Sunday, April 02, 2006

An Enigma Wrapped Inside a Riddle, Breaded And Fried

Little bit of an early birthday present, got some books from my Amazon wishlist -- thanks Mom & Dad! What I got was Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Cormac McCarthy's Border trilogy (as a single volume), and SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide, an O'Reilly computer book. They came Friday, and totally screwed up my weekend...

The first one I read was In Cold Blood; I wanted to read this before seeing that new (sorta new) movie Capote, which is at least partly about how writing this particular book ate him up. I started reading this Friday night, and it was so riveting I sat and read about two thirds of the book before getting up -- it was after 2:00 AM when I went into the kitchen for a class of juice, so I forced myself to go to bed. Saturday was the gym in the morning, then I came home and finished the book. Like I said, riveting.

Went out last night to Which Brew (they had Decadence on tap) with Doug and Lori, also saw Eric and Kris when they arrived later. Kind of neat to get Lori's take on Capote, since she's a big Breakfast At Tiffany's fan. Meantime, Kris had just come back from Philly, where she saw that Body Worlds exhibit with a friend, and she had a few tales to tell about that.

Today I got up a little late, in fact I got up a little later because of the "spring ahead" thing, spent a chunk of the early afternoon reading the SSH guide. Lotta good info in there, I already see some things I want to do to improve my own use of ssh. Kind of funny to be delving into encryption and secure transmissions right now, total synchronicity when I see that an Enigma machine is now up for sale on eBay. (The actual eBay link is here.)

I did my reading on the porch, got a little sun & air on the long-suffering epidermis; later in the day Eric came by and helped me with some shopping, that and a trip to the Quadrant for some coffee.

No comments: