Anyone visiting my imDb comments page would notice that I haven't been writing much there and that is because I have been watching a lot of TV series and those I do not comment on imDb. But I do occasionally list the series I have been watching and a small synopsis on the blog. Here is the latest "TV series I have been watching" entry.

• Virtuality - a show about a state of the art spaceship exploring the Solar System, where the crew is being entertained by a complex virtual reality machine. Which then starts having thoughts of its own. The idea was pretty promising, reminding me of movies like Space Odyssey and books like Frank Herbert's Pandora. Alas, it quickly turned into a jumbled, psychotic, pseudo spiritual mess. No wonder the show was cancelled after the pilot
• Defying Gravity - the sister show for Virtuality, in the Hollywood tradition of trying two obnoxiously similar ideas at the same time so that people focus on similarities and not on how much better they could have been. Same spaceship exploring the Solar System, but this time they are actually on a secret mission as well to collect pieces of an alien that are spread on each of the major teluric planets. The alien is like a small god and soon enough the entire show is about the faith of people and how they feel, etc. It still could have been saved, but in this Lost day and age, people must be vaguely religious, things must never make any sense and the sheer volume of melodrama must suffocate. It survived a first season, but it was cancelled before a second one
• Caprica - spin-off series from Battlestar Galactica 2003. It explains how the twisted AI of the Cylons appeared, in a world divided by religious fervour, terrorism and virtual reality. I kind of like it, although it is clear that the ending can't possibly be good. And since the start is not brilliant as BSG's was, I feel conflicted about recommending it. It is is clearly sci-fi, though.
• Doctor Who 2005 - Season 4 ended with the Doctor, played by David Tennant, dying and regenerating. Season 5 has begun with a new Doctor and a new companion. It is consistently weird, low budget and innovative. The new girl companion is a fiery Scottish redhead who is ocasionally almost as hot as Billie Piper, so I can't complain :)
• Eureka - a show about a secret US town that hosts the most brilliant (and wacky) minds of the country. The series is a light sci-fi comedy so I guess it takes a little from both crowds and survives. The fourth season is supposed to start airing on the 9th of July, with 22 episodes, two of them... musicals. And I am serious here.
• Numb3rs - a series about a brilliant mathematician applying science to help his FBI brother. The show has been consistently nice, even if the math involved has dwindled to the point of exctinction in favor of the procedural police work Americans love so much. It is very likely that the sixth season will also be the last one. Too bad.
• House MD - don't ask me why I watch it. It started as an interesting medical drama only to turn into a farce. I really wish for a show that actually shows good, real work, not the feelings of the people involved. The small amount of medicine shown is beginning to sound more and more surreal
• Criminal Minds - about an FBI unit that catches serial killers by profiling their behaviour and catching them based on that. I like the show, but not too much. Besides, it can't last, the same thing is done by Google, and they just do it better ;-)
• South Park - this animated series has reached the 200th episode (the fifth in the fourteenth season), a two parter, set on making fun of everybody they ever made fun of in the show, which is not an easy task. The episodes usually concern a current issue, mixed up with a famous movie and parodied to the extreme. The jokes are smart, even if sometimes a bit crass, and I enjoy it immensly
• Dexter - yay! A really cool HBO show about a serial killer working for the police and killing other serial killers. The characters and scope of the show have evolved in unexpected directions, digressing from the books, which, in this case, is a good thing, since the script is smart and catchy, while the books mostly sucked. I can hardly wait for season 5, after a great season 4 finale. I am pretty curious to see how the script writers will go on, since the next book in the Dexter series is not even out yet.
• Big Love - I love Bill Paxton. He can play just about anything, including a mormon guy with three wives, practicing "the Principle" and also trying to deal with the society disaproval of it. Unfortunately it turned too much into a "Desperate Housewives" type of show, with useless drama and artificial problems. I am waiting for season 5
• Fringe - getting worse and worse by the episode, this is the new X-Files and it is created by the antichrist, J.J. Abrams, himself. Even my wife stopped watching it.
• Heroes - watching heroes is like playing tower defense games. It makes no sense, but you do it anyway. Waiting for season 5
• Legend of the Seeker - this fantasy series is turning, alas, more and more into Hercule+Xena=Love. Based on the Sword of Truth series, which I have no read, it has some very cool episodes drowning amongst many mediocre or completely bad ones. It's fun, but degrading quickly
• True Blood - another cool HBO show, again based on some books and diverting from the story there, again coming up on top from the original work. HBO series are really worth watching. Waiting for season 3
• Californication - a show about a grumpy and sexy writer, humping everything with breasts and also trying to keep alive the relation with his former wife and daughter which he loves. A really good show in the first season, the quality of the show is diminishing by the season. I still have high hopes for season 4, planned to start airing in August
• Breaking Bad - a show that is at the same time harsh, funny, horrible and good, a dark comedy about a chemistry professor that enters the crystal meth manufacturing business because he has cancer and wants to leave his family something. Season 3 just began and I am always sad when an episode ends
• Secret Diary of a Call Girl - sexy Billie Piper in the role of prostitute/writer/blogger Belle de Jour. Yummy!
• Entourage - another great show! Following a group of friends trying to make it in Hollywood, with ups and downs, but always a feeling of healthy optimism, even at the worst of times. It really feels good watching the series. Series 7 is supposed to start in June
• Stargate Universe - this show is to SG1 what Deep Space Nine was for Next Generation: a dark, politically and humanly charged adventure. I really hope the ratings will be high, because it started as a pretty smart sci-fi series and I would really hate to see it cancelled or mauled by the marketing
Flash Forward - again weird and unexplainable shit that makes people start thinking of god and everything revolves around the same people and some of them are FBI. A mash-up of all the shows of the genre, it is a confused mess that I hope will get ended soon
• Eastwick - Rebecca Romjin and Jaime Ray Newman and some other chick star as the witches of Eastwick, with great Paul Gross as the devil. Unfortunately, even bountifull sexiness and Canadian charm could not save this show from becoming "Desperated" and becoming so stupid it had to be cancelled
• Torchwood - spin-off from Doctor Who, it's still weird, but a little more action packed. Not much, though. Season 3 was in fact a 5 part miniseries, used to champion the unveiling of BBC America. Season 4 is supposed to air in 2011
• The Sarah Jane Adventures - another Doctor Who spinoff, it is oriented towards children and, even if it is fun, it is really more like a fairy tail
• 10 things I hate about you - a show about a single father raising two daughters, one being the gloomy smart one, while the other the popular air head. The pilot was so bad that I decided not to watch it.
• Bored to Death - another "personally cancelled" series about a guy who pretends to be a private eye out of boredom. I just stopped watching.
• The Guild - this is not a TV show, but a web show. It is partially sponsored by Microsoft and it is about a group of MMO players and their weird group dynamic. The lead character is a really sexy chick, which makes about 60% of the reasons I am watching this. There are episodes that are hilarious, though.
• The Forgotten - I like Christian Slater, but this show just didn't feel right. A group of do-gooders volunteer to help the police solve old cases where the victim's identity could not be determined. I don't think there will be a second season
• V 2009 - aliens come to Earth, all filled with good intentions... or are they? Silly script, but then again, the original wasn't a gem either. Sexy actresses in it, though, so who knows? :)
• Paradox - the Welsh version of Flash Forward, it kind of made more sense, if one ignores the premise of the show completely :) It only had 5 episodes and it wasn't received very well. Doubtful that it will see a second season, but still better than Flash Forward
• Men Of A Certain AgeScott Bakula, Ray Romano and Andre Braugher as midlife crisis best friends. It is a smart and funny show, I hope it continues to be so in season 2
• Weeds - another show about a drug manufacturer, this time it involves marijuana and the person in question is a woman, played by the so very hot Mary-Louise Parker. The first seasons were really cool, but in seasons 4 and 5, it became sick with "Desperitits" and so it started getting worse. I am waiting for season 6, maybe they can came back to the surface with it. More light than Breaking Bad, but still pretty cool
• The Good Wife - it's a lawyer show. Not much to say about it, the main character is a wife getting a job as an attorney when her husband is (more or less wrongly) imprisoned. I like the show and the main actress (Julianna Margulies)
• Damages - another lawyer show, this time a bit tougher, with a touch of "The Devil Wears Prada". We watched the first episode and we've decided to not watch it. My work colleagues like it, though

That is it, folks! The bottom line is that while more and more shows get infected by the pandemic of Lost and Desperate Housewives, there are still others that fight the illness and fight for quality, a major player in this direction being HBO, which started sucking as a television broadcaster, but makes consistently good TV shows.

This blog post was a long time coming, but I was pretty busy and didn't have the time its writing deserved. My company was invited to a team building weekend in Berlin by our Dutch partner and so I went there last Thursday for about four days. Here are my impressions.

The first feeling that I got coming from the airport by bus was that Berlin is a real city. Not some bullshit tourist attraction, but a place where people live, work and have fun. The combination of factories in the periphery and the new and old styles of the buildings was very pleasing to my eyes. I was, however, convinced that we are at the very edge of the German capital city and so that explained both the "realness" and the small number of people and cars that I was seeing. I was quite a bit shocked to reach the hotel and having the feeling still firmly rooted in my psyche. The hotel, Berlin, Berlin, was somewhere in the southwest of the city, but as close to the center as to the outskirts. Where were the people, the cars, the chaos, the multitudes of banks and pharmacies, the angry honking, the infernal traffic and the tall buildings one comes to expect in a modern city?

Well, it appears that is something rare in Berlin, be it the East or the West side of it. A lot of people use bikes, on lanes that are both on the sidewalk and the car side, there are amazingly few cars and people don't seem to get angry very often. I heard only three honks my entire stay there. The streets are also pretty empty, be it weekend or work day, however the restaurants and public transportation stay active even beyond midnight. It is more of a cultural city, than an industrial one, but I still liked it :)

The buildings are rarely very tall, if one excludes the TV tower, the 200 meter construction that was supposed to show to the West the great technical skill of Eastern engineers. Since Berlin is built on a former marsh (hence the name, which comes from a Slavic word for swamp, not from the bear mascot of the city, which itself comes from Albert the Bear, member of House of Ascania) it might be the reason why Berlin has expanded more horizontally than vertically. It might explain also why the great communist engineers needed to secretly employ Swedish techs to help them out with the TV tower.

As I said, the bars and restaurants (of all nationalities and flavours) are open till very late. Some are a bit expensive (like 4 euro the cheapest beer and 8 euros for a cocktail in a bar we went to in the first evening) some are too cheap, like the Japanese sushi which is more expensive in Bucharest or a Turkish kebab that I took for 3 euros when exiting the above bar. When we left the bar they didn't have beer on tap anymore, we drank it all, and not because of huge excesses. So I asked the owner: "Are you kidding me? A bar in Germany without beer?". The poor guy glared at me for a second they retorted "We are not in Munich, we are in Berlin". It seems the capital of the country is not really characteristic for the whole of Germany. It makes me cringe in horror to wonder if people outside Romania judge the country based on anecdotal stories of provincial attitudes. Ouch!

You have to understand, there are a lot of Romanians who like to bash their own country, to dream of greener pastures right beyond the border or consider everything in Romania shit. I am not one of those people, I like being Romanian and I enjoy living in Bucharest, but frankly, after going to Berlin, I think I would enjoy living there more!

Also, it was a bit shocking for us to see that, after a certain hour, every street became adorned with young women dressed provocatively. Most of them were really hot, although the quality fluctuated wildly. It was amazing to see police cars passing by and ignoring the working girls. We noticed three especially beautiful girls and one of our group went to say hello, so they answered... in Romanian. Is it any wonder that I like living in Bucharest? :)

Anyway, speaking of girls, there were the rare cases of tall blue eyed blond German girls in the city (although one wonders if not every one of them was actually Polish or something), but the vast majority of women there are either immigrants or plain (to use a polite euphemism). What I found especially weird is that younger girls seemed to be fatter than the older ones. If my eyes got drawn by an attractive figure, it was immediately revealed that the person in question was above forty... or Asian.

People in Berlin understood English mostly, although there was a large portion of the serving staff that struggled with it. TV was voice dubbed in German on every channel, so I didn't find it surprising. Amazingly, I understood quite a lot of the language; I was afraid that my TV knowledge of German had vanished from my brain just as Bulgarian did, so I was pleasantly surprised by this.

There was a lot of sight seeing and history lessons from our guides. We went on a bicycle ride with an American woman with Asian roots in her genealogy and it was a bit ironic to get the explanations about Berlin's history from her. But she was cool. If you want history, just go on Wikipedia, though. Enough said, during war or occupation, Germans, English, French, Russians or Americans behaved in the same way: ugly, petty, disregarding the qualities we call "humanity" completely, ridiculously accusing each other of evil while perpetrating the exact same acts on all sides.

No pictures, as I did not bring my photo camera with me. I might use some from my colleagues, but I don't think pictures could do justice to the feeling of peace I got in the city of Berlin. I really liked it.

I started using a script that shows me what javascript errors occur in my blog. I soon found out that there were about 10-20 errors each day, intermittently, the vast majority of them being '_WidgetManager is undefined'. I googled it, of course, only to discover that a lot of people had it, some fix was applied by Google and thus most of the articles on the web were completely unuseful.

Well, what seemed to happen is that some code was added at the end of the blog page, loading a js file, and if the js file was (for some weird reason) not loaded, the script following would throw an error. So I added my own script to create a fake _WidgetManager class just in case the script did not load.

Hoping it might help others, here is the script:

_WidgetInfo=function(){};
_WidgetManager={
 _Init:function() {},
 _SetPageActionUrl:function() {},
 _SetDataContext:function() {},
 _SetSystemMarkup:function() {},
 _RegisterWidget:function() {}
};

The eighth book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, Toll the Hounds was the worst, I think. First, Steven Erikson experimented with a narrator of sorts, all philosophical and moving the "frame" of the story with wise sounding words that actually sounded fake and convoluted like Kruppe's. Second of all, most of the characters started thinking deeply about all kinds of things that had no real relation to the story, all metaphorical and stuff. Third, the stories themselves were vague, disconnected or filled with "his words brought tears into his eyes" scenes. I swear, even Kallor sheds tears at one moment. The ending was a disappointment too, where the convergence of forces that we got used to in the series seems random and pointless. To top it all off, Fisher Kel Tath made his appearance, thus filling the book with bard poems.

As for the story itself... if you wanted closure on something previous, tough luck. Some new characters, some old ones die (including Hood, how cool is that?) most of the action happens in Darujhistan, while the rest is in Black Coral. No Crippled God at all! Also you may find Wiskeyjack fighting in Hood's army. Didn't they ascend? What is he doing there? Pointless battles abound (and I mean pointless, they are not even strategic, just an enumeration of people starting the fight and then, later on, finishing it. Most of the time the result is pretty much known beforehand, but the battle is honorable or something like that.

Mixed news about the ninth and tenth books in the series. First of all, the series ends! Yes, a huge book, with so many open ends and a great mythos, just ends, because the contract was for ten books. That is both brave and insane in the same time, although I suspect that future books will be scoped in the same universe, just not as part of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. The books nine and ten will actually be a single two part story, with the ninth ending in a cliffhanger. Erikson apologized for this:

While I am, of course, not known for writing door-stopper tomes, the conclusion of The Malazan Book of the Fallen was, to my mind, always going to demand something more than modern bookbinding technology could accommodate. To date, I have avoided writing cliff-hangers, principally because as a reader I always hated having to wait to find out what happens. Alas, Dust of Dreams is the first half of a two-volume novel, to be concluded with The Crippled God. Accordingly, if you’re looking for resolutions to various story-threads, you won’t find them. Also, do note that there is no epilogue and, structurally, Dust of Dreams does not follow the traditional arc for a novel. To this, all I can ask of you is, please be patient. I know you can do it: after all, you have waited this long, haven't you?

The ninth book, Dust of Dreams, started cool, though, in a KChain Che'Malle city with a Matron giving a Destriant the task of finding a Mortal Sword and a Shield Anvil. The Destriant is human and the Matron is insane. Promising, huh? I was considering waiting for a year and reading both ending books, but how can I now?

Short version: use nc -dl portNumber instead of just -l

Netcat is a nice little tool that is very useful in all kinds of networking problems. Basically it listens on a port and it sends to ports via TCP/IP. Using the piping mechanism of Linux, one can send anything, from files compressed on the fly in the network stream to telnet sessions and back doors.

Today I was trying to copy a few files from a computer to another, therefore I did something like this:
tar -c -C /source/folder file1 file2 file3 | nc theOtherComputer portNumber
on the second computer I did this:
nc -l portNumber | tar -x /destination/folder

And it worked perfectly. I made all kinds of cool stuff in the bash scripts and then, wanting to execute the "server" in the background I did:
serverApp &

From then on, nothing worked. The sender would report success, the received file would always be truncated. After trying all kinds of things, I stumbled upon the -d switch of the nc tool. The man page says: -d' Do not attempt to read from stdin.. It appears the application is trying to keep a reference to the input of the starting environment. It makes no sense for a listening scenario, but it does it anyway. Failing to find one (since it is runnning in the background), it just exits earlier than expected.

So, whenever you want to use NetCat listening in the background, don't forget to use the -d switch.

Reaper's Gale, the seventh book in Steven Erikson's series called The Malazan Book of the Fallen made me feel all kinds of things. There was boredom a lot of times, there was uncomprehension in others, there were moments when tears flowed from my eyes as well as great moments of tension. At the end of it, I feel unqualified to actually discuss it. It is still a great book, it ends with a convergence of paths, as all the others have, but it somehow felt different from the previous six books.

I believe that Erikson fell into a well known writer trap. He was so caught in his own world, that he forgot most readers are not, and cannot be unless with great effort. Therefore the characters got out of control. They did things as they pleased, regardless of the reader's need. That is why I think this book was weak compared to the others.

The plot is too complex to expand here. Enough said that Icarium, Karsa Orlong, Quick Ben, Mael, The Errant, Fiddler and Hedge, Bottle and Beak, The Adjunct and Lostara Yil and all the Bonehunters, they all meet in Letheras. Even after reading the book you don't get to know why all that buildup was for, why in the last 50 pages all the characters acted so strangely, where Karsa and Icarium went and, most of all, why did a woman Seguleh have such a small part! The dragons (all of them) are beaten senseless, the Sengars have the worst of luck and the t'Lann Imass are just peripheral characters.

As did the sixth book, but at a larger scale, more avenues are opened than closed. I can barely wait reading the eight book, but I feel cheated a bit. Hope lives on, though :)

Yesterday I was talking with friends of a weird situation near my home: there are 3 pharmacies in the same building and 3 others very close by. Well, pharmacies and banks have the same business model, if you think about it, so no wonder there. What felt a bit strange is that in the building there was the pharmacy that I have been buying medicine from my youth and recently it was bought by one of the larger pharmaceutical chains and converted into a flashy, colorful and very expensive venture. The same happened to a company called Plafar, a Romanian company opened in 1999 with state capital which specialized in natural remedies, infusions and so on. In 2007 it was purchased by a pharmaceutical chain that loses its origin in the vagaries of stock exchange. Now all they sell is terribly expensive as well.

So yes, I think that is strange as seen from the naive view of free market in capitalism. You have a competitive segment of the market, providing no bullshit service at low price, being bought and replaced by the people that gain at least half of their money by overpricing. It's like a virus (A virus enters a bar. The bartender says "We don't serve viruses in here". The virus replaces the bartender with a copy of its own and says "Now you do") and it spreads especially fast in a low immunity environment like a freshly "liberated" country like Romania.

What is going on here? Well, since we are in the medical/pharmaceutical context, let's address the notion of economic health. At economics.about.com they say The value of stock market indices seem to be the barometer many use for the health of the economy.. Well, that is not what I had in mind. What I think is health in an economy is how fresh growth is not hindered, but nurtured. Just as in the human body, disease impedes growth and disables functioning mechanisms that are vital to life. Are other countries healthy? No! They are in the same kind of crap, only there it is harder to suffocate others.

Is there a solution? I don't know. But a full ecosystem is needed to promote health. When only predators remain, the land dies.

Sorry, Bucharest, I will try to release a patch this evening.

I have been using Internet Explorer as my main browser since IE 3.0 and usually I have no problem with it. I know the rendering engine is a piece of crap, but I got used to the feel of it and the developer tools in IE8 are nice and FireFox just rubbed me the wrong way, so that was that.

But since Internet Explorer 7 upwards, and especially with IE8, the first loading of the browser got slower and slower. So slow, in fact, that I have to wait several seconds for the browser to allow me to use the address bar. No wonder I have been slowly using Chrome for searching and reading the news and all that.

Today I got kind of annoyed with it and started looking into the Internet Explorer options. An advanced one was Enable third-party browser extensions and I removed it, just to see what it would do. Suddenly I had no Google toolbar (but I don't use it anyway, since I enter all my searches in the address bar), Flash worked, the pages worked, the internal IE8 developer tools worked. The only difference is that Internet Explorer would load instantly!

Ok, that would work as a last option, but I got intrigued so I enabled the option again and went into the Manage Add-ons section. I haven't being paying attention before, but each add-on in the list also has displayed the loading time. I looked around and I found Groove GFS Browser Helper that loaded in ... 8.2 seconds! Disabled it: almost instant browser loading. Two other addons had over one second load time, both of them from Sun and related to Java (which almost no one uses anymore in web pages). Disabled them and now I have my browser back! Just for the sake of it I googled for Java Applet and went to a site with a Java on it. Amazingly, the applets all worked! So the addons themselves were not responsible for loading Java, they were just useless junk.

But what is this Groove thing? Is it some malignant Microsoft rival that purposefully makes its browser addon load slower as to sabotage Internet Explorer (hint! hint!). It appears not. As it usually happens, the greatest enemy of Microsoft is Microsoft itself: Groove comes from Microsoft Office 2007!

What does Groove Syncronization do? Microsoft Office Groove was designed for document collaboration in teams with members who are regularly off-line or who do not share the same network security clearance. In other words: nothing useful. Even better, the whole groovy thing can be easily uninstalled, which I also did.

To uninstall Groove go to Add or Remove Programs, look for the Microsoft Office entry, click on Change, remove Groove. That's it!

Just two month ago I was blogging about the cracking of 768bit RSA and now 1024 was cracked by using only 81 Pentium4 CPUs in 104 hours. There is a catch and that is they needed to fluctuate the power to computer CPUs. Here is more detailed information.

Update: Web security attack 'makes silicon chips more reliable'

Oh, man, what a book this is. Steven Erikson uses a pattern in his epic Malazan Book of the Fallen series, with books that are standalone(ish) and others that continue the humongous story arches started in previous (or, indeed, later) books. The Bonehunters was heralded like a separate story, however that cannot be said to be true in any way. Old characters, patterns that evoke old stories, as is the birth of the Bonehunters, reminiscent of the Bridgeburners, and the sheer number of new characters, races and even gods make this book more of a hinge rather than a singular pillar in the epic. The number of open ended threads and unexplained new characters paves the way for the next four books. I am already starting to fear for the ending of the series.

What the book is about is difficult if not impossible to explain. It starts with a military campaign of punishment against the remnants of the Seven Cities army, but it ends suddenly and quite strange. The leadership of the elder Tavore sister unites the Malazans and binds them to her, in truth becoming hers and not merely an imperial army. There are strange machinations and moves from all the gods one can imagine, most of them hidden and quite hard to understand. What is even harder to explain is the way the empress allies herself with Mallick Rel and Korbolo Dom and starts rumours that make the Malazan population hate the Wickans, in truth war heroes of impecable honor. The ending is explosive but in no way final, leading the path onwards in the story.

I haven't posted a music entry in quite some time, but this will compensate. Here are three female singers and some very good songs:

Cosmic Love from Florence and the Machine. You might also want to listen to The Drumming Song



The Girl you Lost to Cocaine from Sia. You might also want to listen to Buttons, with a fun video.



Hollywood from Marina and the Diamonds. She is a very prolific song writer and I like many of her songs. Not to mention she has a voice I love and she's cute as well. You might also want to listen to Mowgli's Road

The fifth book in the Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series, Midnight Tides is separated by the previous four in location, characters and, I would say, quality. We are witness to a battle between a lost enclave of the Tiste Edur and a lost enclave of The First Empire. From the perspective of the Malazans (which have no involvement at all in this book) both peoples would have been seen as ignorant savages, their conflict merely a petty squabble. The only characters we can recognize are the Crippled God, who is indirectly manipulating things, and Trull Sengar. Trull is almost the main character in the story, explaining his tortured past, although little connects this story with his freeing from the fragment of the Shadow warren in the forth book.

The end, another convergence of characters and stories and gods and magical powers, only opens avenues for further development, rather than actually explaining things. There are some interesting parts to the story, mostly the description of the Letherii culture, so much alike the Western culture today, which Erikson is criticising at every opportunity. He has similar ideas in House of Chains, but he really lets himself free in this one.

Aside from that and from the history of Trull Sengar which is surely to have an impact in the next books, the story was not really that captivating compared to previous chapters in the saga, almost like it all was a prop to describe Trull's way of thinking and to berate capitalism; like one of those TV show episodes that happen in the past so that we can understand what the character will do in the next episode that happens today. Still a good book, though.

Dear God of the Internet, please grant me this one gift, the perfect way to cancel out the world around me and concentrate on Your work!

Another great Malazan book, the fourth in the series, House of Chains starts with the personal history of Karsa, the Teblor, previously known to us as Shai'k's Toblakai guardian. His tale is both brutal and inspiring, as he evolves from a mindless brute to a ... well... slightly minded brute. At the end of the book there is another battle, like I have been already accustomed by previous reads, only it must be the weirdest one yet. You have to read it to believe it.

Since it started with the singular story of Karsa and because of the many characters that were both introduced, developed from the previous stories or simply clashing at the end, the book felt fragmented (like Raraku's warren :) ). That wasn't so bad, however it opened to many avenues that need to be closed in following books.

At this point it is obvious to me that the Malazan Book of the Fallen is not really a series, but a humongous single story with many interlocking threads and characters. Like chains dragging ghosts of books read, I feel the pressure to end the series so I will probably start hacking away at the fifth book this week.