Testing Zooomer

I've been trying to decide what photo sharing site to use. The Yahoo! logon! for flickr annoys me far too much. I did create an account a while ago, but while Yahoo! will tell me my forgotten! ID! they won't reset my forgotten! password!.

LiveJournal's Scrapbook seems to delete you photos if you stop paying for it.

Photobucket will replace your images with "Bandwith exceeded" if too many people look at them.

Zoomer, uses LiveJournal Open ID, has a free basic account, and doesn't seem to have a bandwith limit. They're offering a 2.5 4Gb monthly upload limit to bloggers. So I'll give them a try.

( A Qantas advert flying past the BT tower. )

If only they had an S60 uploader (or there was third party one like shozu that worked with them).

The future's bright, the future's ... Canadian?

Stone by Adam Roberts.

( Disclaimer )

Plot:
A criminal (a one in a billion throwback) is helped to escape from a very ingenious jail in a star. A condition is he must kill every human on a planet somewhere, or he will be turned over to the police. This is even harder than it sounds as all humans (except him as his punishment) have nanotechnology keeping them healthy. The only contact he has with his "employers" is via an AI grown in his skull.

He visits a few of planets, and cosmological phenomena, before, well, the resolution of the book.

A series of incoherent thoughts:

Quantum Mechanics is weird:
The main conceits are Nanotechnology and Quantum mechanics. It's used a few times to explain how things work in this universe, that don't currently in ours (such as FTL travel, and Intelligence). It's internally consistent, if not completely in accord with what I understand about the real world. That makes this Space Opera, but not Hard SF. Not that that's a bad thing. I do think the explanations of technology were at a good level. We get given some theory, but don't get bogged down in it. Then again, maybe I'm not the best judge of that, I like lots of infodump ;)

Characterisation:
This story is told out loud, by a Sociopath, about his earlier solo mission. It's pretty clear this story isn't going to be about relationships. The other characters who he does run across are all quite distinct, not cut from cookie cutters, and enjoyable. Ae himself though is quite likeable for someone who's trying to murder a planet.

Language:

One aspect of the world building is a language. There's lots of foot notes on the translation of the language into English. This language is supposedly derived from English, but has drifted over the years. This adds some sense realism as it really does feel like the sort of issues that translators come across. However, I found it quite jarring.

I felt the language drift was conveyed much better in the "Wellhello", which everyone says a greating. It's a nice bit of slang that: shouldn't become dated, is easy to decipher, and never appears in the middle of paragraphs, so doesn't give you a jolt. Plus I tend to associate "Well, hello" with the start of a Cory Doctorow's podcast, so it already feels futuristic ;)