Long day....
Sep. 17th, 2001 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ferenYet I got very little done at work. My biggest activity was displacing air. I worked an occasional help desk ticket, though, so I guess I did something productive. I do feel better now that I've nailed up the VPN between our New Jersey campus and the New York campus. Oddly enough, when Tuesday's terrible events happened, the campus lost connectivity to the corporate WAN but not to the Internet. Strange, eh? This left a campus that is over 90,000 square feet with about 4,000 attending students at any given time completely isolated from the computing resources necessary to schedule courses, enroll new students, disperse student loans or even check out books to students from the library. I honestly wasn't sure I'd be able to make this VPN work, and I wouldn't have been able to if I hadn't received help from one of our vendors. Credit where credit is due, and all that.
It's been a while since I've done a rant, for any number of reasons. One, I was just "all ranted out." Two, there weren't many things to rant about. Three, I just didn't feel it was appropriate for a given time period. I'm slowly getting back into the mood to write, and slowly beginning to feel the stir of echoes far back in my brain. Mostly it's the events of the last week that have given me pause to consider. I suspect I'll have something written either tomorrow night or Wednesday.
Currently I'm reading a book that is a collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, called Good Omens. It's a rather interesting story, with some very good insight and very subtle (well, usually it's subtle...at other times it is very un-subtle) humor. Jen is responsible for pointing this out to me. I was looking for something to read while I was at the office on Saturday for the data center shutdown and restart, and I wasn't terribly enthused to be rereading any of the books I've already read four or eight times before. Since Twan's girlfriend has moved in with us there's been a bit of an influx in reading material. I never even noticed this book on the bookshelf until Jen pointed it out to me and said, "There, read that one!" I thought I recognized the names on there, and sure enough, I found out later that it was Neil Gaiman who had written American Gods, a novel that has gotten some good press and that I was looking to pick up somewhere in the future.
I've got Winamp playing some quiet music, and likely I'll be shortly retreating to my room to make some phone calls and read for a bit longer. I believe I'll be going to bed early tonight.
Rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plow
It's been a while since I've done a rant, for any number of reasons. One, I was just "all ranted out." Two, there weren't many things to rant about. Three, I just didn't feel it was appropriate for a given time period. I'm slowly getting back into the mood to write, and slowly beginning to feel the stir of echoes far back in my brain. Mostly it's the events of the last week that have given me pause to consider. I suspect I'll have something written either tomorrow night or Wednesday.
Currently I'm reading a book that is a collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, called Good Omens. It's a rather interesting story, with some very good insight and very subtle (well, usually it's subtle...at other times it is very un-subtle) humor. Jen is responsible for pointing this out to me. I was looking for something to read while I was at the office on Saturday for the data center shutdown and restart, and I wasn't terribly enthused to be rereading any of the books I've already read four or eight times before. Since Twan's girlfriend has moved in with us there's been a bit of an influx in reading material. I never even noticed this book on the bookshelf until Jen pointed it out to me and said, "There, read that one!" I thought I recognized the names on there, and sure enough, I found out later that it was Neil Gaiman who had written American Gods, a novel that has gotten some good press and that I was looking to pick up somewhere in the future.
I've got Winamp playing some quiet music, and likely I'll be shortly retreating to my room to make some phone calls and read for a bit longer. I believe I'll be going to bed early tonight.
Rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plow
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Neil Gaiman
Date: 2001-09-17 07:05 pm (UTC)Gaiman is a very good storyteller. I should point you towards Sandman, the comic book he wrote for DC Vertigo. I also have two compilations of short stories and poems he wrote, as well as two CDs of him reading said stories. He's got a lovely British accent, murrr...
Anyways, I'll toss the books into my bag for when I come down this weekend. I think you'll like them.
no subject
Date: 2001-09-17 07:36 pm (UTC)Hum. Good Omens is brilliant. I tend to compare it to Dogma and Dogma to it. They're both funny as anything, very well done, and impart a few points. I've heard murmurs of a movie... Murmurs, only. I'm still waiting for Gaiman to get done with "Death: The High Cost Of Living". (Death is a sweetheart, by the by, if you crumble and read the dreaded comic books. Dream's a real bastard, and adoreable in his own way, but Death...)
Tell Jen to hunt Neverwhere and Stardust (the illustrated one), too. Not bad at all.
When you're done with that, I'll point you towards the Good Omens slash! ;) (I'm not making this up.)
no subject
Date: 2001-09-18 06:08 am (UTC)> towards the Good Omens slash! ;) (I'm not
> making this up.)
I'm sure you're not. Over the weekend, I was idly talking with some people, and the topic of really bad SciFi slash came up. I was watching TRON at the time, and made some sort of comment along the lines of, "I wonder if there's any Sark/MCP slash out there." Someone responded that they were pretty sure they'd seen some :P *twitch*
Hmmm....
Date: 2001-09-18 07:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2001-09-18 08:08 am (UTC)Allready own 'em hon. Plus all the Sandman comics in graphic novel form, Death: The High Cost of Living and Death: Time of Your Life, the Books of Magic, The Day I Sold my Dad for Two Goldfish, and a compilation of stories by other authors using the Sandman characters, Book of Dreams.
The only one I have yet to purchase is American Gods.
no subject
Date: 2001-09-18 10:44 am (UTC)Re: Hmmm....
Date: 2001-09-18 10:46 am (UTC)Re: Hmmm....
Date: 2001-09-18 10:47 am (UTC)