davidcook

Today was planned to be a Lazy Day, true enough, so I figured that stirring from bed at around 11:30am was about right. Alas, I quickly found my way back to bed with Glasshouse (by Charlie Stross) in hand (and a bit of chocolate to keep me going), and only emerged again at 3pm, book finished. Apparently it's a good read, then.
One little thing bugged me, though - at the start of the book, there's a Note, explaining that time is simply measured in seconds (kilo, mega, giga-seconds as required) and relating those to "Archaic" earth time. Then, about half the time a period of time is mentioned, it gets explained in the "old style" anyway. It seems a little unneccessary, assuming that the reader didn't pay any attention to the Note and can't make the effort to turn back if confused. Examples :

'... Only been out for a meg, to tell the truth.' (A bit over ten planetary days, a million seconds.) (page 2)

Gigaseconds? Thirty planetary years each. (page 3)

'... where it will live alongside roughly a hundred other volunteers for thirty to a hundred megaseconds.' Roughly one to three old-style years. (page 19)

I wonder if it was an authorial or editorial choice ? (I have the Orbit 2006 edition, in case that helps)

And this weekend, there's finally a national fencing Open back in Australia. 52 entries for the men's epee ... so, three fewer than we had here last weekend in the Glasgow Open. Seamus won, of course. So far, only men's epee and women's foil have been run, and the WF result was also pretty predictable. For the remaining events, I predict Du, Hoffman, Slowiaczek and Halls to win.

I imagine fencing in Australia is going to get boring pretty quickly if/when rwrylsin and I head back - I can see why rwrylsin wants to get into coaching - with only 8 entries in the women's sabre !

Meanwhile, we missed Doctor Who, mainly because we were expecting it at 7:00pm, not 6:30pm - apparently we didn't watch enough TV during the week to pick up on that timeslot.