Planet a.f.p.

Enough events have accumulated in Real Life since the last time I wrote about them that it’s worth posting another summary.

The “Singing For Beginners” class at the WEA has started on Monday nights, and there’ve been two so far (six to go). One reason I have for doing courses at the WEA is to meet people and hopefully make friends, and indeed I have established private communications with one other member of the class.

The “Great World Thinkers and their Great Ideas” class starts on the 27th of May, and the other class I enrolled for, “Drawing and Painting in the Botanic Gardens“, isn’t starting at all because it’s been cancelled. I’ve been refunded for my enrollment payment.

As for my recent kitchen renovation, I have now made a decision about what tiles I would like, so the next step is to make an appointment with the tiler.

My final piece of significant news is that I recently bought my first mobile phone. My parents have been bugging me for ages that I should get one (isn’t that traditionally supposed to happen the other way around?), and I also thought it might come in handy for taxis.

I’ve been using it to send SMS messages mostly to my parents, and the phone also has video capacity but I’ve not used it. Getting the phone to connect to my computer via Bluetooth took several trips to the appropriate shops for assistance, but I got there in the end and I’ve chosen some wallpaper and ringtones. (Doesn’t work perfectly, though; an attempted upload fails about 50% of the time.) Below is the wallpaper I created for the phone, based on one of the fractals on my website:

I’ve created two ringtones out of music in my CD collection, both approximately 40 second excerpts at a quality of 96kbps. The first (which I’ve actually set as my ringtone) is from Planxty George Galiatsos by Jimmy Gregory, and the second (in case I change my mind) is from Ril A Do by Kila. The links in this paragraph lead to the mp3 ringtones I’ve generated from these tracks, so that people can hear what the excerpts sound like.

One thing that really sucks about the phone is that several songs (all of which are awful in my opinion) are installed by default and cannot be deleted. There are always things to complain about with new electronic devices, and I won’t bore you by trying to list them all, but I think that one’s worth mentioning.

In general, my home phone is still a better way to contact me. About that, please note that my contact details such as phone number and address are not jealously guarded secrets - I give them out quite readily to those who ask. Let’s imagine, for example, that it’s really late at night, you can’t sleep, and you want a conversation with someone. All your local friends are asleep and you don’t want to disturb them, but you realise that it’s a perfectly respectable time of day in Australia. Well, provided you know me, that’s fine, no problem at all. One thing I like about phone calls from people who are actually interested in socialisation is that they reduce the proportion of calls from people who are just trying to sell me something.

I thought I’d write an overview of the works of fiction adorning my bookshelf - not a comprehensive list but a fairly good summary, using enough examples to represent the overall spectrum.

To start with, there’s lots of Terry Pratchett, among my favourites “Small Gods“, “Hogfather“, “The Last Hero“, “Going Postal“, and “The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents“. I also have “Good Omens” (written with Neil Gaiman), “The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy” (edited by Mike Ashley and including Pratchett’s “Troll Bridge“), and a special honorable mention goes to “Once More With Footnotes” from NESFA Press.

There’s some Doctor Who and Red Dwarf stuff, some of which are novels (e.g. “Legacy” by Gary Russell, or “The Red Dwarf Omnibus” by Grant Naylor) and some of which are not (e.g. “The Monsters” by Adrian Rigelsford and Andrew Skilleter, or “The Space Corps Survival Manual” by Grant Naylor).

There’s some Tolkien (”The Hobbit“) and some C. S. Lewis (”Out of the Silent Planet” & “That Hideous Strength“). Also some Douglas Adams (”The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“, up to and including “Mostly Harmless“).

Then there’s some miscellaneous science fiction and fantasy, including “Climbing Olympus” by Kevin J Anderson, “Pawn’s Dream” by Eric S Nylund, and some books by Irene Radford including “Guardian of the Balance” and “Guardian of the Trust“. I still have some anthologies of science fiction and fantasy for younger readers, including “Twisted Circuits” (edited by Mick Gowar) and “A Spadeful of Spacetime” (edited by Fred Saberhagen).

Finally there’s the very miscellaneous category, which includes “God: The Ultimate Autobiography” by Jeremy Pascall, “An Alien at St Wilfred’s” by Adrian Plass, and “The Complete Yes Prime Minister” by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay. I have an edition of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” which I’ve had for over twenty years and never actually read, but it has a cool front cover design.

Thus ends the overview. Below are photographs of the books listed in the last two paragraphs above - miscellaneous science fiction and fantasy, and very miscellaneous.

If you’d like more information on particular works, requests are welcome (requests are always welcome on this blog). I’ll write a post covering non-fiction sometime in the future.