★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Managing expectations is difficult. Because I enjoyed Name of the Wind so much, when I finished it I dove right into Wise Man’s Fear. I think now that that was a mistake. There was very little chance I would have enjoyed the book as much as the first in the series. That said, I still like Wise Man’s Fear quite a bit, but it definitely had its faults.
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★ ★ ★ ★ ★
This is a book that never would have made it onto my radar if I weren’t in a book club. Which I guess is why I’m in the club; to “force” myself to read books that I wouldn’t otherwise consider. I think it’s safe to say that if I had never read this book, I wouldn’t have missed much.
I changed a bunch of stuff about my daily Go Bag (what I take to work every day). So I figured it was time for an update. The biggest change is that I swapped out my Timbuk2 bag for a Powerbag. The Powerbag has a built-in battery pack for charging mobile devices. I added this, because I built a LibraryBox, and the Powerbag can power the LibraryBox. I also got a new laptop; trading in my Macbook Air for a Thinkpad. It’s great to be running Linux again.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
There are very few negative things to say about The Name of the Wind, so I’ll start there. I found the structure of the book to be very confusing at the start. I was 1/4 to 1/3 of the way through it before I came to grips with how the story would progress. And even then, it was because I was discussing the book to someone who had already read it and the second book in the trilogy (the third has not yet been published). It’s much more obvious to me now that the stuff happening in the Waystone Inn is basically just filler, and that the heart of the book is the story in a story; the story the inn-keeper is telling. This book is filled with stories within the story. Sometimes even stories within the stories within the book’s story. Confused? So was I. After understanding that the flashbacks are the real meat and potatoes, and that the majority of the book revolved around this, it was much easier to keep track of what was going on. It’s easy to see now that the inn-keeper is telling his tale to Chronicler and that it will take three days’ time – hence The Name of the Wind being Day One of The Kingkiller Chronicles.
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★★★★★
I really wanted to like this book, from the moment I read the title and added it to my reading list. I am very interested in politics/political philosophy, history, and my country’s complete lack of regard for the principles on which it was founded. This book is right in my wheelhouse. It’s preaching to the converted. And yet even I didn’t find it convincing. It’s pretty hard to write a book so poorly that you unsell people who were already sold on your ideas.
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Today, on the same day I decided to give up on a personal project I’ve been working on for months, I also gave up on a project that was already live. I decided to force myself to reflect on these failures by writing about them, and to force myself not to feel too bad about them by listing the positive things I have learned and can take away from these projects.
Last week, I wrote about how I have started keeping a journal using Evernote and IFTTT. In that post, I mentioned that I’ve tried as many todo list systems as I could find, and never really stuck with one. I think that’s changed, now that I’m using Evernote both for journaling and for todo lists. And as an added bonus, I use IFTTT for this, too.
I worked from home yesterday for the first time since getting Linux Mint 16 installed on my new laptop. That meant I spent all of yesterday morning figuring out how to get the VPN connection to my office working. I ended up having multiple problems throughout the process, and none of the guides I found were definitive or included all the steps required for resolving the entire issue. I’m recording this for posterity, in hopes that people will be able to find it and won’t have to dig through multiple sources just to get stuck on the next issue down the chain.
UPDATE: Thanks to this post by Jamie Todd Rubin, I now know how I could have solved the duplicating journal entries problem: add ” +” to the end of the email subject line that IFTTT sends (or manually add it myself when I change the address).
I started journaling 37 days ago, and using a simple IFTTT recipe, I haven’t missed a single day.
I obsess about the stuff I carry on my person even more than the stuff I carry around in my bag. This is what I currently carry.
You can see older iterations here, if there are any.
