Anticipating some downtime during my recent vacation (stopping for lunch on the road to Vegas, waiting for the folks to show up a few days later, etc), I decided to catch up on Glen Cook’s Garrett novels, which I’d left off around book 9. I quickly reread those before starting the next five.

I think I should have stopped after book 11. I definitely should have stopped before book 14. Angry Lead Skies (10) and Whispering Nickel Idols (11) are “Garrett Lite”, suffering mostly from a lack of good plot ideas. Good for revisiting the setting and the characters, but a big step down from the earlier books.

Taken together, Cruel Zinc Melodies (12), Gilded Latten Bones (13), and Wicked Bronze Ambition (14) feel like a contractual-obligation trilogy designed to put an end to the series forever, with little regard for dangling plot threads and series continuity. I’m honestly surprised that he didn’t finish off the Dead Man to drive the final nail into the coffin.

The last one is the worst. I can’t decide who was doing more sleepwalking, Garrett or Cook. Lots of continuity and character errors, and in a series that’s always been built around Western fantasy tropes, suddenly we have a character named Hagekagome, and Garrett is glibly tossing off terms like shinagami and shinobi, and demonstrating a familiarity with Japanese folklore. Utter crap.

A little something we stumbled across while heading for the Terry Fator show at The Mirage.

Great show, by the way.

And if you want some really good Italian food in Vegas, go to Nora’s.

Not fun: starting your second vacation day the same way you started the first one, by connecting to the office and trying to debug a firewall performance issue through a VPN connection that’s affected by it.

Yesterday it mysteriously vanished while we were looking at it, so I didn’t have the opportunity to try a few things. Today, I was able to mitigate the problem by disabling the HFSC queues in PF, reducing the interrupt overhead just enough to compensate for the attack.

The downside to shutting off the throttling is that we risk being DDoS’d by syslog traffic from our products out in the field.

In completely unrelated news, there cannot be any symlinks in the path to a GitLab install, or it goes all wonky.

9/21 Update

So it looks like someone is trying to DDoS our office network. Since the previous attack didn’t keep us offline, they switched to an NTP amplification attack on a machine that had been misconfigured. It was actually kind of pathetic as attacks go; it chewed up some bandwidth (and the incoming packets are still bouncing off my firewall at 1.1 mb/s), but had zero impact on the network.

Metaphor alert: each book on display is held upright by the spine of another.

(via)

A lot of people are drinking Schadenfreude by the gallon today, as they parse the words written for the new book about how Hillary Clinton lost again. No need to link to anyone in particular, it’s everywhere.

Looking at the quotations, large and small, hilarious and pathetic, I think I’ve identified the one thing all her excuses have in common:

there were other names on the ballot

I wonder if I can get these shipped to the nearest Whole Foods now…

50,000 Rubber Ducks, ￥2,500,000

500-gram gold bar, ￥3,230,238

472cm brachiosaurus figure, ￥2,268,000

It is reported that Jerry Pournelle has passed.

I’m a bit surprised ancestry.com doesn’t draw this correctly.

It’s a functional pedigree chart, at least. The vertical family-tree view is completely busted, with two copies of Rachel and her parents.

Cousin marriage isn’t particularly rare, so you think they’d at least mark the duplicate family members with a little icon: