In the Time of Dying is an excellent sci-fi book I just read. I did a review of the book on the website Goodreads.com. It’s basically a social networking site for readers of all ages and kinds. It allows you to let people know what books you’ve read, what you’re reading now, and write reviews of them if you’d like.

I found Kristine Williams only because when I got my Sony E-reader last Christmas, it came with a gift card that still had a couple bucks left on it. I was having a need for some original sci-fi and hoping to find a new author to enjoy. I had been reading numerous books of short stories (my personal favorite kind) and just wanted something different.

In the time of dying called out to me for several reasons. One, the title seems to have a kind of power to it. It makes you think, “oooh what’s this about?” Two, the description sounded awesome. I have a special love for dystopian futures and interstellar travel in my sci-fi. The idea behind “In the time of dying” is that Earth is completely drained of resources and devastated by war to the point that the only way for mankind to possibly survive is to leave and attempt to colonize elsewhere. My third reason for buying the book was that it was only 2 bucks. How can you say no to that?

When I started reading it wasn’t long before I realized that this was going to be an awesome book. The characters are multi faceted. The dialogue is never boring or wasted. It’s fluid and written as if these people are real. I get the feeling this book would do great if it were ever turned into a movie. It has little bits for lovers of multiple genres and not just Sci-fi. It has flairs of fast paced action, mystery, and intrigue, among others as well. There is a bit of a romance in the book as well but it was also well written and never too in your face for you to feel bothered by it if you are like me and don’t particularly enjoy romance. This book will keep you guessing and never quite knowing everything that’s going on right up until the end. I like books like that.

It’s time now for the bad parts of the book. There really wasn’t much that I disliked about the book though. I wish the ending was a bit more dramatic. It seemed to wrap up plot lines a bit fast, right after an action sequence right near the end. I was hoping for more out of the ending mostly because we were still left with some questions that were unanswered. A lot of authors have books from time to time where the ending or what happens after is left to the reader but I don’t always like it when they do that. There’s always the possibility that Kristine will grace us with a sequel, which I would wholeheartedly approve and love to read. You get close to these characters, you see them build up relationships, and then they’re gone. They will be missed. Only great ideas and writing can accomplish that.

I would recommend this book to any lover of good sci-fi but as mentioned before it has many things in it to love even if sci-fi isn’t your “cup of tea”. Buying this book for 2 dollars was a steal in my eyes and since finishing this I have also purchased and started reading her other two stand-alone novels as well as book 1 in her “Keeper” series. As a last note, Kristine Williams is a name that isn’t that well known and that’s a travesty. If you read her work and really enjoy it, tell a friend.

Hey people. Let’s talk about me. I like doin’ that.It seems I discover more about myself every day. In my first ever blog post I talked about how much I hated the fact that I always wait until the last minute to write papers. Well, not surprisingly, I did it yet again. I had a 3 page paper due at noon today and i finished it at near 7 in the morning… What makes me constantly keep doing this? I am so tired riht now I can’t even think straight. I did a great job on it but that’s beside the point. Maybe I will just never learn. Oh well. I’m working up a blog post about the Fairfield Hills abandoned insane asylum still. That’s about all that’s keepin me awake.

My friend Jeremy bought me Half Life 2: Episode 1, so i’ve been working on beating Half Life 2 so I can play it. For some reason HL is like a flash in the pan joy for me. Like I would never deny the fact that it’s a great game series, but sometimes I get bored of it. It’s parts throughout the game that do it. It’s kinda like a movie that has some action, then some dialog, then some action. Well, all the dialog kills me. Most times when I play an FPS I want a mindless fragfest. That’s what I love Left 4 Dead for so much. I can log in, shoot some zombies faces off, complete levels with minimal coordination if I want, and just have all around fun. Maybe HL is just a little too high brow of a shooter for me at times.

Politically my mind has been changed recently. I decided to go from being a Democrat to an Independent. It mostly came about as part of a long seeded lack of trust in both parties. It always seemed to me to be more about party politics than actually ever getting anything done. It’s like a big my dick is bigger than your dick war in Washington all the time. And at the end of the day, both sides end up just looking stupid and incompetent, and do nothing for the American people. I’m tired of all the bickering on both sides and never seeing any real action, it’s all just plans. We can use trillions of dollars on a war, whether you agree with it or not, and I don’t, but we can’t spend money where it counts because then that gets called out and trashed. Whatever happened to helping the homeless get jobs, or affordable housing for those in need? Don’t even get me started on the educational system in this country. That’s probably most of the reason we have this mess of a system right now. It breeds stupidity and ignorance, neither of which can ever lead to anything good.

There’s my rant for the day. Later.

Allow me to preface this post by saying I have no problem with most of law enforcement but in every job where you have a good amount of power, some are bound to abuse it. Such was the case in Austin, Texas. They installed cameras on a small number of the stop lights around the city early last year. The idea behind this was to catch people who ran red lights by taking a picture of their license plates so that a ticket could be mailed to them. This turned out to work very well but it also ended up catching something rather unexpected. Between May of 2008 and April 13th of this year the hidden cameras at just those few stop lights caught police officers 39 times, running red lights. They were NOT responding to an emergency and had NO reason to be doing that when they did it. Some even flipped on their lights for a second to change the light to green after they had started going through the intersection and then shut them off a few moments later.

This is not a horrible abuse of power no, but if any of us were to do that we would be guaranteed to get a ticket or at least be held responsible in some way. Not these cops. The Police Chief of Austin is on record as saying that the officers involved have not been ticketed nor will they be. Seems moronic to me but oh well. I’m sure we’ve all seen a cop do something questionable while driving. Who’s gonna pull over a cop right? I guess the people of Austin if so inclined should perhaps use the media or speak to someone in Austin city government to see if theres something that can be done about it.

You think the craziness ends there? Nope. This story is a little shorter and a lot different as it involves correctional workers and not actual police officers. This one takes place at the Franklin Correctional Facility in Florida during a “Take your son or daughter to work day”. A corrections officer named Walter Schmidt decided to use all 50,000 volts of his stun gun on a few of the children, apparently with the parents permission… What is wrong with this guy? I remember one time I was being stupid as a kid and ended up getting shocked by the house current and it hurt really really bad! What would make him think that even with parent permission that something like this was an ok thing to do? It boggles the mind. Thankfully this guy was fired pending an investigation. It’s things like this that make me lose faith in humanity!

20th Century Fox has been very much on top of internet piracy and has tried to get as many people as possible prosectued for illegaly downloading their movies or other content. I myself have gotten TWO cease and desist orders from then through my cable company. (Used to be a big Pirate. ARGGHH!) So it isn’t even necessary to say that when their latest blockbuster movie “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” was leaked on March 31st they went ballistic. The copy of the film that was leaked was still in post production and many special effects were yet to be implemented. The overall look of the copy was still by and large excellent. The FBI was involved from the beginning but to this day no arrests have been made in the case.

This is not the first time that even I can recall a movie of DVD quality being released before it is actually released in theaters yet. I recall the same thing happening with Jason X and The Hulk movies of several years back. I remember a day when movies that were leaked onto torrents were for the most part horrible. Especially if the movie was still in theaters. They were horrible sounding, scratchy, twitchy versions of themselves. Alot of them had bad cropping, people talking or walking in front of the camera, and other very annoying things. The technology that these pirates and hackers use has increased massively in recent years. It is not uncommon to see a movie available for download in DVD quality that is still in your local cinema. A lot of these releases are leaked copies of DVDs that are sent to critics and the like for review. These copies contain watermarks but creative pirates can completely remove any trace of these.

The problem with controlling or stopping piracy all together is two fold. There is the fact that the internet resides in this massive legal gray area right now. There are so many websites up from so many countries all over the world. Some of these sites and their servers are located in countries that do not have international copyright laws. The second flaw with catching these people is that after a file has been uploaded to a few people it will spread like wildfire with all the people downloading it also uploading it to others at the same time.  With there being so many people involved in the crimes it is very hard if not impossible to do anything about it.

It is estimated that within a week of “Wolverine” being uploaded it had been downloaded by over a million people. That number rose up and up obviously as time has gone on. If they are ever really going to do anything about piracy on the internet it would probably take some sort of rewriting of the entire net as a whole. Other wise they’ll just keep comin up with ways to block pirates, and the pirates will keep coming up with more inventive ways of getting around it all.

Where do I begin with this oddly hilarious story? Well, when I was growing up I lived for quite some time in Puyallup, WA. I believe I went from 3rd-6th grade there.

Now, apparently in that little town there was a plane crash recently. The pilot (who hasn’t beed identified yet) had engine problems shortly after taking off from a nearby airport. The Cessna 182 was reportedly about 150 feet off the ground when the engine just quit. His first reaction was to try to turn the plane around and land the plane. Smart idea in concept but it didn’t end up working as he had planned. The plane slammed into a fence, then flipped over and landed on a large collection of portable toilets that were in the secured storage facility that he landed in.

The pilot was able to walk away from the accident and apparently had no injuries at all besides obviously being a bit shaken up. There are so many jokes that one could make on this topic that I think i’ll leave it alone just this once. Way too easy….

Now by that title you would think that I intend to make light of the recent uproar over the Swine Flu or H1N1 as it’s being called now. My major point is that I think the media loves to overhype things and take things to such a great level that people get worried over nothing. Would a massive epidemic of Swine Flu be horrible? Yes. Is it likely to happen? No. You see there hasn’t even been 60 cases in the United States yet and there is all this commotion over it. Only 1 confirmed death has been related to these cases and it was a 24 month old child. A 24 month old obviously has a higher mortality rate when it comes to almost any sickness or disease.

The H1N1 strain of the flu that is out there is sort of a bastard child of the Spanish Flu strain that caused a massive coast to coast epidemic in 1918. There was also an epidemic of Swine Flu in 1976. All 3 strains, from the 1918 to 1976 to 2009 are all related. The ’76 epidemic is an absolutely scary sign of what may be coming in the near future. They released a vaccine for it and immunized enough of the population so that the immunity would spread and kill the epidemic. After the dust settled and scientific research was conducted on the whole affair, a startling conclusion came about. More people were killed by the vaccine than were killed by the disease itself. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that now.

I’m sure all or most of you also remember the Avian Flu or H5N1 mass panic of a while back. This is slightly different as there has been more cases faster with Swine Flu but not by much. Where did Avian Flu go? It wasn’t the Flu shot. It wasn’t anything besides taking average everyday steps to not get sick. The media blew it up into a hypestorm the likes of which I haven’t seen in years over anything that isn’t politics. And what was all that for? It accomplished nothing and H5N1 went the way of the Dodo pun intended.

I wish that people would just think about it seriously before they listen to everything that the media says word for word. At least for now. Medical technologies have improved more than ten fold since the previous two outbreaks of the strain. I think that the government being as on top of it as they are, and by government I mean local and state governments where minor outbreaks are occuring, makes it increasingly less likely that this will ever get that far. You are far more likely at this point to get struck by lightning TWICE in your lifetime than you are to get this new Flu variant.