Well I haven’t posted anything in a while but that’s because I’ve been pretty busy.  For those of you who’ve never gotten married before, I’ll let you in on a little secret:  the planning takes a lot of time.  Of course I don’t have nearly as much planning to do as Stephanie.  I just kind of have to get things done.  And we realized the other day that we have almost everything planned now, but I still have every weekend between now and Easter reserved for some wedding-related activity.  In what time I haven’t been busy with wedding stuff, I’ve been absorbed into Quicksilver, the first of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle books.  I really like the way this guy writes.  Cryptonomicon was an amazing book that took me something like two months to finish reading, weighing in at over 900 pages.  It could be described as part techno-thriller, but half of the story was World War 2 historical fiction, and the other half really seems more like historical fiction set in the times it was written (1999 dot-com era).  It has some Tolkien-esque qualities; namely, the length, the descriptive passages, the creation of not just characters but histories to go with them.  He even touched on creating his own language: Qwghlmian, the vowel-less native language of Qwghlm, a ficticious island off the north western coast of Scotland.  Also invented is a World War 2 Pacific Theater island called Kinakuta.  The Baroque Cycle is a three-volume work that follows ancestors of the main characters of Cryptonomicon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Each of the three volumes is just as long as Cryptonomicon, and there are multiple books within each volume (the whole novel consists of eight books... in much the same way that The Lord Of The Rings consists of six books in three volumes).  They’re great books for a geeky fantasy world (much different from Tolkien’s fantasy worlds).  The author was described to me as a huge geek who is also a great writer, and I’d say anyone who writes a LISP program to format their novel in Emacs would have to fit that description.  I guess that’s all of my rant today.  Normally I add lots of links to my posts but I’m too tired to do that right now...  maybe I’ll go back and add them later.