Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

25 Mar 2001, 2:34 a.m.

Books for Spring Break

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2001 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

I have now finished Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. I finished The Amber Spyglass less than 24 hours after I received it.

More: Nancy Kress and irritating MS errors.

Last night I went to Black Oak Books in north Berkeley, and bought all three books comprising Nancy Kress's Beggars series. I read the novella Beggars in Spain about two months ago, and was gladdened & surprised to learn that she had expanded it into a book, and that the book was the first of a trilogy. Three Kresses and The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West (for my "Political Theory: American Movies and American Society, 1939" class with intellectual badass Prof. Rogin), all for $11.34.

I really ought to go to the northern outskirts of Berkeley more often. Black Oak is there, as is the Cheese Board Collective (which sells good pizza, I've heard), and other neat eateries.

Gosh, this sounds like an entry Seth would write.

Servers that use IIS (I think) give, it seems, more aggravating error messages to visitors than other servers. For example, if I try to get to a main page by chopping off the end of a URL (example), then I get "The Virtual Directory does not allow contents to be listed," which oddly reminds me of the quote from "The Simpsons": "Disco Stu does not advertise."

On the way to Black Oak, on the 43 AC Transit bus, I saw the flowers. There's a little shrine now, marking the spot where a pedestrian got killed at Hearst and Shattuck.

Be careful, everyone.


Originally published by Sumana Harihareswara at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/3/25/143448/131