:: books

There was a sale of review books at work this week and I scored some great bargains. The best book was The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. It came out only recently and I'd been waiting for the paperback to be published -- so imagine how thrilled I was to get the £25 hardback edition for 50p.

It's a controversial book -- Pinker quotes rave reviews on his website but not everyone thinks it's a good book. Mary Midgley, a philosopher whose writing I enjoy, gave it a right good thrashing.

Another great book (and only 20p!) was the Rough Guide to Weather. I always wondered how hail stayed up in the sky long enough to get big, and now I know.

An even better bargain than the books was a French film, Betty Fisher and Other Stories: I asked how much the videos were and the woman said, "Oh just take it, I don't even know what's on them all." I wanted to see this film when it came out, but it was only on at the art-house cinema and I missed it. A friend told me the entire plot over lunch, and it sounded interesting if confusing. I haven't watched the video yet.

I've been doing some very concentrated computer work -- since fixing my irksome usb problem (I think), I've decided it's time I upgraded to Windows XP. My friend Kevin assures me it's much more stable than Windows 98, which would be nice. Because XP is very different from 98, I'm having to track down new drivers for my hardware and download them, time-consuming business. I should be ok with most of my kit, but some of my older software might not work.

The plan is to back up all my files, reformat the hard drive, divide it into two partitions and install XP on one and Linux on the other. (If any boffins are reading, I'll be sticking to the Fat32 file system.) The Linux version I'm looking at comes with office and graphics software included.

I'm quite excited about doing this, it's a major move. I've been wanting to try Linux for years, even did a Unix course to prepare myself.