You probably know Melissa Auf der Maur as the bassist of the band Hole. She was the cute skinny redhead. She also toured with Smashing Pumpkins for a while. I don't remember where I've heard of her, but I got her album and listened to it and I really enjoyed it. Here is a taste of her music from her (so far) only album Auf der Maur.

About a second album, I am quoting Wikipedia:In a 2007 interview, Auf der Maur announced that she had finished her second solo album which would go hand in hand with a graphic novel and a concept film, the release dates of which are unclear. The album will be released under the name of MAdM, whereas the comic and film will go by Out of Our Minds, or OOOM for short. A website containing teasers of the projects, as well as a movie trailer, was launched in August, 2007 and can be found at xMAdMx.com

Enjoy!

Well, I just said I can't wait for the third book, haven't I? :) Anyway, Dexter in the Dark was a bit of a disapointment to me. Apparently, Dexter's inner demons are just that, demons, liked to some ancient deity from the times of Solomon called Moloch which is like an alien parasite thing. Really... What did Lindsay do? Read Snow Crash? Watch Fallen? Try to mix Stargate Goa'ulds with Wicker Man and Eyes Wide Shut? Geez!

When I was getting so comfortable with the character of Dexter, thinking that Jeff Lindsay was a genius for portraying a type of character I was always thinking of writing, he just takes all that inner maniacal urge that both empowered and limited the character and transforms it into an external, fantasy like thing. Bad writer, bad!

Anyway, that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the book. I just think that when the third series of the TV show became too far fetched, they were still safe when compared to it. I mean, until now Dexter was a brilliant guy with a dark path and also with a sort of artificial morality, mix in some police stuff, some blood spatter, the weird police seargent sister. It was a perfect setting for introspection and solitary struggle. I loved that! And now demons? As Doakes would have put it "the hell for?".

The fourth Dexter book is supposedly due for february 5th 2009. I hope Lindsay abandons the weird supernatural crap and instead focuses on Dexter's training of his adoptive children into the art of killing. Otherwise I can only see it turn toward so many bad directions like Blade or Hellboy or other green "hybrid saves the planet" thing.

Dearly Devoted Dexter is much darker than the first Dexter book. Maybe it is just because all the facts about Dexter are clear and it starts with a gruesome murder, insane special forces style. The title comes from the fact that he helps his sister, now partially in the loop about his Dark Passenger, to solve the newest serial killer case. Of course, Deb, now a seargent after Laguerta has died, has a personal stake in this, since one of the people the murderer abducted and intends to do bad things to, is her boyfriend, with whom she is very much in love.

It is interesting to develop the Dexter character in this way, especially since he is described as totally indifferent to the horrible fate of people he doesn't care about, yet he is still compelled to help his sister out.

I was a bit disapointed by the police work involved. If I were to believe Lindsay, the Miami police are a bunch of morons, following (badly) a set of procedures without any real talent other than badmouthing.

Elements from this second book in the Dexter series were clearly used in the series, but it is already a completely different story. The FBI agent that Deborah briefly dates in the series was inspired by the character of Kyle, shady government agent that she falls in love with in this book. The stalking of Dexter by the grumpy seargent Doakes is also mirrored from this book, although the motives and the outcome are completely different.

Again, the series evolves the Dexter character more and the story is more complex than the book, but by now it is obvious the TV show and the book are going in completely different directions.

All in all, a bit better than the first, darker, but also funnier. I have never laughed as much reading a book for a long time. Can't wait for the third book now.

I have been watching this TV Series called Dexter and slowly but surely I fell in love with it. It features a psychopathic serial killer that has a hobby of killing other killers. The story is long and I suggest you watch it to get it fully. Anyway, the series has reached season 3 and stars Michael C. Hall, which you may recognize from the Six Feet Under TV series. I've also noticed that the series is based on a book! So, naturally, I got the book and started reading it. It's Michael C. Hall on the cover there.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter is the first in a series of Dexter books by Jeff Lindsay. While it starts pretty much the same as the series, the series quickly moves away from the script in the book. However, the spirit is there, even if, of course, they had to make the lead character a little more likable in the series and the whole thing less bloody.

Imagine an emotionless killer, raised by his cop father to kill according to a code and also to be thorough and attentive to the details so that the police wouldn't catch him. He is also working for the Miami police department as a blood spatter analyst. The inner dialogues are really delicious, the way he sees the world as a cynical dark Data is both funny and deep. Lindsay manages to portray an alien being, silently watching the world we take for granted, hunting on the edge of our own morality.

And while I do enjoy the book, I have to say that the series is more complex and the story a bit more realistic. So, there, finally a movie or series that surpasses the book!

The story in Claymore was pretty standard: monsters attack people, people are powerless, therefore an organization of hybrids (female warriors carrying deadly claymore swords) emerges to protect people from said monsters. So it's like Blade, in theory. But in reality it has the feel of Berserk (the first cool part, not the crappy lingering mess that it is now). Or you can imagine Naruto, with the monster and everything, fighting against a species of demon foxes. Only without the sillyness and all the mentoring.

I really liked the manga, I can barely wait for it to continue, unfortunately it is distributed like one chapter per month. The 26 episode anime series follows closely the manga story, but unfortunately ends prematurely with a different idea in the last two episodes. Not that it is not a lot better than Berserk leaving us in the dark at the end of the anime or other series that just ended in mid air.

Bottom line, if you liked Berserk, you will like this. If you like Naruto/Bleach, you will like this. I can even throw a little Akira in, to convince you, but it would probably be a stretch :)

Wee! Another Peter F. Hamilton book has been published. This time it is the second part of the Void trilogy, an ongoing series set up in the Commonwealth saga universe, but much later. Many characters are rented from said saga, so it would be a good idea to read that one first. Besides, as is Hamilton's style, the second book starts abruptly from the end of the first one and ends abruptly awaiting the third part.

And, again, like in the Night's Dawn trilogy, the plot is a combination of stories, one set in the technological future of mankind and one in a feudal, fantasy like, universe. Hamilton's talent is to combine these two in a believable common narative. They are not so linked as in Night's Dawn and, I have to admit, I like the fantasy arch better, even if it is the classic Messiah myth. Maybe because it is not contiguous, but rather made up of small stories that have a beginning and an end.

Well, either way, it was a great book and I am waiting for the third part, due to be released in far away late 2009 or even 2010 :(

A new (and old) buzzword: to reinvent. It is always a good thing to reinvent yourself, they say, with the effect of relieving boredom and living a "new" life. You may discard bad or useless things in favor of good things. It is also good to reinvent something somebody else did, like a movie. You take the idea, you remove the bad things, you add good things. But, as in the case of the benevolent tyrant, the definition of good and bad is always fuzzy.

Was it good to reinvent BattleStar Galactica? I say YES! It was (and still is, despite screenwriters efforts) the best sci-fi series out there. Of course, that is my opinion. Was it good to reinvent Terminator, incarnated into a teenage girl looking machine? Ahem. But I still watch it. Was it good to reinvent Superman as a troubled teenager? Puh-lease! Come... on! Nah-uh! (See, I address the younger demographic here).

Because, you see, the people that decide what is good and bad in movies are actually the money people. They look at superficial statistics that only show... money! They make abhorent remakes of decent films (like Indiana Jones 4 - The Rape of Indiana) or they turn every hero into man/woman/teenager/animated-character/doll versions that bring nothing new.

In the case of Star Trek, they made the first low budget series than achieved cult level regardless of bad production values and some ridiculous scripts, then they made a sequel (at that time reinvention was not invented yet) where Patrick Stewart redefined the space captain as a cerebral science oriented man, but with lots of guts, then they started the old routine: make the captain black, make him a woman, replace the ship with a station, then with another ship, but in some other place, etc. They even made a prequel, which, for almost a full season, was decent in both interpretation and scenarios. What was missing, of course, was a teenage Star Trek captain. Well, no more!

"Star Trek", the 2009 movie in the making (and no doubt, with a series looming if money are made), features a young Kirk and (what a fallacy) a young Spock! The director is none other than my least favourite person in the world: J.J.Abrams, the maker of such abismal stupidities (but well received by the general audience) like Alias, Lost and Fringe. The writers are Abramses old team, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, the brilliant creators of such idiocies like Alias, Fringe and Xena/Hercules!

I am trying to keep an open mind here, but I would venture to guess that the new Star Trek will have big booming sounds whenever something strange happends, will be filled with inexplicable things that will never be explained, except maybe in the movie (but I doubt it, they have to plant the hook for a series) and will have people calling the others by name obsessively, regardless if the need for it arises. So, it may be cool, but I expect to be baktag!

I've listened to this song for a long time now, it was only proper that it would appear on my blog sooner or later. Sandra Nasic sang for Guano Apes and after the band split she released a solo album in 2007 called The Signal which features some good songs, although a little mellow for my taste. You can listen to fragments of some of Sandra's songs on her MySpace site, visit her official site or just plain google for videos like I do :)

So listen to this symphonic Sandra Nasic sound. I wish she would have done more pieces like this.

Brisingr is the third book in the Inheritance cycle (now a cycle because the author could not end the story in only three books). While I enjoyed reading it and I know that Paolini had all the best intentions writing it, I would not recommend it.

I have too little recollection of the first two books, to tell you the truth, but I do remember I was captivated by the action in them, if nothing else. The "magical technology" also had a great lure for me. In the third installment, all of these are missing or of poor quality. Roran is far more interesting than Eragon in this book, while the bad characters have lost a few dimensions (from the few they already had) and have become pathetic. T'Pol (sorry... I meant Arya) is docile and closer to the human heart, making her completely uninteresting, while the elves in general (and Oromir and Glaedr in particular) act like Asgaard on pot.

Why use StarTrek and StarGate terms to describe a fantasy book? Because it seems that's the only real inspiration of the third book of the Inheritance cycle. I could have done without the Doctor Who references in it, as well.

You can see a little YouTube video of Christopher Paolini talking about Brinsgr here, where an "unofficial" fan club is trying to earn money from said YouTube by disabling the embedding option.

A nice song I found myself humming today. I guess I had a reason for it. Hmm.

Zodiac is an environmental eco-thriller. It's Stephenson's second novel and it started in a similar way to The Big U, which I couldn't really read through. But I had nothing else to read so I kept going until it got funny and good. If you read it, try to get over the bad start, because it is not a bad book at all.

The basic plot is that of a pragmatic environmentalist with a chemistry background working against the waste dumping industry. In the end he uncovers a plot of global implications and, of course, foils it. But the story itself is more important than the ending. This is not one of those books you read in half a day, driven by the need to know how it all turns out, but one of those you read waiting to see what the main character is going to do or say next, while going towards the predictable finish.

Here is a much better commentary than mine, what I can say is that the book was definitely not sci-fi, rather a thrill-fiction, but it was well written. It makes for a good train book.

The Cobweb is not a sci-fi story, just a fiction thriller. It happends in modern day America, where a small town cop slowly unravels a plot of international proportions and implications. He has to foil it with no help from (or rather against) the corrupted systems of university academia and government security and diplomatic agencies.

Actually, this is the main subject of the book, if I can say so: Throat cutting internal politics inside the CIA, the rule that CIA operations cannot take place inside the borders of the USA, and they ways to bend that rule, university scholarship stewards that live off foreign student exchanges (real or not) and bogus grants, etc. It was a bleak picture, the one painted of the CIA employees who cannot exceed their assigned duty, even if they have plenty of reason to, else face career stop or even dismissal.

In the end, of course, Deputy Sheriff Clyde Banks saves the day, but I can't help noticing that I knew this would happen from the very start. The real information is in the path to the end result and that is what I've appreciated in this book. The reader is taken away to discover the filthy world Stephenson and George expose.

It starts a little slow. It also provides plenty of information for would be terrorists :) So I recommend it to everyone, even if it is not a sci-fi book, it's a solid well made story.

We intended to go to Thang Long, the Vietnamese restaurant, but so it happends that it was closed. On the same street there was this large, Indian looking (elephants and all), restaurant: Karishma. It looked too flashy, that being the reason why I usually suppressed my curiosity of going in there, but that day I felt curious enough.

As it turns out, it is the real deal: good food at reasonably high prices, real Indians running the shop, even serving the food, and nice people (at least with their customers), beautiful interior. Four people ate enough with 215 lei, that is about 60 euros or 84 USD. We tried the lassi drinks (yoghurt with mango or with cumin and salt), the masala tea (black tea, ginger and cardammon with lots of milk and sugar) and saucy meat foods. We could choose the level of spicyness, I asked for very spicy and it was heaven. My table mates called it poison and stuck to their own meals.

All in all, I highly recommend it. Here is the address and contact information:

Karishma restaurant
Address: Iancu Capitan 36, Bucharest,
Phone: 0040-21-252.51.57

In the blog posts about my trip to Greece I placed some of the pictures taken, but mostly stuff pertaining to the place we were in and the paragraph before. Here are other pictures that have no special meaning other than that I like how they turned out.

Ok, what's done is done, Maria wanted to spend more time with her sister and we both got tired of Kyparissi, so we went back to Sparti. This time we went alone, having gotten directions on how to get there. The GPS was useless, since it had no maps of that area whatsoever. I did pin the house on the map, though, so I knew the general direction.

Back towards Sparti, Greece (5)

Of course, we got a little lost. We entered a town we did not know the name of and we found ourselves on a road to Monevasia. We have been to Monevasia, it was in the south, we wanted to go a little north. What should we do? I pointed out to Maria that the road to Monevasia probably meets another one that comes from Sparti, using her own words from the experience with Kulata and Sofia. Of course, now that the same words of wisdom came from my mouth, she decided to turn back. We again entered the nameless village and we noticed a sign towards Sparti (fixed on a wall, so you can only see it when coming from the other direction) so we took that road. We've had the inspiration to stop next to a guy and ask if that was the road to Sparti. No, of course not, it's the other one! (the one from which we came from).





Sparti, Greece (6)

Finally we got back on track and reached Sparti and the small village next to it where Maria's sister lived. We stayed there a few days, during which the girls either spent talking to each other (and dragging me into it as much as they could, while I was trying to read the boring books I brought with me) or my sister in law spent at work and me and Maria sight seeing.

We first went in the city of Sparti to visit "Ancient Sparti". It was a big sign that directed us to it. It was a bloody park, a small one at that. Just a few stone looking modern roads, olive trees (of course), and some ruins, partly escavated and surrounded by do-not-cross tape. There were people that had parked their cars there, even their RVs! There was a modern contraption in the middle of it, something like a concrete electrical thing or maybe a janitor house, I don't know, full of graffiti. The only good thing that came out of this was a great view from above of the town of Sparti.







When we came back we took the car through the orange orchard from the back of the house and we found a goblin tree! Heh, just look at the picture, you will see what I mean.



Trip to Kalamata, Greece (7)

After that we decided to go to Kalamata, which is a rather large city in the south, taking first a mountain road that would take us directly, then return on a path that would follow the seaside and go around the mountain. It was a very nice trip. The mountain road felt like normal country for once, with actual green, non olive, trees and even rain! The towns on the edge of the sea were all nice, even if we only saw them from afar. In Kalamata, for example, we got lost trying to find the center of the city. There were signs for the center, but after following them, we would always get to the same spot, which was obviously not the center. On this trip we actually noticed vast regions covered with black ash. We theorised it was related to the extended fires that had plagued Greece the previous summer. But it could have been just as well new fires or even some weird agricultural system.







After the few days in Sparti we decided to go back to Bucharest. Again a night trip through Greece that would let us do Bulgaria during the day and reach home in the afternoon. This is were it got interesting. I told the GPS to take me home. Not only did I specify Bucharest, but the exact address. I then trusted it to take us there, without (as Maria would soon point out) actually checking the path. My only defence is that I am a software developer and I instinctively trust the electronics more than any paper map.

So, in the middle of the night, we found ourselves on a twisting road, dark and full of poorly signaled curves. Maria got upset immediately and asked me to look at the GPS. I did and I found out that the highway would take a large curved path and that the road that the GPS put us on was cutting that path. I did remember a setting on the GPS that involved road tolls. I thought the machine wanted us to avoid the tolls so it took us away from the highway. So I checked the setting off.

The road now went on another path. I could see that both previous and current path were taking european roads, but it didn't specify which was a highway and which was not. Maria was angry as hell and I was slowly losing my patience. I can stand hysterical shouting just as any guy, maybe a little better, but I do have my limits. I proposed to stop the car and look at the paper map and decide together on the path we want to take. Maria refused. So we went on.

At one moment I was actually reasoning that impulsive reactions (like swerving the car at high speed off the curve and killing us both) were usually an effect of low levels of serotonin, the comfort hormone. Both in animals and humans, serotonin is produces when the subject is caressed. So I actually caressed my wife, cooing her to close to normal levels of serotonin, when I almost felt like ripping her head off. Of course, that would solve nothing, since I can't drive (not to mention I am a rookie at ripping heads as well).

We passed through the town of Thiba, then we continued on a road that was nothing close to a highway. It was a good road, but not what we expected. The darn GPS took us from the highway because I checked that road toll setting off. Maria finally decided to stop and look at the map. The map showed us that the highway was 2 km from Thiba. We were already 20km away from it. But the small town where we stopped had two clear (albeit very thin) roads taking us directly to the highway. We inquired of the way to the highway to a gas station lady. She said that no, the only way is back to Thiba. So we went 20km back to Thiba, 2 km to the highway, 20km on the highway, where we noticed an exit to the small city we just left from.

At least everything went cool from that. It was good that we looked more attentively on the path home, since the GPS had prepared another surprise for us: it wanted to cross the border to Macedonia, then Bulgaria. I think that it would have been a more interesting road, but Maria insisted we take the known path through Kulata. Remember Kulata? Anyway, we got to Sofia, where the ring road around it was still under contruction!

Bulgaria (8)

After following a long queue of cars going at 4m per minute on dusty unmarked unpaved roads in the middle of Sofia, we got to the ring road again. It was under contruction there as well. So we stopped at a gas station and asked for directions. Bulgarians are different from Greeks. When they say they know a little English, they actually mean they don't know some of the words, not they just know a few. They were nice, showed me where I was on the map, where I should go to exit Sofia and reach the road to Ruse (the border town to Romania) and they even gave me a Bulgarian map. I told them I have no money to pay for it and they gave it to me anyway! I gathered that the map costs less that 5 euros + the repairs to the cracked lateral mirror, but still it was amazingly nice of them.

Then we got to the road to Ruse. This time, the GPS took us on another road that had no more 40 and 60km speed limit signs. I was glad to see it, especially since Maria had exclaimed "oh, now we get on that boring road" only minutes before. I was thus surprised to hear her complain the entire way to Ruse that it was NOT the way we came on when going towards Greece.

And that's about it. We got home, I started writing all this, I enjoyed my last 4days of freedom before going to work, answered my emails, I couldn't believe the people leaving spam and messages on the blog DEMANDING work done for them, etc.