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I just traded in a couple more surplus bags of books at the local used bookstore and "entertainment exchange," and picked up from the classical music rack something entitled (as copy-pasted from iTunes)


彩なす島の伝説 沖縄島唄

which Google translates as "Legend of the Island of Okinawa Shima Uto eggplant" and Babelfish as "彩 The legendary Okinawa island of the island which is formed 唄" which I guess wildly might actually be something like "The legend of the formation of the island of Okinawa."

It sounds like a variable number of voices singing, presumably in Japanese, with a jaunty accompaniment of clicky percussion and plucked strings. Not my usual sort of thing, but not unpleasant.

Also, my copy of Win7 for the HP laptop arrived today -- closely followed by an email announcing that it had been dispatched and please to allow 5-7 days for delivery.

Talking of Win7, I wonder if there's a way to stop it randomly switching on the Canon printer. I suppose I could disable the software power-up in the printer driver, but it's sometimes handy to be able to send something to it from the other room, without going in to press the button first.

Jo Walton, Lifelode

Well, that was probably the oddest book I've read this year. It's set in a world where there's an East-West gradient of ability to use magic, and also of the speed at which time passes. In the east there are gods -- whose nature we eventually find out -- and also an increased difficulty to hang on to personal identity, and conversely to the magicless west. Travelers to the East also age more slowly; it's a bit like Vinge's zones on a small, fantasy-world scale. To the mostly peaceful village of Applegarth, about halfway between the extremese, there come two travelers; Hanethe, an ancestor who went east a few generations back and has come home with a vengeful goddess after her, and Jankin, a tourist^H^H^H traveling scholar from the west. Hanethe has a vengeful goddess after her; Jankin has more charm than is good for him. Their arrival causes a series of events that seriously disrupt the cozy, polyamorous domesticity of life at the manor.

The whole thing is told in a peculiar sort of continuous present tense; one of the viewpoint characters has the ability to see people's past and future selves, but the juxtaposition of events from different epochs isn't confined to her narration. It's all done skilfully enough that it isn't hard to follow, which is quite a feat; there are echoes of Le Guin and McKinley in the style and the setting, not in a bad way.

Computers ...

Am embarked on the process of en-Sevening the HP laptop. At the point where it asks you to stop and uninstall iTunes (and some other things that there doesn't appear to be an uninstall path for) it decided the driver for the DVD drive was corrupt, and a reboot didn't fix it. I tried a system restore, which claimed to have failed, but the drive came back to life. So now we are at 94% on Copying Windows files, and we'll see how it goes.

Also, I grabbed an ethernet cable to connect it to the router, in case the wireless went down during the process, and now it seems to be inextricably stuck in the port.

Sigh.

Also, I probably need new glasses again, but I was too stressed and sleep-deprived earlier in the week to do anything about it. Last year I did it early in my November break, on too little sleep, and flunked the visual field test, which ended up costing me an uncomfortable morning and my insurer several hundred dollars for a glaucoma exam. Not risking that again; I'll probably leave it until after the February trip (if it happens) is over.