This training stuff is rough…

I’m not really into book reviews, but when you glance up from reading a book and the reality around you is fluctuating from the sheer mass of concepts being presented, you need to speak about it.

I’ve been in a major sci-fi book glut for almost two years now. A place of painfully boring stories of all too common space-borne societies doing nothing in particular. It felt like the authors gave up and simply decided to write mystery novels set in space.

The book Accelerando by Charles Stross passed by my consciousness several times via several different blogs. In a now obviously embarrassing archaic thought pattern, I shunned it because the author had released it “free” on the web via the Creative Commons license. I picked it up in analog form recently due mostly to the TSA’s notion that anything electronic must be a tool of bearded dark skinned terrorists. In other words, I wanted something to entertain me on my flight to Texas without causing me any undue body cavity searches.

What I got was a mind bending reality revisioning tool the likes of which I haven’t felt since the beginning of my reading life when I picked up my first Foundation series book by Asimov. Those youthful days when my ears would be red and burning from the realization that there were other people out there that were willing to think beyond the painfully mundane here and now.

Accelerando goes even beyond that, literally (or literarily) feeling like some of the more fascinating drugs I’ve experienced in my day. In fact, both Sarah and myself guffawed at a review on the book cover that said the book makes hallucinogens obsolete. The reviewer was spot on. The book transcends a simple entertaining story and seems to surreptitiously guide you into realms of such future thought that when you look up from the page you are shocked to find yourself in such a low resolution reality.

The cab driver excitedly explained to me, on the way to the hotel from the airport, that it might actually rain today. It only rains about four times a year and it’s been over 100 degrees and sunny for weeks.

The picture above is my head. The result of walking about 20 feet across the street. I’ve been here two days. It’s rained two days. Perhaps it will just keep going, Texas will become a tropical paradise and they’ll name a city after me, like they did for Sam Housten. Or Yakko, Waco, and Dot.

And I thought I’d be sunning by the pool every day. Guess I’ll just have to take pleasure in the painfully exciting computer training I’m getting. The one with the huge test at the end of the week. The one that you need to study an extra 4 hours every night, after the 8 hour class every day.

Being healthy sucks…

Sarah says: Yes. Yes, it does.

Classroom… Already failed pre-test…

Cloudy, rainy, humid day here…

…in Texas.

Bored… outside hotel getting some air…

In Plano Texas for training… view outside my hotel window

It’s not really the middle of summer anymore, and I really should have removed the air conditioner weeks ago, but the title just fits..