In search of an archeology book that would be fun to read I came upon this book thanks to Amazon. This was a great read and really fun. Think of it as a cross between Indiana Jones and Lara Croft and the main person here is a women. She has a body guard or two that follow her around and try to keep her out of trouble as she is always in the wrong place at the wrong time. The characters and their development are really entertaining. This is the first book in the series along with The Tomb of Hercules and The Secrets of Excalibur with the same characters. As the title suggests this book is about an exploration for the Lost City of Atlantis. The search takes them all over the world and to some great remote places and of course as most of my books tend to have it has a fair amount of interesting technology behind it. The authors style of writing is short simple sentences and I feel that this plot is fairly believable from the standpoint of ‘can this actually happen’. There were parts where I was laughing out loud and there were some great action scenes, I was very happy to hear about the fact there were other books with these characters. I made Secrets of Excalibur my next one on the list to tackle. It is a nice break up from the heavily complex books I tend to pick and is just an all around pleasant read.
Category: Miscellaneous
This was a great book. Everybody loves a story about the crazy Nazis and bad Germans right? In this book a new US submarine is working on a training/testing run of their new sub under the ice in Antarctica when they run into a frozen in time and underground hidden Nazi base left over from the war. They then launch a big excavation of the project and attempt to find out what happened there as the base appeared to have just been abandoned. The Germans find out about the re-discovered base and want to make sure its secrets stay safe and that nobody finds out what it was originally created for. This was a great page turner and I highly recommend it. The authors writing style is great and keeps you reading, character development is alright but it supports the plot very well. I look forward to reading more from this author as it seems he has a lot of great sounding books out on Amazon. One thing I also noted about this writing style I had a great mental picture of what was happening during all the action scenes in the book, sometimes I find some authors are a little hard to visualize the high intense action scenes but not with this one!
I just finished this one last night and must say it was a fun and a very quick read for me. The basic plot here is there is a Delta Forces team that all its members are named after chess pieces (King, Queen, Knight, Rook, Biship) and their mission is to stop a scientist from perfecting a genetic engineering project that would allow for people to have regeneration abilities and live forever. It is sort of like the Resident Evil plot line in the fact that a few of their ‘experiments’ go a little crazy and cause some issues along the way. I really like the mix up of military and archeology here it makes for a fun plot line and is also the first in a series of three books with this Delta Forces team. I look forward to reading the other books in the series. The author’s writing style is easy to follow and action packed, the chapters switch back and forth so be ready to remember what happened two chapters ago or so to be able to follow the plot easily. Luckily its not that difficult!
This was probably the first book that I started reading with all my travels and this was probably also the first Tom Clancy book I have read in a long while. Looks like Tom Clancy no longer writes his own books and this one is the first one written by David Michaels. I really liked this book as it was written from a person with a strong military background and had great character development. Long and short of this one without ruining the book is that HAWX is a special program for high altitude flying and as is typically of stories these days an over patriotic leader wants to make the US safer and stronger for the long haul. This was a super fast read think I read it in about 4 flights to Dallas so a great one to pick up if you haven’t read it already. I would recommend this one and look forward to another book from this author.
I decided since I have been reading a lot of books that I should start writing them down so I can point people to my blog when they are curious as to what books I have read. We can start with one I did a while ago and then read the followup just recently. Now that I am done with grad school I might actually be able to read again, especially with my Kindle it makes things so much easier. And yes in case you are wondering a Kindle is much better than my iPad for reading, much clearer and easier on the eyes plus it works outside. So back to the book reviews:
The first book I read on my Kindle was Daemon by Daniel Suarez. This was an awesome book. The author wrote it was a computer programmer for a number of years so he writes it from a very technical point of view which is great for me. Also I felt that you didn’t need to be a techie to understand this book but it does help! Basically the long and short of this one is that a computer gaming genius wrote this program to execute after his death. This program reeks havoc on everything that is connected to data. The character development is great and you really get into the story line. The only issue I had with this book is that it had an abrupt ending, but that is when I found out that there was a sequel out there which is called Freedom that I read as well.
Freedom did a great job picking up where Daemon left off. I did read a few books in between which made it a little difficult to keep the story line correct as if you read a lot all the books start to blend together or you forget the names. This book along with Daemon kind of made me worry about how much of my life is online and available for this type of attack. I really enjoyed the way this book and the series ended and would recommend this to anyone who like a high action book with a great developed plot. Expect to be blown away with technology in this one which was great again for me!
So I ended up picking up a new router after bricking my good old WRT54G which I have had for a long time and served me well but kinda left we wanting more. That is probably why I was pushing a firmware upgrade to the router only to have it fail and brick it. So after doing a bunch of research as far as what was available at MicroCenter and reading reviews from NewEgg and Amazon I ended up with a D-Link DIR-655 Wireless N.
The main thing I was looking for in a router was stability and supportability I had a few other things in my mind that I figured would be awesome if I could find but were not too big of deal breakers. One thing that really led me to choose D-Link was their support network and the forums and their emulator of their firmware. The emulator was nice because it let me test drive the options of the router before buying it, why more companies don’t do that I will never know. Also you have the ability to easily download old firmware if you need to downgrade after an update. The forum was a welcome support link for the router but as usual you have to take those with a grain of sand as there seems to be a lot of angry people out there! Although I did take the biggest advice of the forum and did not upgrade to the latest firmware as it seems to have a lot of issues, and is not something you can remove after installing it. I figured since 80211N just made gold that there would be another update coming soon anyways.
A nice feature of this router is I have the ability to set up schedules. So I can open my FTP port for the 1 hour I need it to do my automated website backups. I can also do some port mapping from incoming external port to another internal port in my network. I also get some very useful logs and a whole bunch of other buttons and options to change (QoS, DHCP Priority Address, Guest Access, Email new Firmware, Uptime Clock). I can also enable a second WiFi hotspot with a different security level for guests so I can easily open and close a non-secure wireless access point. And it has a gigabit switch to boot so that is helpful for all four ports which i have plugged into my PS3, DirecTV, Media Center, and weather station.
It was on sale for $99 at MicroCenter and has turned out to be a very good router. I have tested it by pumping a ton of data through it via Bit-Torrent and Hulu and downloading 1GB files from FTP all at once without a hiccup (well my cable modem did reboot but don’t think that was the router’s fault). So this router gets my vote!
UPDATE – I have found some other settings that are particularly useful with this new router. Looks like you can setup a dynamic DNS account and setup the router to ping the service and update your IP if it changes so you can have a static URL go to your home server.
As far as stability goes this thing seems to be fairly solid, it likes to reboot every once and a great while and does it by itself and just looks like it takes a long time for a page to reload when it happens, so no really effected services. I have also been making a bunch of changes to the config of the router which require reboot so that kinda screws up my uptime counts.
So I finally decided to jump into 2001 and upgrade our cable package to include HD programming. After creating a spread sheet and running the numbers of my current Comcast cable/internet package and moving to DirectTV I found that I save a whopping $6/month on service and I get all the HD channels and an addition 50 channels. I decided to keep my internet with Comcast as unfortunately that is one thing that they actually do very well. I picked the choice package which has 150 channels and then picked up the HD package and an HD DVR. The DVR has a 500GB HD and holds 40 hours of HD TV and 200 hours of standard def. It also has 2 USB ports and 1 eSATA port so you can easily add an additional external drive. And yes they actually work unlike the Comcast or Tivo boxes that you have to kinda hack to get those ports working. HDMI out makes super easy installation to the TV and it has 2 ethernet plugs (not sure why, wish I had a redundant internet connection!) so it is hardwired to my network. The internet is how it downloads the On Demand features.
After waiting all day for the installer to get there (hey at least they gave me a discount afterwords) and watching him install the satellite and then plugging everything in a setting it all up I am very happy. I was sad to call Tivo and let them know I needed to cancel my account but running the numbers on a new Tivo box and staying with Comcast and doing a cablecard was just too much money and sounded kinda complicated. One nice benefit that I didn’t even take into consideration was the dual tuner of the box. This was something we have fought with on our Tivo for as long as we have had it, we could only record one show at a time. Well not anymore so finally we can capture just about all the shows we can throw at it.
The navigation of the menu and moving around is a little slower than I would like but nothing that is a deal breaker. I actually found it easier to use my iTouch and download the DirectTV app and browse the shows that way to decide what should be recorded. Then go on the DVR and just search for the show. It is also nice to have On Demand type features so we can download via the internet certain shows and not have to worry about recording them. The downloads work pretty fast and you can queue up as many as you want and it just pulls them down in about 10 minutes or so for a 30 minute show. One funny thing we noticed is all the adult channels and porn they have that you see while searching for just about every show. Chances are I will play with the parental controls and try and remove those from the search as it just makes it more cumbersome.
The Tivo like functions work as expecting and the video output is set to the highest of 1080i which looks a little bit better than my old standard definition basic extended cable! I took a $12 increase on my internet because I dropped the cable package but thats alright as I get $13 back from cancelling Tivo so it’s basically a wash there.
All in all if you are looking at an HD package I would suggest DirectTV. Of course we only have one TV in our house so setup was pretty easy and our house isn’t pre-wired seing as our house is older than me!
Why it took so long for these products to actually materialize I will never know. I always have kept a USB drive on my key chain but I have had issues with it breaking or being a little too bulky or fragile. These new ones from Lacie are all metal and the shape of your keys so they fall in line super easily. Since they are a whopping $27 for 8 GB I think I will be picking one of these up when they come back in stock. Check them out: Lacie Key Drives
I couldn’t help myself and I have to post this as I think it sums up things very very well!
So this is a modification to the Architect Digest theme that I found a little while ago. I had to make a lot of changes to the theme files so that it would show the full posts for the archive pages and search pages. I also had to add in the Ajax stuff and change the header. I played around with the CSS a little here and there to make links stand out a little more. All in all it took me about 2-3 hours to flip over to the new theme.
I decided it was time to update the picture in the header to the new S4 because its a great looking car and matched my color scheme pretty well.
