Saturday, April 09, 2011

Motorbikes

I love them, I love being out on my bike, out on the road on a sunny day. However I am completely crap at doing anything at all mechanical. I changed my battery today and on my way to the mechanics to have the bike serviced, it died. I have no idea why, initially I thought the PCV had died which left me with a bike that was I'm possible to start.

Thank god I signed up for 24/7 roadside assist. I called them and they had a truck out to pick me up in less than an hour. The frustrating thing was I got the bike home and into the garage and just for shits and giggles I turned the key one more time to see if it would turn over.

What do you know, it fired up perfectly first time and ran with no issues for 5 minutes. Why?. I have no fucking idea. I am planning on taking the M out for a run tomorrow and I have bought a new battery to put in it. The battery is juicing up now and I am hoping that I will put it in and it's all going to work perfectly. However referring back to my original comment, I am crap at anything mechanical so I reckon it will all be fucked tomorrow morning.

If the bike gods are happy with me it's all going to work perfectly, the new battery will get the bike started and the trickle charge will have provided enough power to get me started again once I stop for lunch in kulnura.

Update tommorow, hopefully a good one.

Thursday, April 07, 2011

Woot the M is back

Going to head out to kulnura on Sunday. The M is finally back on the road and needs to go out for a serious run. If anyone wants to go out for brunch, see you there at midday.

The Malazan empire

I have started reading a series by a guy called Stephen Erikson called the Malazan books of the dead. A lot of review will say things like "comparable to Tolkein at his best" and after reading the book you are left wondering if the reviewer read the same book you did. Stephen Eriksons series is not only comparable, it exceeds Tolkeins work in many ways.

In short I am convinced of Eriksons genius.

The trick with this weighty series of tomes is to keep reading. Erikson doesn't explain things, he doesn't give you a quick potted history of a new character or race after introducing them, he simply assumes you know as much as he does and moves on. The beautiful thing is the way he unveils information. You will be reading through the 3rd book in the series and he will explain something that was originally mentioned in the first book.

Everything has meaning, a cast off comment or what you think may be a passing character may turn out to be critically important hundreds or even thousands of pages later. His history covers, literally hundreds of thousands of years with races, characters and even gods coming and going over that period. Some characters have in fact been around for the entire history of the world.

His writing is in some places simply stunning. The fate of Coltaine at the end of the Chain of Dogs literally had me in tears. There are hundreds of characters of varying importance and you can never be sure if a character has truly gone even if they die.

The Malazan books of the Dead aren't easy to read, but the reward in persevering is substantial.