Entry #219
- Listening to:
- Queen, greatest hits. Bohemian rhapsody,
Another one bites the dust, all that stuff.
- Now reading:
- James Joyce, Ulysses. I read perhaps 10% of this
over the weekend. This means it could be a good long while
before I have anything to say about it.
- Holiday reading:
- Bill Bryson, A walk in the
woods. This is another book I read in Australia,
almost a year ago. It's the story of Bryson's attempt to do the
Appalachian Trail, a famous long-distance trail that goes from
Georgia to Maine, over a distance of some 2100 miles. I enjoyed
it, finding it both amusing and quite informative.
Occasionally, Bryson sounds a bit preachy as he bemoans the
various environmental disasters about to happen or already
happened in the areas he walks through, but most of the time
he's just interesting, on both where he is, and the pyschology
and habits of the long-distance walker.
I was particularly amazed to learn that Bryson couldn't get any
good maps of the trail. In the UK, the Ordnance Survey
provides maps at scales down to 1:25000 of the whole country,
and these are readily available at bookshops. You'd need a lot
of them to cover all of 2100 miles, but hey, Bryson is a rich
author now. (The OS also has some
very nice screen wall-paper images available free every
month.)
Finally, a
"search engine" that
does a whole bunch of searches using other engines around the web, and
then collates them into what it hopes will be useful categories. Looks neat!
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