I’m about a quarter of the way through Dominic Sandbrook’s massive White Heat, a history of Britain 1964-1970. It’s a fantastic book, that’s very well written and serves as a great antidote to the endless dull and repetitive documentaries I’m tired of seeing about the period.
Here’s another interesting books meme from a site called Overdue Books.
If, like me, your shelves are overflowing with unread books so much that you’ve started to pile new ones up on the floor, then this could be for you. Before January 30, you must read five books that you already own. That’s books that are just sitting around unread; on shelves, on the floor, in buckets, wherever. For me, it’s a great exercise that’s going to hopefully prevent further Amazon purchases in the run up to Christmas.
But what five books to choose?
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley. Inspired by posts I’ve been reading over at The Bibliosphere. I dug out my copy and discovered a bookmark in place on page 84. I’m determined to see it through this time.
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens. I can’t work out why I haven’t read this one yet, but there you go.
What Maisie Knew – Henry James. I like James, but for some reason I’ve never progressed from Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw. Until now.
Walter De la Mare – Ghost Stories
I’ve had this on the shelf for years, and this is the best time of year for ghost stories. It’s kind of haunting me there on the shelf, so at last time to read.
Philip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
One of those books you borrow, never read and never return. So time to read and return. I just have to remember who it belongs to…
I just hope I can do it. Not the reading, which I’m sure I can manage. No, I’m talking about the Amazon thing. I find something exciting about the mundane activity of ordering a book over the internet and then waiting for it. Waiting and then receiving that tell-tale brown box and tearing it open to inspect my latest buys (especially now that my postman has worked out where to leave my parcels when I’m at work).
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I’m finally back on line after a few frustrating blogless days. Thanks to Jack Pickard for being the first person to spot that something was up (well, he is the web chemist).
I’ve lost about a week of posts and comments, but I’ve managed to find them (thank heavens I subscribe to my own feed – which is continuing to act as if nothing has happened – and even though I’d deleted comments from my inbox I discovered I hadn’t yet emptied the ‘deleted’ folder).
I realised that it wasn’t really the end of the world earlier this week when I was listening to a programme on the radio on the way into work about a man who had been kidnapped. He was chained up in a dark hole for four months with only a candle for company and kept himself sane by counting the slugs on the wall. Oh yes, and he was periodically covered in chicken droppings. It sort of put things into context.
The only thing that niggled me (about the blogless experience that is, not the kidnapped man – who had come out of it surprisingly chirpy) was that I had to really badger my hosting company before they told me what was up. Eventually they confessed to a catastrophic cock-up:
We have had to rebuild both the raid drives on the hard disks which takes several hours a disk, then the disks have to be reformatted and the drives totally rebuilt and configured.
This would not normally be a problem, but this is a freak incident which has affected the backup drive as well, which has meant we couldnt swap to it.
This also means that we are dealing with 3 drives as opposed to 1 which increases the time span as well.
There are over 800 customers on that server which is why it is imperative for us to get the servers up and running as fast as we can. But the problems that the drives are having are time consuming resolves and we cannot speed up computer processes.
We again are very sorry for the problems that have been caused.
The later messages became very grovelling indeed.
At least 799 other pissed off people! Maybe I should start a forum for disgruntled webmasters. I’ll know where not to host it…
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