CUViper

I like to read fiction, when I have the time, and most often I live in the fantasy section of the bookstore. Right now there are three series in development that I’m following as each new tome comes out. (I say tome because they’re huge — each book tends to be around a thousand pages…) In no particular order:

• The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan
• Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson
• A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin

I’m currently reading A Feast for Crows, the fourth in Martin’s series. I also read his blog, and I saw today the announcement that HBO has gotten the rights to do a show based on the series! I got home and told Millie, and she was laughing at just how excited this has me.

This series of books is definitely on the adult side of things, with often dark and violent themes. It’s less about Good vs. Evil, and more like the real world where good and evil aren’t always well defined. I’m glad that HBO got the rights for this, because on any other network I would fear that the show would be gentrified. With shows like Rome and The Sopranos under their belt, you can be sure that HBO won’t shy away in Martin’s world.

My desire for it to be done up right is seriously conflicting with my need to start watching it. For now I’ll get back to the book and anticipate great things to come…

Some food for thought: The Denver Blizzard

Of course, I don’t live in Colorado anymore, but I still consider myself a Coloradan. People around the Bay Area are freaking out that the overnight temperatures are dipping below freezing – OMG! News sources are having a field day with how to protect from the cold, even telling people how to keep their pipes from freezing. Give me a break…

The internets are all a-buzz with chatter about the iPhone (this one, not those) so I thought I should throw in my 2¢. And then I realized that I’d need $498.98 more to actually get my hands on one, plus a 2-year contract. I find it ironic that people were so up-in-arms about the price of the PS3 — which ironically has the exact same pricing tiers — but a cellphone seems somehow reasonable at that price. I like my phone just fine, and a 2-year contract got mine and Millie’s for free. So while Apple’s new toy does look cool, I’ll be passing on it, thank you very much. I hope I don’t lose geek-cred for saying that though…

My blog has moved — its new home is http://blog.cuviper.com/. Of course, if you’re reading this, then you’ve already found it. Anyone who can’t find it, just let me know… Actually, those of you who use a feed-reader instead of probably won’t notice, assuming my redirects work properly. You might want to update your feed subscription though.

The move is mostly inspired by me being lazy. I used to have the blog on my own hosting account at AxisInternet, which worked great. WordPress keeps coming out with new versions though — it’s good to get new features and bug fixes, of course, and the upgrades have all gone smoothly, but it’s still a nuisance. So, I transferred my blog to the official wordpress.com site (with some DNS magic so you still see it on cuviper.com), and now they can update it for me.

Hosting WordPress on your own is good if you want to do a lot of customization, but I’m not really doing anything special. The new site is almost exactly the same as before. The only loss is to the people who subscribed to email updates before, and I’ll send a note to those on how to get updates now.

If you read this far, you are now rewarded with our Christmas pics. Bombs away!

Update: After writing up directions of the various ways to easily track new content on websites, I decided I might as well copy that here. When a site gives you a feed URL, here are some things you can do with it:

1. If you use a custom homepage like Google or Yahoo, they usually let you add feeds to see updates. Look for a place to add content by URL and copy in my feed link.
2. When you have a lot of sites you want to keep track of, an aggregator can come in handy — this is what I use to read all my websites. There are programs you can download to manage this, or you can use a website like Bloglines or Google Reader. Basically, you get all of your websites collected into one page for you to read, so you don’t have to go all over the place looking for updates.
3. If you really like getting email updates, you can do that too. There are several sites that can translate RSS feeds to email for you. RssFwd looks pretty good, or you could try R-mail or FeedBlitz.

For any of those, all you’ll need is my feed address: http://blog.cuviper.com/feed/

Enjoy!