Ministry of Intrigue

I will preface this post by saying that I know how close I am skating to social media douchebaggery by writing a post on a new Facebook feature, but I was reading about Facebook Questions today in a post from Dan Patterson, and as I began to pen my response I realized that I had more to say than what could be reasonably considered a comment. Fair warning, this piece is opinion only, and is based upon my initial reactions to the new features, as opposed to detailed analysis.

If you want some background on what Facebook Questions is, I highly encourage you to take a look at Dan’s post, as he provides a great summary of the new features along with his commentary. Also, he has screenshots, which I will not be able to provide.

Go ahead and read his post first. I’ll wait.

Done? Awesome, let’s move forward.

You may have noticed that Dan has included a link to a Mashable post that explains a number of ways that Facebook Questions can be improved. As the service is not rolled out to me yet, I can’t comment on that aspect of it, but in principle the ideas outlined in that post make a lot of sense. It would behoove Facebook to follow up on those suggestions, particularly the integration into a user’s profile and wall. To be honest, I am a little shocked they did not integrate it that way in the first place. I’m sure most — or all — of the suggested functionality will be incorporated to future versions of the feature as development continues, especially if Facebook wants to be able to effectively capitalize on their user base to make FQ a success.

Now, if your interest in Facebook Questions was totally confined to UX and playing with your social graph — there’s a dirty euphemism in there somewhere, but of course I am too classy to make such a vulgar insinuation — that would be the end of the matter. However, I don’t think the features or success measured in number of users is the real test of a Q&A site.

I think the real test of a service like this is how useful the answers actually end up being to the end users. FQ is a publicly available feature, covering any topic under the sun, which is a bold move aimed at leveraging the diversity of knowledge available among its 500 million users. This answers-for-anything approach is a tantalizing path for any company that would like to start seriously monetizing based on search, but ultimately it can become more of a weakness than a strength for this type of service. There are a number of general purpose Q&A services on the web, and the consistent trait among all of them is that the quality of answers vary radically, with most of the answers being pretty useless, e.g. most of Yahoo! Answers. The general rule — at least in my experience — is that quality answers to questions typically are best found by visiting niche Q&A sites — such Stack Overflow when I have a programming question — or hitting up forums dedicated to the specific topics I am asking about. These types of niche communities tend to have more experienced participants, and also tend to be more rigorous when it comes to community management, with the aforementioned Stack Overflow being a stellar example.

That’s not to say there haven’t been some unique approaches to trying to solve this problem in general purpose Q&A sites. Mahalo’s approach involves incenting users to provide good answers by providing a way for the asker to set up a cash bounty for the best answer. Now, I don’t have enough information to gauge how effective this has been for them overall, but a quick browse reveals a number of good answers to questions when a “tip” or cash reward is offered, but the quality of questions — and respective answers if there are any — seems to drop otherwise. Although, I must say, that I’m surprised at the number of cash bounties being offered for opinion/discussion based questions. It’s an interesting model, and it certainly seems to have built up an engaged community.

It’s clear that FQ has a significant advantage just from the raw user base available to them, and I don’t have any doubt that the product launch will be successful. Although, if Facebook does not quickly integrate FQ deeply into the social experience on Facebook, it’s going to be treated as separate service by it’s users, which diminishes the likelihood of prolonged interaction with the Q&A aspects of the site. Further, if they don’t provide some incentive for users to produce great answers, it is in danger of becoming yet another of the worthless general purpose Q&A sites littering the search results in the SEO-dominated wastelands of the Internet.

It’s only fitting that I conclude this piece by asking you all a question: Will Facebook Questions become a useful service, or will it only add to the noise?

That’s up to you. I’d love to hear your answer.

Last night I found myself looking through old blog posts on this site in an attempt to avoid thinking about any of the other things I need to get done. As I was looking back through the posts from 2004-2005, I was struck by how much my writing style changed when I switched from blogging anonymously to using my real name. My earlier writing was much braver, and significantly more personal. I took more risks with how I approached telling my stories, and in general I think the material was more interesting. However, after making the decision to use my own name, the posts slowly began to veer away from the personal and became much more distant. Topics became centered around surface-reactions to news items, formal reviews of books or services and discussion of technical concepts.

This was disappointing for me, as I consider this type of writing pretty boring. I mean, it is always fun to express one’s opinion, but the formal reviews and technical writing are completely at odds with what what spurred me to create a blog in the first place. In fact, I think this is the primary reason that I post so rarely these days. Certainly, I’ve been very busy, but come on, who can’t find 20-30 minutes every few days to write up a blog post?

Now, I have noted this change before, and my desire to revert back to a more interesting (not to mention more frequent) approach to posting here, so I won’t belabor the point by going over all of that again. Certainly not until I show much better follow-through in this regard.

While I was pondering all these things, I noticed that most of my recent posts have consisted of very long reviews, and I began to wonder if all of my posts were as long. I started paging through blog entries, but quickly realized that this would only give me an anecdotal grasp of how much (or little) I write here. So, like any good geek, I wrote a script to do my work for me.

The results were interesting to me. The average number of words per blog post were significantly lower than I expected, but there are a significant number of long posts (which I arbitrarily defined as anything longer than 500 words) which may give an impression that I produce more content per post than I typically do.

The results for blog entries were as follows:

Entry Stats:

Total Blog Entries:       317
Total Words:              94705
Average Words:            298
Max Words / Entry:        2544
Min Words / Entry:        9
Entries w/ 500+ Words: 58

Of course, I don’t just post to my blog here, I also write descriptions and commentary in all of my Diigo bookmarks, which I then import here as link entries. I knew these would be shorter in general, but it was only a few more lines of code to get that information as well.

Link Stats:

Total Links:              567
Total Words:              24029
Average Words:            42
Max Words / Link:         365
Min Words / Link:         4
Links w/ 500+ Words: 0

Now, of course, if you are a geek, and you end up with two sets of stats, there is no way in hell you are not going to take the extra time to find out the overall average for all posts.

Overall Stats:

Total Posts:              884
Total Words:              118734
Average Words:            134
Max Words / Post:         2544
Min Words / Post:         4
Posts w/ 500+ Words: 58

Of course, the links weigh in heavily and bring down the average number of words, but I was pleased with the overall results and a little surprised at the overall word count for the site.

These kind of stats seem like a fun way of evaluating how often I am posting, and could be a useful motivational tool. So, exchanging a little bit of sleep for geek power, I went ahead and created a stats page for the site that I can use to monitor how I am doing in general. At some point, I would like to add functionality to track posting by day of week, and percent change over given time intervals, but for now this will do.

These are the kinds of things nerds do when they are bored, and don’t want to do anything else that they are supposed to be doing.

What do you get when you combine the genres of hard-boiled detective noir, spaghetti-western and urban fantasy set in L.A.? You get Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey.

This book was recommended to me by my friend Quentin, and my fiancé had also mentioned to me that she had read a promising review of the novel. Intrigued, I read through the first few pages at the bookstore, which involved the protagonist’s return from Hell upon a pile of flaming garbage, and I was immediately hooked.

Stark, the protagonist, is a dirty punk magician that was betrayed by his buddies and sent to Hell while he was still alive. The residents of his new home were so amused by him that they had him fight unholy creatures and demons in an arena, gladiator-style. He very quickly became “tough to kill”, and graduated to working as a hitman for one of Lucifer’s generals. Now, he’s escaped, and he’s back to take vengeance on the bastards that sent him to Hell in the first place. It’s a gritty, violent story, featuring an amoral protagonist most easily recognized by his multitude of scars and his tendency to inadvertently destroy his own clothing.

Things are not all joyous though, as the book does suffer from some issues that I would normally consider fatal for a fantasy, such as not having any consistent framework of rules for the magic that appears in the story. The explanations given for it are vague at best, and half of the time, the cosmology is dropped in as an afterthought, while the other half of the time the exposition is completely unnecessary, serving only to set up the world for an apparent sequel. The latter issue is a bit annoying, but there is a certain adrenaline-infused momentum to the story that makes it easy to ignore the former and just go along for the ride. In the end, I didn’t mind the lack of these details much because it’s pretty clear that Stark doesn’t care much about the rules or abstract concepts and his murderous single-mindedness makes it pretty hard to argue with him.

Regarding the cosmology, I have to admit that I was fairly sure that I was going to be disappointed by this aspect of the novel. The whole Judeo-Christian war between Heaven and Hell with mankind caught in the crossfire has been done a heck of a lot in fiction, and in most cases, it has gotten to be a bit boring. I was worried that the same would happen in Sandman Slim, and that I would be rolling my eyes during the climax of the book. I think Kadrey must have been aware by this danger, which is why he ensures that Stark makes clear that he does not care about the ongoing war across the planes. His protagonist’s obsession with revenge and stubborn refusal to take interest in the overall conflict, except as a means to an end, means that the reader doesn’t spend a whole lot of time caring about it either. This was a really smart move, because by the end of the book, I was not thinking about the fate of the world, I was worried about whether Stark was going to catch up with his enemies and get the brutal, messy revenge of his dreams.

Ultimately, my review of the book boils down to the fact that Sandman Slim is a hell of a lot of fun, with some great action and a gritty thug of a hero that wants none of your pity, but earns it nonetheless. It’s a quick read, with some great lines, and enough Tom Waits references that you’ll be ready to pour yourself some whisky and listen to Alice, Rain Dogs and Mule Variations all over again, though not necessarily in that order. If you are craving an entertaining, moody and dark dance with the supernatural, Kadrey’s Sandman Slim is certain to satisfy your hunger.

Just a short post to say that I’m altering the Everything feed for this site. Previously, it contained all the blog posts, links and photos that appear here. However, as I am piping this feed into several external sites, notably Google Buzz, and until services like Buzz allow me to specify particular feeds for import, as opposed to using auto-discovery, I risk flooding my activity stream every time I do a mass upload to my Flickr account. I’d rather not annoy anyone, so I’m temporarily removing photo posts from the Everything feed. If you still wish to see my photos as I post them, feel free to subscribe to my Flickr feed.

Hopefully, this will just be temporary, and I’ll be able to specify my customized Google Buzz feed later without interfering with the primary feed, at which point I will return photos to this subscription feed. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Also, because I haven’t repeated the word often enough: feed.

I have not been posting here much of late, which is partly due to the amount of stuff I’m working on, and partly due to the fact that I’ve been writing and posting stuff in other places around the web, since it is easier. Some of this will get fixed with the next revision of this site, but honestly, it has less to do with those other things I’m working on and a lot more to do with general laziness. Either way, it is high time for an update.

What have I been doing?

Among other things, I’ve been working on the next version of the custom CMS that powers this site. I initially started this process to fix the comment issue I was having, and it quickly turned into a complete rewrite of the Django applications I use to power Andrlik.org. It’s a lot of work, mostly because I started off with way too large of feature list. I would trim some of those features, but at this point the actual code for the new stuff is already written. Ironically, it is the new comment application (among a few other things like actual template design) that are not completed yet.

The new site is being rewritten from the ground up to take advantage of all the new features and capabilities available in Django trunk, and it will incorporate pulling detailed activity data from virtually every social network I participate in that provides an API. I have not decided to what extent this information will play a role in the actual layout of this site, the primary purpose of these features is to provide me with an automated backup of all of that data. In addition to pulling data from social networks, I’m adding more discrete media types to the site which should allow me to do more interesting things such as podcasts if it ever strikes my fancy to do so. There is some basic podcast support baked into the blog application for the current site, but it’s inelegant and a pain to use.

In addition to new features for me, I’m incorporating the ability for readers to authenticate using OpenID, Facebook, or Google, the latter two options being new, while improving compatibility of my OpenID solution. I’m doing this because I’m planning to allow comments from authenticated users only, which allows me to utilize different privacy settings for any posts.

So, yeah, that should be cool. At least, whenever I get around to finishing it and deploying the new version to the server.

I’ve also been busy with work, and doing a lot of traveling, which means by the time I get back to the hotel room I am ready to pass out. When at home, I’ve been reading, spending quality time with my girlfriend, and working on yet another project that I can’t talk about yet.

Splattered Content

While I have not been posting or bookmarking here, I have been posting to various other sites online. Of course, there is always my Twitter feed, where I post random bits of questionable wit, as well as links to stories I find interesting. In addition, as I’ve been reading, I’ve been posting quite a few book reviews to my Goodreads account, which I try to also mirror on my Readernaut profile, when possible. In general, I don’t include rereading books in my activity streams but there has certainly been a lot of that going on as well.

Every time I post a review to either service, I feel like I should expand it out into a real post for this site, but I rarely take the time to, which is a habit I hope to change in the upcoming months. In the meantime, I thought I would include some of my Goodreads reviews for books I’ve recently read that are particularly notable.

Memories of the Future, Part 1 by Wil Wheaton: 4 out of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book. I laughed so much while reading Memories of the Future, more than I have for any other book in recent memory.

The episode recaps are the real stars of the book, and I would often stop to read a particularly hilarious passage out loud to my girlfriend. However, this isn’t just a book of condensed snark; Wheaton’s love of Star Trek TNG comes through on every page. His profound respect for his fellow actors, and his affection for what the show will become gives the recaps a humane quality. As a result, the snarky episode recaps, feel less like a nasty internet posting (the natural habitat of undiluted snark), and more like the playful ribbing of a friend at the dinner table, while reminiscing about that embarrassing event that everyone had to go through back in high school.

It’s a great book, but I do have a tiny niggling complaint. There’s a lot of references in the recaps to later episodes by their title, which I wouldn’t mind if the recaps of those episodes were in the same volume, however a few of them are slated for volume two, and since I don’t have the 1st season of TNG around the house to figure out what Wheaton’s referring to, I felt left out of a joke that probably won’t make sense to me until the second volume comes out (soon, I hope).

There were also a couple episodes where Wheaton didn’t actually recall anything from behind the scenes, so for those entries the “Behind the Scenes Memory” section would be a little weak.

To sum up: I loved this book and can’t wait for volume two. However, I knock off one star for the two small complaints I mention because I am a bit of a prick despite Wil Wheaton’s sage advice: “Don’t be a dick!”

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi: 3 out of 5 stars.

I enjoyed this book, which actually surprised me a bit. Typically with sci-fi I tend to prefer heavier fare, but Scalzi’s light touch with his prose worked for me quite well. It’s central idea is spectacular story-fodder, and I’m interested in seeing what he does with it in the later books of the series.

Unfortunately, there is a little bit of a strange disconnect in the story, which might have a lot to do with the fact that the protagonist seems to excel at everything, and never seems to face a real challenges, so the central conflict of the story feels almost superficial. Also, the alien species are painted in very broad strokes, and it gave me the impression (rightly or wrongly) that the universe was not fully realized by the author beyond the limited conflicts that are depicted. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I like to feel a bit more depth to the world, and I might have been able to ignore it had the protagonist faced more challenges.

Don’t ge me wrong, I enjoyed the book, and will try out the next book in the series, but the disconnection I felt means I can only give it three stars.

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest: 4 out of 5 stars

This was my first experience with Priest’s work, and it was a pleasure. I found it to be a brilliantly imagined steampunk novel set during an extended Civil War, and in Seattle, a catastrophic event has brought the Blight upon the city, which causes the dead to walk. The story focuses on a mother seeking to save her son, whom has charged off into the city to find out about his father. Along the way she encounters air pirates, zombie rotters, and the other people who choose to brave the Blight, living beneath the ground and in sealed vaults for protection. However, it’s also a mystery, for the son’s quest will lead them both on a journey to answer the questions raised by the Blight, and to learn once and for all the real history of the experiment that brought the plague.

The book is well written, the action is tight, and it’s just a hell of a lot of fun to read. The only complaint I have is that the last chapter seemed a little flat to me, almost an unnecessary epilogue, that answers none of the questions that still remain, but without actually building any sort of wonderment or cliffhanger. This is the reason that I’m only giving it four stars.

The Child Thief: A Novel by Brom: 4 out of 5 stars

I admit that I approached this book with trepidation. In the past, I have encountered a number of attempts to retell the Peter Pan story, most of them spectacularly bad. Add in the fact that the author only goes by a single name, and alarm bells begin to ring.

I was pleasantly surprised. What I found was a dark, tense and well written piece of fiction that successfully reinvents Peter Pan, while still holding true to the core elements of the original. Brom doesn’t cheat. Peter is an unpredictable and violent figure, who is clearly borderline insane. However, Brom also demonstrates quite clearly that Peter is a pawn of greater forces, and the enemy that he is being pitted against is truly horrifying. With this in mind, you might almost forgive him for stealing the abused children of the world in order to serve as infantry in the battle, but the author rightly refuses to let Peter off that easy. You are confronted with the terror the children feel, and that is what makes this novel work.

And if that wasn’t enough, it comes in a beautiful hardcover edition with artwork from the artist himself. It’s definitely worth a read, so if you hear the same alarm bells I did, cover you ears. This book is worth it.

I’d also add in that you should read all of the Joe Abercrombie books in First Law trilogy, including the one-shot follow-up novel Best Served Cold. However, I recommend you start with the trilogy, and I am including my review of the first book. It is worth noting that the first book of the trilogy is the only one that I awarded less than five stars.

The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie: 4 out of 5 stars

An outstanding debut novel and start to a trilogy. Abercrombie does a wonderful job of introducing all of the complex characters and manages to make them all fascinating in their own right, although every reader may favor some more than others. In my case, I am particularly captivated by both Logan, the practical barbarian that is haunted with regret, and Glotka, the crippled torturer and inquisitor.

Abercrombie is also very effective at introducing the reader to his world, without much tedious exposition, which is a welcome change from a lot of other epic-fantasy. He also clearly illustrates what is at stake and carefully sets the events in motion that one assumes will drive the course of the story in the next two books.

I do have one complaint, and that is that occasionally Abercrombie starts a chapter without clearly telling you which character’s point of view the narrative is being told through, which can be a bit confusing. Usually, you can tell just from the voice of text, which is quite an accomplishment on the author’s part, but occasionally I would encounter a chapter and it would take me half a page to orient myself, which is the only reason I’m knocking off one star.

I can easily seeing this book joining the likes of Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles as one of my favorite epic fantasy series produced recently, and I can’t wait to start on the next book in The First Law series.

Needless, to say I loved the rest of that series.

Get Back To Work

I’m serious, I’m sure we all have shit to do. I’m sure the various things I am working on will keep me busy over the next few months, but I will try to post here more often so that I don’t have to do such a gigantic braindump next time.