Book of Screed

I find myself unable to fully make up my mind about this book.

The gist: “Wind” is a frame story. In a little town in the middle of nowhere there’s a an inn run by a battered, run-down old innkeeper. It turns out the innkeeper is actually a feared and notorious wizard named Kvothe, both famous and infamous for his daring deeds and some world-shattering crime in his past. Kvothe has apparently fled to anonymity to die, but a wandering scholar calling himself “Chronicler” turns up, and convinces Kvothe to tell his story. As Kvothe does, stranger and stranger things begin happening around the inn.

There are some powerful scenes and great moments in this book. The black-eyed man and the hooded man with no face, for instance. The man who takes care of the orphans. The brutal guard on the streets. The drug addict dancing in the snow. Kvothe’s song to win his silver pipes, what happens when his string breaks, and his confrontation with a cruel teacher and his rivalry with an older student. The “Hee Haw” song. The horror the under the floorboards at the wedding. The legends of the Amyr and the Chandrian. Each one of these scenes were powerful.

But…in a certain sense, nothing at all happens in the book. The first half of the book is much better than the second half. In the beginning, Kvothe, surrounded by ominous secrets, starts to tell his story to Chronicler. In the end, Kvothe, surrounded by ominous secrets, is still telling his story to Chronicler. Nothing has changed. In the beginning of Kvothe’s story, he is an orphaned, precocious youth. At the end of Kvothe’s story, he is still an orphaned, precocious youth. Nothing has changed. There’s building action, building action, more building…and then nothing. The book ends.

It’s a cliffhanger without an actual cliff at the end.

Now I know this is supposed to be the first of a trilogy, but still. You expect some sort of ending. Reading this book is like picking up a novel and finding that the final three hundred pages were blank.

Kvothe himself seems a little too superhuman; he’s good at music and magic and logic and lockpicking and languages. His relationship with his semi-girlfriend Denna is somewhat annoying. It seems like the stereotypical “geek lets pretty girl cry on his shoulder in between her dates with football players while frustrated that she just doesn’t see him ‘that’ way” transposed into a medieval fantasy setting. I felt the same way about the “Spider-Man” movies; if Peter Parker is so smart, why doesn’t he find himself a girlfriend with a lower Drama Queen score? The same goes for Kvothe.

So, despite numerous fine individual scenes, “The Name of the Wind” just didn’t do it for me. To be fair, I suppose I should wait for the next book before rendering a final opinion. But the next book had better have a lot of payoff.

-JM

When I saw “Batman Begins”, I was pleased, because it was massively superior to the Batman films produced in the 90s. And now, “The Dark Knight”.

Wow. Just wow. Epic, raw, operatic.

I did not give Heath Ledger his due, I think. When I heard that he would play the Joker, I thought “what? The gay cowboy/metrosexual teen heartthrob! Surely you jest!”. But his take on the Joker was…scary. His Joker is not some Cesar Romero-esque buffoon in clown makeup, or Jack Nicholson hamming it up. No, his Joker is frighteningly real, a man certain that rules and laws and moralities are the rankest hypocrisy, and he’s going to make you prove it, and laugh all the while.

It helps that everyone else on the cast could act, as well. Bale has to play three characters…the real Bruce Wayne, the playboy persona Wayne wears, and Batman. Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman were all good, and Maggie Gyllenhaal was an improvement over Katie Holmes, Scientologist Space Princess. And Aaron Eckhart’s turn as Harvey Two-Face Dent was surprisingly powerful.

Good movie, maybe the best of the summer. But definitely not for kids. Because it turns out that kids are right to be afraid of clowns.

-JM

“Spider Robinson, in his book VARIABLE STAR, has one character voice the opinion that conservatives are fearful, slothful creatures, because they only seek to cling to the institutions they know, whereas the radicals are brave and blessed, superior forms of life, because they boldly go where no man has gone before. This is perhaps the stupidest political analysis of Left and Right that can be imagined.”

Yet another fine essay from John C. Wright, this time arguing why the traditional American conception of Left vs. Right is fallacious. What is fascinating (and alarming) is how many contemporary political philosophies are branches off the tree of tyranny, seeming to spring from the same dark impulse to turn the State into an earthly god.

And as Nebuchadnezzar, Domitian ,and Diocletian could tell you, this isn’t even a new impulse.

-JM

Jim C. Hines explains once and for all what it takes to be a modern SF novelist.

-JM

I care not a whit for professional football, but I admire the way Brett Favre has retired with dignity. Indeed, many men in a similar situation would make a foolish spectacle of themselves, desperately trying to return to the game in an epic hissy fit of “My Sweet Sixteen” proportions, craving still the worshipful adoration of a servile media, but not Favre. No, he has bowed out with dignity and class, and ridden off into the sunset, keeping his legend unsullied by unseemly histrionics.

Is this the face of a man who quit his job only to realize that he has neither hobbies nor interests nor a purpose in life outside of work? I think not!

-JM

Lately I’ve been seeing numerous instances of a Trojan called “XP Antivirus 2008”. The wretched little thing is particularly clever. It either installs itself by pretending to be a video codec, or you get bounced to a website that claims you have thousands of viruses on your computer, which then offers to install software to remove the aforementioned viruses. Of course, the viruses don’t exist, and XP Antivirus 2008 will then busy itself buy pestering you to buy the paid version (which offers “Maximal Protection!”) and downloading additional malware.

All this is standard Trojan operating procedure, of course, but whoever built “XP Antivirus 2008” did a surprisingly good job of mimicking the appearance of an actual Windows program. It’s even got the Windows Defender icon in there. People are getting fooled because it looks quite legitimate, even though it’s a massive raft of fraud.

That’s the problem with the modern malware situation, I’m afraid. The good guys are always on the defensive, and you win a war by pounding your opposition into mush, not by staying on the defensive.

-JM

‘The basic attitude of the Dem party leadership is “Christianity is crap and Christians are an enemy to defeat.” The basic attitude of the GOP leadership is “Christianity is a useful form of crowd control, and must be exploited so that we can attain money, votes and power.” Obama’s principal contribution to Dem political thought is, “Hey! Slow down! We might be able to exploit Christians too!”‘

That, found via here, made me laugh. I suspect it’s also quite true.

-JM

Let’s kick off the week with some good news, shall we?

My story “Knight of Sorrows: Frozen Shadows” has been picked up by MindFlights. And you can still read the first two stories in the “Knight” cycle here:

Knight of Sorrows

Knight of Sorrows: Poisoned Thorns

-JM

Judge: “You stand accused of attacking your crew members, giving information to the Romulans, singing loudly in the ship’s lounge, and seducing both the ship’s doctor AND the ship’s counselor. How do you plead?”

Defendant: “Your honor, I plead that I was possessed by an evil alien entity.”

Judge: “Oh. Why didn’t you say so? Case dismissed!”

Apparently jurisprudence has devolved somewhat in the 24th century.

-JM

Are you ready to ruuuuuuuumble?

As you might recall, recently I opined that Adobe Reader 9 wasn’t quite as good as FoxIt Reader. One thing led to another, and before long I wound up promising Adobe’s PDF Standards Architect that I would do a head to head comparison between Reader 9 and FoxIt Reader 2.3.

The Internet is a funny place.

Let’s get to it!

The specs on my test machine:

Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Pack 1
Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 processor
3 gigabytes of DDR2 667MHz RAM
500 gigabyte SATA hard drive at 5400 RPM

This is probably a more powerful machine than your average home user or business user currently possesses, but we’ll be able to see Reader 9 and FoxIt go head to head unhindered by insufficient system resources.

First, I downloaded the installers for both programs, and compared their respective sizes:

Adobe: 33.4 megabytes.
FoxIt : 2.55 megabytes

FoxIt wins this category, especially if you have a dial-up connection.

Let’s see how long the installations took. Obviously the install process pauses at various times for user input, but I went with the default options in both cases and clicked through as quickly as I could:

Adobe: 1 minute, 43.5 seconds.
FoxIt: 16 seconds.

FoxIt wins this one.

After the programs had finished installing, I compared the amount of space the installed programs took up on the hard drive.

Adobe: 198 megabytes
FoxIt: 6.56 megabytes

FoxIt wins by a substantial margin.

I have a pet peeve about programs that add themselves to Windows’s startup items without explicit permission, since I prefer that a computer start as quickly and efficiently as possible. Granted, I can see the occasional need for a program to do so, but I still dislike it.

Adobe: 1 startup item added.
FoxIt: no startup items added.

Another practice I dislike is bundling additional stuff onto free applications. The way Apple bundles its Safari browser to the iTunes version of Windows, for instance, regardless that Safari for Windows seems to have numerous security holes and doesn’t mesh well with Windows’s graphical systems in general. I’m not contesting that companies have the right to do this, just that it’s rather annoying. Adobe Reader 9 puts an Acrobat.com icon for Adobe’s new steps into cloud computing. Alas, FoxIt Reader fails here as well, since an ad for the paid version remains consistently on the application’s toolbar. This one’s a tie.

We’ve established that FoxIt Reader has a substantially smaller footprint than Adobe Reader. Now let’s compare actual performance, since a small program won’t do you much good if the larger one actually works better. Launching the programs from a cold start:

Adobe: 6.2 seconds
FoxIt: 0.5 seconds

Next, I compared how much memory the programs used without having first opened a document of any kind.

Adobe: 9.9 megabytes
FoxIt: 2.4 megabytes

FoxIt wins for memory usage.

Now to the actual meat: it’s time to compare how fast they can actually open PDF documents. For my first test PDF, I picked the 847 kilobyte PDF of my novel “Worlds to Conquer” (which, of course, is a work of both stunning genius AND heartbreaking power).

Adobe: 0.5 seconds
FoxIt: 0.5 seconds

We have a tie! (If there was a difference, it was too small for human attention.)

But “Worlds to Conquer”, while indeed a work of staggering genius, is only a mere 847 kilobytes in size. For the next test, I picked the PDF version of the magisterial “Upgrading and Repairing PCs, 16th edition”, but Scott Mueller, which tops in at a whopping 1,585 pages and is lavishly illustrated throughout. The PDF file weighs in at 56.6 megabytes.

Adobe: 0.5 seconds
FoxIt: 0.5 seconds

Once again, we have a tie. But opening a big file in half a second is still pretty cool.

Next, I tried a PDF that was extremely graphics-heavy. I picked an Epson product brochure for a line of printer inks.

Adobe - 1 second
FoxIt - 1.5 seconds

Adobe Reader wins this round. It looks as if Adobe Reader might do better with handling large quantities of graphics in a PDF file.

Then I tried to fill out a PDF document. I located the dreaded W-4 form off the IRS site, opened it with both readers, and tried to fill out. Both programs handled text input with equal facility. Annoyingly enough, neither program lets you save any changes you make to a PDF file, since that feature is available in the paid versions. So once again we have a tie.

Final Verdict: Adobe Reader 9 has a substantially larger installation footprint than FoxIt Reader 2.3 and uses more RAM. That aside, they give almost identical performances, which needless to say is a substantial improvement over previous versions of Adobe Reader (especially version 7). I also think Adobe Reader can handle some of the more wild and exotic things you can do with a PDF file better than FoxIt, which is not surprising, since Adobe owns the PDF format.

That said, I think FoxIt Reader would be the best choice for a home user only views PDF files casually, or one with a slower or older machine. A business user with more rigorous or specific PDF needs might do better with Adobe Reader.

And both Adobe Reader 9 and Foxit Reader 2.3 are faster than the Mac Preview application. So that’s something.

-JM