions from Internet were not very stable: they crashed and gave strange error messages.
The solution with PlayStation looks much better. First of all, the software, which can stream video to the game station – PS3 Media Server looks much more stable. At least I was able to watch an episode of Fringe yesterday. Second , it’s possible to send the 5.1 sound not to the TV-speakers, but to an external 5.1 amplifier. The disadvantage is – you have to use a game controller to watch movies (or buy a special remote control for it).
All the solutions have their advantages and disadvantages. Probably I’ll have to try them all before choosing the best one.
Last weekend we’ve spend cycling in the northern parts of Rhine-Westphalia, an industrial region in the center of Germany. A friend of mine has developed a 165-km 2 days trip through the picturesque fields between Duisburg and Munster.
Here are some photos I’ve made:
This time I’ve tried to mix German beer and cycling. Surprisingly, it went really well!
Broken Angels is the sequel to “Altered Carbon” by newest cyberpunk idol Richard Morgan. Takeshi Kovac has again some nano- and megaenimies to crush with his “envoy conditioning”.
This book is less brutal and less sex-oriented. Actually it’s more sci-fi-oriented than the first one. We are getting more and more inside into the world of the future. How has the human race invented space travel and soul digitization? Was that a good decision (to invent all of this)?
First book had a typical “revenge” story. A crime has been committed and the protagonist must restore the justice. The second one is a “quest” story. A band of brothers are on a mission, they must destroy all the obstacles and reach the goal. And the finale is so mysterious, that I immediately started reading the third one, Woken Furies.
