Merry Christmas (Post Robot Apocalypse) 2008!

Merry Christmas from the Gomm family!

We decided that this year we would perform our favorite Post Robot Apocalypse Christmas song as our holiday greetings! Turn up your volume, press play, and start cringing!




This is a song by our family's favorite artist Jonathan Coultan. Click here for the lyrics.
You can download the mp3 of the OreGomm version of this timeless Christmas classic here.

We wish everyone a:

Merry Christmas,
Happy Hanukkah,
Killer Kwanzaa,
Super Sweet Solstice, and
Happy New Year!

My Birthday Portal!

It's no secret that Portal is my favorite video game of all time. Well, Thursday was my birthday, and Amanda made me the perfect portal cake:


Oh, and on the left there is the present my kids got me (with their saved allowance): 1600 MS Points to buy Portal: Still Alive.

What a great family!

Well, for some reason, I've read a TON of books in the last few weeks, here are my reviews.

^___^


Sabriel
I really enjoyed this book. It's mostly a fantasy novel, and I believe it's a young adult book. Sabriel is a coming of age novel about a young girl who’s just completing the equivalent of high school. Oh, she's also a necromancer.

The magic system in it is unique, but not really well described (it doesn’t lay out all the rules like you find in some fantasy novels), but that doesn’t prevent it from being intriguing. Garth Nix pulls you into the story right away and does a fairly good job creating a few memorable characters that you really care about. He also creates some vivid imagery that I won’t soon forget (Abhorsen’s house, the paperwing flight). The book has some memorable lines that are reinforced by the themes of the story (“Everyone and everything has a time to die” and “Does the walker choose the path or the path the walker”).

I highly recommend this book. I found out that there are two sequels to this book (“Lirael” and “Abhorsen”) which are on my To Read list.

Darwin's Radio
This is the first book by Greg Bear that I’ve read, and I really enjoyed it. Darwin’s Radio is a contemporary novel set maybe a few years in the future. It follows the discovery of a family of Neanderthal mummies, the discovery of mass graves in The Republic of Georgia, and the outbreak of a disease targeting only pregnant women (don’t worry, I haven’t given you any spoilers!).

I found the book to be well written in that it not only had believable and interesting characters, but also intriguing scientific contemplations. The book deals with theme of evolution (I was reading Spin when I started this book, so the evolution ideas were doubly interesting) as well as how the public reacts to a disease outbreak. I have no idea how authentic the biology presented in the book is, but it did make me check the wikipedia entry on several ideas (like endogenous retroviruses), so that’s got to be a good thing!

I’d recommend this book if you’re in the mood for some present day speculative science (light on the speculative, heavy on the science). I just found out that this book has a sequel, Darwin’s Children. I’ll add that to my To Read list too!

Quantico
This one was my second Greg Bear book, and I’ll say it was OK. This is also a contemporary novel set a few years in the future. The book follows several FBI agents as an anthrax-related terrorist plot unfolds. Greg Bear does a fair share of ruminating on the ways society has changed since 9/11. He posits that we can never return to the pre-9/11 state of quasi-innocence and asks the reader to decide if humanity would be better off forgetting that it ever happened. It’s a decent story with ok character development. There wasn’t a lot of story to it, though, and I often wanted to just skip to the end.

If you are really in to police stories or want some terrorism-related food for thought, then definitely try this book. Otherwise, I’d skip it.

The Last Colony
This is the third book in the Old Man’s War series (by John Scalzi). This book, again, is a very different kind of book than the previous two. It follows the story of a group of colonists settling a new planet. It sounds a little mundane (and I almost lost interest in the first couple of chapters), but it turns out to be very satisfying. There are ample twists and turns, and the author ends up taking his ultra-violent Old Man’s War universe in a direction that I found very satisfying.

If you liked the first two in this series, then you MUST read this book. Scalzi says in the afterward that this is his last book in the series, however, a fourth book is coming out this year and I can’t wait!

Axis
Axis is the sequel to Spin (by Robert Charles Wilson), which I couldn’t say enough good things about. I wasn’t sure how Spin could have a sequel, but there were enough unanswered questions from Spin, that I was excited to read Axis. The thing that made Spin really stand out to me was the combination of superb character drama with a great “big science” science fiction story. Axis has a lot of both the character drama and the “big science,” but Wilson doesn’t do either quite as well as he did in Spin. Axis felt like less of a complete story than Spin did, mainly because it covers a much smaller chunk of the characters’ lives, and doesn’t go nearly into the same depth. Also, Axis doesn’t really move the Spin universe forward, you end sort of where you began, albeit with a slightly better understanding of their world.

That said, it’s still a good book and it’s very well paced -- giving you a little more substance in every chapter. If you liked Spin, you should probably read Axis too.

Artemis Fowl
I read the first chapter of Artemis Fowl about 3 years ago, but I didn’t continue. This time I read it all the way through and I’m really glad I did! This is definitely a young adult book, but there are a few non-critical references some kids might not get. Without spoiling the book, Artemis Fowl is a super-intelligent 12-year old criminal mastermind who tries to discover the secrets of fairies to get his hands on their gold. One of the reasons I liked this book so much is that for most of the book you’re not quite sure who you should be rooting for! There are definitely two sides in conflict, but both of them have antagonist and protagonist facets to them. That uncertainty keeps you guessing until the end, and frankly, I wasn’t sure how I wanted it to turn out until I’d finished.

This was a quick read but very enjoyable, and I highly recommend it.

Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident
The Arctic Incident takes place 1 year after the first book, with a 13-year old Artemis Fowl. This story (as hinted in at the end of the first book) involves Artemis being forced to work with the LEP. As such, it feels a little different than the first book. There’s a clearer antagonist and the plot is a little more complicated than the first book (it’s still not that complicated for you adult smarty-pantses!). The story is quick-paced and fun and gives all of the main characters some development. I recommend this one as well.

Lord of the Isles
Oh my. Lord of the Isles by David Drake.
OK, it’s my policy to give a book 100 pages. If it can’t hook me in 100 pages then it’s not for me. After dragging myself through 70 pages of this little gem, I gave up. This is just a poorly written book. David Drake may have some fabulous ideas for a neat-o magic system and Earthsea-like world, but he’s a bad writer.

One thing that really bothered me was his use of highly obscure jargon – all the time! Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty geeky. I’ve read my share of fantasy novels, DMed my share of D&D games, and gotten addicted to MMORPGs, so I know my way around a fair bit of medieval lingo. Well, apparently David Drake believes that you need to be institutionalizably (yes I said it!) into old world ship building or medieval dress making if you want to ride his ride. Well, sorry, I don’t know what a ship’s cordage or your boat’s thwart are, and I’m OK with that.

The other big problem is Drake’s awkward prose. I’m not sure how to describe it, but I kept having to re-read several sentences every paragraph to figure out what he was trying to say! I may make Amanda read a chapter or two to see if she can figure out what the problem is. Lastly, the fight scenes were boring, but at least they were long. This is going to come as a surprise, but I recommend running away from this book!

Recommend me some more books!
If you're reading anything good let me know!

Troy's Search for Books

And now for a break from all the House Selling posts...

Way back in one of our first posts, I mentioned that I was reading the Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher. These are pretty good. They're basically gritty modern detective stories, set in Chicago with a LOT of supernatural elements thrown in. I definitely recommend the Dresden Files.

When I finished those books, I realized that I was fresh out of good Scifi / Fantasy.

The first thing I did was go to Powell's Books in downtown Portland. This is an AMAZING bookstore - the largest I've ever been in. It sells new and used books, and has a lot of character. It also has author recommendations mixed in with the books.

Based on the recommendations for Scifi, I bought The Algebraist by Ian M. Banks. To be fair, I didn't really give this book a chance. I was in the mood for something a little more action-oriented, and this was a little slower with a lot of politics. I seemed like a well-thought-out and interesting setting. I only read a couple hundred pages when I gave up on it, but I think I'll come back to it at some point. I would recommend this if you're looking for a highly political, very far future space opera (think the Dune series).

So that was sort of a bust. I tried some books recommended by friends, but I didn't find anything interesting (fantasy romance novels are just not for me). By a stroke of luck, I found out that tor.com is launching a new eBook download service, and to help promote it they're giving away free eBooks - one a week for 12 weeks. (They're still doing it, so go sign up right away!).

The first eBook was Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson (I guess it's actually called "The Final Empire, book 1 of the Mistborn series," but whatever...). Let me just say, WOW! I printed out the first two chapters of the book and read them on my walk home from work. As soon as I got home I opened up the ebook on the computer and kept reading. I couldn't get enough of it and devoured it very quickly. It's been a long time since I read a fantasy novel this good. He throws out all the old ideas of fantasy (you won't find any dwarves or elves or anything else Tolkein-esque or any Dungeons & Dragons rip-offs). The characters are believable and you care about them right away. The magic is original, and the politics aren't too overpowering or convoluted. The whole story is very satisfying. I can't recommend this book (or this author) highly enough!! If you like fantasy even a little bit, go buy this book right away!

I finished Mistborn while we were on vacation, and we went to a book store so I could buy the sequel. Unfortunately, they only have it in hardback and I can't bring myself to pay $30 for a book. Instead, I bought Brandon Sanderson's stand-alone novel Elantris. Again, WOW! I read a chapter or two while we were on vacation, but when we got back, I sat down and read this book straight through in one day. Again, this is an original, understandable, and believable setting. The characters are well-developed and endearing. The magic is interesting and original, and the book is a stand-alone novel, so you don't have to commit to some 8000 page series. I strongly recommend this as well. Amanda is currently addicted to it and has been reading it whenever she gets a spare second (which isn't often for a mom of her caliber!).

The most recent book on Tor's free ebook list, is The Outstretched Shadow by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory. I'd already read this one back when I was at Ford (during the Inferno days as it were). I really enjoyed this one. It has a very subtle magic system with some interesting religious undertones. The story is well paced, and this book makes for a very nice slow, savory read. This is a trilogy, and the third book just came out. I recommend this one.

Well, this list sounds like all fantasy, but I didn't give up on Scifi! The second ebook from Tor was Old Man's War by John Scalzi. This was just the science fiction novel I was looking for. It's only about 300 pages, so it's a fairly quick read, but I had a VERY hard time putting it down. Without giving too much away, it's a military novel with a good deal of action. It's told from the perspective of a 75-year old man, and has a lot of interesting twists and turns. It feels a lot like Heinlein (think Starship Troopers), but be warned that it's REALLY cussy! There are plenty of F-bombs, but I thought it was fairly appropriate for the genre. I'd definitely recommend this one if you like scifi.

So that's it for what I've been reading this month. I'm currently reading the second Mistborn book, The Well of Ascension, and totally loving it.

If you have any recommendations for good Scifi or Fantasy, definitely post a comment!

----- Update -----
I actually read all day and finished The Well of Ascension tonight. It was great but ended with a major cliffhanger. The sequel, "The Hero of Ages" won't be out until this October! What will I read until then?!!! Also, one more note about Brandon Sanderson: Robert Jordan, the author of The Wheel of Time series, died recently. Brandon met with him and went over all of his notes beforehand and he'll be writing the final book of the series, A Memory of Light.

Halloween 2007

Now that it's December I think it's finally time to take the lid off of the closely guarded Gomm Halloween photos!

This was our first Halloween in Oregon and it was great! Last year (in Michigan) we had to all wear thick coats and drive around trick-or-treating in a nice warm car. The temperature here was GREAT and there were plenty of autumn leaves swirling around to make it very spooky.


Scout dressed as a fairy princess, Savannah was an über-goth vampire, and Random was Link. The fabulous Link costume was tailored by Grandma Bryan!

I wore my warmest shirt which doubled as my costume. In case you're curious I'm a Totoro from Tonari no Totoro - a great Japanese movie. (By the way, I highly recommend all films by Hayao Miyazaki).

At the first door, Scout came running back to Amanda with wide eyes saying, "Mommy! They gave us CANDY!!" The kids all had a lot of fun and scored about 13 tons of candy. By the end of the evening, Scout was so tired she couldn't hold her bucket anymore. All the sugar lasted them until mid-November.

Happy Halloween!

Trip to Chinatown - Singapore Style

Last Saturday I took a trip to Singapore's Chinatown. This was also my first Singapore subway trip, so I looked up the route and hit the subway (called the MRT here). Luckily there's an entrance to the MRT across from my hotel:


The Singapore MRT handles tickets different from other subways I've used. Here they have a vending machine that issues you a temporary card credited with the amount you put in plus a deposit. Here's the machine:

and here's the ticket:


The ticket has an RFID in it to buzz you through the gates, then you return it at your destination to get your deposit back.

A couple of stops and a line transfer later, I emerged in Chinatown - and I really mean emerged. The escalator from the MRT comes right out into the middle of hundreds of little shops. Here's what you see when you first come out:


One thing this picture doesn't communicate is how hot it was. Not only was the air sticky and thick with the near 100% humidity, but the sky was clear, allowing the sun to stoke the air into a furnace.... it was really really hot :P

Oh, and here's a vid:

Once you get into the shops a bit (where those yellow and red umbrellas are in the picture), the shops get very crowded. It's elbow to elbow from one shop overlapping the next, and little space from one side of the street to the other. It may sound terrible, but it was fun - you could really lose yourself in the crowd and just take it in.

I spent quite a bit of time browsing the shops, and I bought a few things for the family. For Amanda, I bought a jade ring and a tiger eye quartz bracelet because they're the color of her eyes! ^_^

Singapore Tidbits: Part 2

While in Singapore, I heard this song. It's a Mongolian Folk style song called "My Three Treasures". It was written by a Mongolian guy in China. He saw how a lot of Mongolians were moving to the large cities in China and the next generation was losing their mother tongue. He wrote this song so that Mongolian kids growing up in the cities would at least know some of their ancestral language through the words to a Mongolian song. The song is about Mother, Father, and Child (the three treasures). The song was extremely popular and stayed at the top of the Mandarin pop charts for over a month. I also saw a show about the little girl singer in the song on the Discovery Channel Asia (the show was called "Mongolian Idol").

Next tidbit. I've been buying a lot of baked goods at a Japanese bakery across the street from my hotel (most of my meals have been from there. oops! ^____^). Here's a picture of my sweet sweet candy:On the left is a curry donut - donut dough with chicken curry inside, fried like a donut. On the bottom is a chocolate and custard bun. On one side it has a vanilla custard inside, on the other side it has a chocolate paste. On the right is a soy bean & cheese roll. Soft bread, soy beans inside, toasted cheese on top. Yuhm Yuhm Yuhm!

Singapore Shrine Hunt

Since it's Sunday today, I figured it would be appropriate to go on a shrine hunt.

I looked up the closest subway station by the shrine and just took off. When I got off at the station (Raffel station I think), I found a couple of vague locality maps that showed the shrine just off of Church Street, but not how to get to Church Street. So I walked in the general area and stopped and asked people for directions.

I did end up finding it and it was pretty interesting. The whole area smelled strongly of incense. The shine was a very old walled structure, right next to high-rise buildings. The contrast was pretty neat.

I had my little camera and snapped some photos, but I also tried to grab some video. Here's my first attempt at adding video to this blog:

Here's an attempt to add some video of the hunt:

Video #2:

Video #3:

Here are some photos of the shrine. From the outside:



On the inside. The spiral things are incense sticks. There were probably 30 or so of them hanging all around and all of them were lit. Check our the details on that roof!

Video #4:

Video #5:

Well, that was my quest for the shrine! I hope you liked it, I did ^^

Singapore Tidbits

Here's a couple random tidbits:

The paper money in Singapore comes in different sizes for the denominations. I don't think I've seen that before. Here's a pic:
Amanda and I have a friend who goes by "Milo" online, so I had to pick up these:


There are just tons and tons of trees everywhere in Singapore, more so than any other large city I've been in. Some of the trees are really striking. I asked some local people about them, and apparently one of the old Prime Ministers had them brought in from overseas. I was told that when they're kids, Singaporeans learn all the names of the trees in the city. I think this one is called "flame of the forest" (maybe, my Singaporean colleagues were a little fuzzy on that ^__^ ). Here's a pic!

My Malaysian Excursion

One of the suppliers I'm visiting is in Senai Malaysia, so on Friday the 5th, I had my first trip there. One of the Xerox people who lives in Singapore came and picked me up and drove me, and let me say, PHEW!

Singapore is really big, metropolitan, and clean - it's like the nice downtown area of most large cities, except it covers the entire country (Singapore is the city, the country, and the island). The down side of that is that traffic is crazy. Now, I've lived and driven in large cities before (Detroit, Toronto, Fargo, Portland, Seattle, etc.), so I'm not a total n00b, but here, not only are there a lot of cars, but they also seem to ignore lane markings on the road. So, I say PHEW! I'm glad I didn't have to drive myself around.

The other part of my PHEW! is that Customs at the border between Singapore and Malaysia is a lot more rigorous than the US/Canada border. You have paperwork to give them along with your passport on both the Singapore and the Malaysia side. Coming back is the same: paperwork and passport. Thankfully I was with these guys who do this at least once a week, so they had all the paperwork for me to fill out, and they knew all the right lanes to be in. (I said, "PHEW!", right?)

I'll be going through again on Monday and Tuesday, but here's my passport now, stamp-o-icious:

Malaysia is very different from Singapore. The climate is the same, but that's about it. First, the official language there is Malay (Singapore's is English) so all the signs are in Malay - but in roman characters. That means that when you see a sign out of the corner of your eye, you think you should be able to read it, but when you try to sound it out, it just doesn't work out.

Another big difference is that since there is more land in Malaysia, it's not all urbanized. So there are big stretches of palm farms (for the palm seed oil - very cool), small towns, and such. The city I visited was Senai - about an hour and a half drive from my hotel in Singapore. It's got a TON of huge industrial manufacturing sites for large companies whose names you'd recognize (Mitsubishi, Hitachi, etc.).

The non-industrial areas seemed really rural - yet crowded, and not as well kept up (at least on the outside) as Singapore. I say that it seemed not well kept up, but when we went in to one of these little places for lunch, it was very nice.

The people at the site I visited were very nice and accommodating. There was a big sign on their plasma TV that said "XEROX VIP:" with my name on it. It is a massive facility with a ton (literally many thousands of tons) of injection molding equipment, plus a very capable tooling shop. But from here I'll have to leave out the supa-secret, uber-proprietary details of the visit, but I will say that these guys are VERY competent and really great to work with.

While I was at lunch I had a crazy drink called Chendol. It was really funky. It was coconut milk, red beans, brown sugar water slush, and minty green gummy wormy things. It was really sweet (kick you in the teeth sweet) with Lovecraftian textures. Pretty good though.

Off to Singapore

I'm off to Singapore!

A couple of suppliers for parts I'm designing at Xerox are in Singapore and Malaysia. So from October 2nd through October 12th, I'll be staying in Singapore!

I flew out on Tuesday October 2nd (Happy Birthday Tom!). Amanda was super sweet and bought me a ton of magazines, some video games, etc. for the grueling flight. I flew from Portland to Narita (Japan) and then to Singapore. I ended up getting really sucked in to the book I started and ended up reading it cover to cover in one sitting. It's Storm Front by Jim Butcher (Book 1 of The Dresden Files). It was really good, I highly recommend it.

There's a picture of me holding the finished book on the air plane. If you look closely, you can see the crazy amount of leg room available on international business class. ^__^

It was an 11 hour flight to Japan, and even with too much leg room, it gets REALLY old. I tried to break it up by looking for Dutch Harbor as we flew over the Bearing Strait.

Also, I played a lot of Final Fantasy III for the DS. If you have a DS and liked the old FF games on the original NES, then you should definitely go pick this up.

I stopped in Japan for an hour and a half. I haven't been there in 12 years, so it was pretty nostalgic.

By the time the flight left to Singapore from Narita, I was really feeling the jet lag. I slept pretty much the whole way (about 7.5 hours).

I was worried about Singapore Customs, because of all their VERY strict import laws. But it was a snap. Two checkpoints, very little hassle.

The cab ride to the hotel was a little nuts. The driver apparently views the lane markings on the streets as rules of thumb - he was weaving all over the place while using both hands to describe to me the difference between flat and round noodles. Interesting conversation though.

So, now I'm here in the Marriott on Orchard Road. Here's my hotel (yep, the tall one with the roof of destiny):

Here's a view out of my window (this was pretty early in the morning):


Orchard Road is apparently the main shopping district. There's just tons and tons of shops. I walked around for a bit this morning - I'm trying to not sleep during the day to get over the jet lag quickly. It's hot and humid enough to feel exotic, and has that not unpleasant smell that reminds me of Japan (I think it's a combination of the humidity, the concrete, bamboo, and the cigarettes).

Tomorrow I'll visit Malaysia. Wish me luck!