Reading for March, 2006

Dragon Weather by Lawrence Watt-Evans. I’ve been a fan of Watt-Evans for a while, though for some reason his books are sometimes hard to find. His writing has always been of a consistent quality, unlike a lot of the other stuff on the fantasy and science fiction shelves. As he has gotten older, he seems to have become increasingly cynical. In Dragon Weather, he creates a protagonist who loses his family and is then sold into slavery, and after escaping vows to seek vengeance.
His books have also gotten longer, and this is the first volume of a trilogy, following the trend of every other fantasy writer in the market today. But I’m not sure I like the story enough to continue.
Stanisław Lem died on March 27, 2006. In tribute, I read Eden which I bought at a library book sale many years ago. Lem’s descriptions always make me feel a little queasy, and I’ve never been able to reread any of his stories.

New spam technique

Spammers are now creating junk domainnames (short nonsense words made of numbers and letters) in an attempt to avoid blacklist filters. Of course unless a large number of junk domains are used, it is easy enough to add one or two domains to the blacklist and defeat an ongoing attack.
I’m going to have to dump Movable Type soon.