DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The first half of this novel is fascinating and very difficult to put down. Grisham weaves two disparate stories into one. The reader can assume that the two plotlines will meet, but still, when they do, the result is shocking.

I found the ending to be somewhat unbelievable, given what we’re told about certain of the characters, but all in all this was an enjoyable thriller… with some thoroughly likeable characters, generally believable situations, and as usual, many chapters that end in such a way that beginning the next chapter immediately is unavoidable.

Any Grisham fan will like this book, I predict, as will anyone who likes legal or political thrillers.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (Paperback)
• Amazon (Hardback)

I spent Friday morning at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. This was about my 5th time there. I think this was one of the lowest-energy shows I’ve seen.

I’d seen the press lamenting that Apple had no grand announcements, but that wasn’t the problem. I think this Expo was smaller than previous years: the corners seemed empty, and there were a lot of places to sit and chill out. The ends of the halls were curtained off. And several large vendors were not present.

For example, I was surprised DigiDesign was not there. I had specifically hoped to see them (to complain that their lame software isn’t compatible with OS9). But the “Digital Audio” area of the Expo had only a few forgettable booths and a lot of empty carpet.

The best thing about this year’s Expo is that I didn’t catch a horrible disease. I worked in a booth at the 1996 show, and after four days of exposure to imported germs and tainted business cards I felt like I wouldn’t survive the day. I spent the next 48 hours on my back with a 102° fever and vowed never to work another trade show.

I was only a tourist at this year’s show, but still I was cautious… piles of colorful schwag could be teeming with the Expo Flu, or, what the hell, Ebola, for all I knew. I washed my hands seven times in three hours.

Earthlink was giving away orange “gel” pens. I picked one up as a curiosity; I assumed there had to be more to it than what I could see, which was a ballpoint pen attached to a squat tube filled with some sort of gunk, on a lanyard. But, no, that’s all it was: pen, gunk, neck strap. When I got home, I unscrewed the end to divine if maybe there was something more there, something I missed with some sort of geek appeal, and this piece of trash dumped goo all over my desk. I curse Earthlink’s marketing department.

There was a great article on schwag in Wired recently.

Near the top left corner of this image, from Terraserver, is a picture of the house I grew up in. I am just dying to know who wrote the ‘X’ on there.

I had to laugh at this job posting. I think this company needs more help than they realize.

The ad boasts that Kanisa transforms a company’s e-service web site from a source of customer frustration to a source of customer satisfaction! And yet Kanisa’s own e-service website is apparently so poorly executed that in the same message, the hiring manager goes on to warn candidates: do not send resumes through the www.kanisa.com web site - they will get lost!

I played briefly with the Zend Optimizer, which promises to speed up PHP scripts (such as those that create this journal) by 40%-100%. In practice I found that when the Optimizer was enabled, single-script execution speed actually slowed by a few thousands of a second.

The statistics are not significant, but I sure didn’t see any improvement in performance.

I tested various levels of optimization with similar results. I wonder if the Alternative PHP Cache would yield better results? (But I don’t wonder about it enough to warrant actually testing it… this site is, regrettably, a long way from “heavily loaded.”)