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Back to my ever-growing reading list. This time I read The Appeal by John Grisham. This is another one of his legal thrillers. The man knows how to write legal thrillers, so I’m glad he’s back to what he does best. What is The Appeal about? A company with a factory in Mississippi has just had a huge verdict returned against them. They were dumping harmful chemicals into the ground and the people in the area started getting sick. They are going to be appeal the case before the Mississippi Supreme Court and the company wants to get a friendly justice elected to the court. I saw an interview where Grisham said that this is the most political book that he’s written. He makes a good argument for appointing state Supreme Court justices instead of electing them. He gets Mississippi, its people, and their attitudes right so the book felt very familiar. It’s a pretty good book and I enjoyed reading it.

• Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
• Timeline, Michael Crichton
• Unshapely Things, Mark Del Franco
• Finding Serenity, Jane Espenson
• Serenity Found, Jane Espenson
• On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt
• On Truth, Harry G. Frankfurt
• The Appeal, John Grisham
• Playing for Pizza, John Grisham
• Night Watch, Sergey Lukyanenko
• Day Watch, Sergey Lukyanenko
• Twilight Watch, Sergey Lukyanenko
• Final Watch, Sergey Lukyanenko
• The Taking, Dean Koontz
• His Majesty’s Dragon, Naomi Novik
• Throne of Jade, Naomi Novik
• Black Powder War, Naomi Novik
• Empire of Ivory, Naomi Novik
• Victory of Eagles, Naomi Novik
• Lyra’s Oxford, Philip Pullman
• Unholy Domain, Dan Ronco
• Elantris, Brandon Sanderson
• Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare

It seems like I get a lot of emails at work that fall into the following catergories:

• A is leaving for a new job. If you would like to make a contribution toward a gift…
• B has had a death in the family. If you would like to contribute toward a plant…
• We’re having a baby shower for C. If you like to buy a gift or contribute toward a group gift…

I like doing it for the most part. It’s a nice and thoughtful thing to do. I’m sure they would do the same for me. Of course it’s always optional, but I used to feel like I needed to contribute something for each one. However, it started to get on my nerves after a while especially when a bunch come up around the same time. Now I’m a little more selective about which ones I contribute to. Is that mean? If it’s someone I don’t know and never see I don’t usually make a contribution. It’s not as bad now as it was when I first started here, but I work with a lot of people so it still happens a lot.

I talked to my sister about this a few months ago and she has the same complaint about where she works. And she’s got a good 10 years on me in the work force. I think part of the reason I started to get annoyed is that I hardly ever carry cash on me and when I do it’s for a specific reason. I always have to go out of my way to get money each time I get one of those emails. Another part of it is that I’m tired of giving away money when there’s stuff that I want need to be doing with it. How selfish!

It’s been about a year and a half, but I remember being upset that I didn’t get the “free” portable DVD player that I was promised for signing up for DirecTV. Instead I got a crappy DVD player and then a second one. I didn’t think about calling in and complaining. I guess I just figured that DirecTV changed their deal sometime after I made the call to order service and something in the fine print gave them a right to do that. Every time I see portable DVD players in stores I kinda want one, but not enough to actually buy one myself.

Last week I got an interesting letter. There’s been a class-action lawsuit filed against DirecTV for not coming through on those portable DVD players. I had no idea. So there are others who got screwed like me. That must be why those two posts I made about the DirecTV gift received a lot of page views back then. It seems like a lot of people didn’t get DVD players at all. It’s great that I’ll finally be getting that portable DVD player. That’s all I want.

This letter about the lawsuit came on the same day that my DirecTV bill came. Is that a coincedence?

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 when it came out in late March/early April or whenever.  I liked it, but there were problems.  I kept getting JavaScript errors and I would loose formatting when I edited certain pages.

When WordPress 2.5.1 came out a few weeks ago I immediately upgraded.  This update is such a drastic improvement visually and I haven’t had any problems using it so far.

Of course, people that just come here to read the entries won’t see any difference.  However, if you use WordPress on your site and haven’t upgraded to 2.5.1, don’t wait any longer.  

Today, my roommate and friend John is leaving Starkville. He got a new job in Jackson and will be living in Brandon. His first day is on Monday. I’m glad that he’s starting on a career and that he’ll be getting out of Starkville, but I’m going to miss having him around. The good thing is that he’s not that far away and we’ll probably be able to meet up from time to time. Just reminiscing right now.

I’m seriously annoyed with my desktop computer at home. The computer, which is only about a year old, recently started shutting down on its own. I noticed after the big April Windows Update, my icons weren’t showing up in taskbar. Maybe I should’ve done a system restore then, but I didn’t. The shutdown problems started soon after that, so I figured the update might have been causing my computer to act crazy. Now I’m not so sure about that.

Using software that came with the motherboard, I checked the CPU temperature. Mostly it runs around 180° F, but if I open up a browser or start playing music, I’ll see the temperature jump to a cool 220° F. Ouch! So, I think that may be why my computer is shutting down. All the fans inside are still working, so I don’t know what could have changed.

I have also noticed that some of the decorative lights on the computer case are no longer working. Maybe this weekend I’ll take the time to look at it more closely. I’m not really a hardware person, but maybe I can figure something out.

I can’t do anything intensive on it without it shutting down, so for now it’s mostly just a really large mp3 player.

Any suggestions?

Update, 5/10
I replaced the CPU fan and heatsink and I also added a second case fan. Now the system temperature is around 75°F and the CPU temperature is around 100°F. It’s a little louder than before, but at least it’s cool. A cool computer is a happy computer.

When I picked The Taking by Dean Koontz as my next book, I had no idea there would be similarties to my last book, Childhood’s End. There’s an alien invasion, but this time they appear to be hostile. The adult characters in this book have read a lot of science fiction books and watched a lot of science fiction movies, and that kind of annoyed me at times. The way that they talked didn’t seem like the way that real people talk, but maybe I just don’t know how real people talk. SPOILER: In the end the aliens leave and the survivors are left to rebuild society. You end up wondering if it was truly aliens that caused the catastrophe in the first place.

I keep hearing good things about Koontz, so I’m going to assume that I just picked the wrong book by him to try first. I’m not sure how I came to across this book in the first place. Next time I want to read one of his books, I’ll ask for recommendations from my friend John the Dean Koontz expert.

• Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
• Timeline, Michael Crichton
• Finding Serenity, Jane Espenson
• Serenity Found, Jane Espenson
• On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt
• On Truth, Harry G. Frankfurt
• Playing for Pizza, John Grisham
• The Appeal, John Grisham
• Night Watch, Sergey Lukyanenko
• Day Watch, Sergey Lukyanenko
• Twilight Watch, Sergey Lukyanenko
• Final Watch, Sergey Lukyanenko
• The Taking, Dean Koontz
• His Majesty’s Dragon, Naomi Novik
• Throne of Jade, Naomi Novik
• Black Powder War, Naomi Novik
• Empire of Ivory, Naomi Novik
• Victory of Eagles, Naomi Novik
• Lyra’s Oxford, Philip Pullman
• Unholy Domain, Dan Ronco
• Elantris, Brandon Sanderson
• Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare

I’m glad that Battlestar Galactica is back on. A lot of us BSG fans are eager to find out the identity of the last Cylon, who is signified by the empty spot in the left part of the picture above. I’m throwing in my guess.

They’ve pretty much ruled out most of the remaining major characters. I guess they could’ve lied about certain characters not being Cylons, but I doubt that. As much as I like characters like Dee, it won’t be that big of a deal if it turns out to be her. I think it makes sense to bring in somebody completely new.

I remember hearing a story last summer. I may be getting some of this wrong, but I’m too lazy to look it up now. Billy Campbell, who played Jordan Collier on The 4400, met Ron Moore (executive producer of Galactica) and was practically begging to be given on role on the show. He’s a fan and offered to be on Galactica for free. The head of SciFi Network was there. She said she was going to Campbell to what he said.

Later on I heard that Ron Moore had actually had an idea in mind for Campbell and he was going to be on the show. My guess is that he’ll be the last Cylon. Of course, I’m probably wrong. I just hope they don’t make us wait the entire season to find out.

Update, 4/28
I guess my theory isn’t really new and a Google search would’ve shown me that. I didn’t watch the Season 3 finale until about 6 months after it aired. When the story about Billy Campbell came out last summer, 4 of the final 5 Cylons had already been revealed and at the time people were already wondering if he was a Cylon. At the time I hadn’t realized that they had revealed any new Cylons.

I had some more weird dreams the night before last.

In one dream I was at Northpark Mall in Ridgeland with my sister and brother-in-law. When it was time to go, I left them to return to my car, which was in a parking garage even though in reality there are no parking garages at the mall. I discovered that a gang had taken over the parking garage and they were all pointing guns at me. I asked some of them if I could go to my car and they directed me which way to go. They were sending me through door after door and it became obvious that they weren’t taking me to my car. When I tried to get away somebody pulled out a knife and stabbed me. That’s when I woke up.

The next dream had me in some kind of scavenger hunt/contest where each clue would send my team to our next destination where we would find another clue and so on…. It reminds me of that show Drive, which not many people saw. My team was trying to figure out where we needed to go next. I thought I was begin clever in the way that I interpreted the clue we were working on, but it turns out that I led my team into a trap. The bad guy that was holding us said that one of us had to die. He drew a random number and that was the number 6. Guess what? The number 6 was my number. I was taken into a room with a toilet. A tablet dropped into the toilet from the ceiling and the room began to fill with gas. That’s when I woke up.

Weird, huh? It makes me think of that song “Mad World”:
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying
Are the best I’ve ever had

I wouldn’t say they are the best, but they are interesting. I also had a dream about playing Lost Odyssey that night. I bought it a couple of weeks ago, but still haven’t played it.

Bad things seem to happen in 3s.

In early January my roommate John and I were going to check out the sushi place in the recently reopened Student Union on campus. A guy driving the other way turned in front of us and the cars collided. The collision was pretty scary. At one point I thought that the car was flipping over, but afterwards I knew that it didn’t happen. It was totally the other guy’s fault. John was driving and his car was totaled. His toe was broken and I came out of it a little sore. The other guy and his passenger were okay as far as I know.

At the end of February, guy broke into my mom’s house and attacked her. She fought him the whole time. She wasn’t seriously hurt but she was really shaken up by the whole thing. The guy who did it lived only a few blocks away. Mom recognized him as someone who she had seen walking down the street one day when she went to check the mail. The police knew that this guy had been going around committing lewd acts like flashing to elderly women. He’s in jail now and hopefully he’ll be there for a long time.

At the end of March my grandmother fell and broke her hip. They were going to perform a hip replacement surgery and they discovered that she had suffered a heart attack. She suffered another heart attack while they were testing her. She went into a “risky” surgery and they removed a blockage that was causing the heart attacks. She’s doing better now. She had the hip replacement surgery last week and is now undergoing rehab.

I’m hoping that this month will continue to be pretty stress-free.