Sea of Monsters sees Percy reunited with Annabeth and a new friend, Tyson, a young Cyclops. Camp Half-Blood is under attack and its magical borders will fail if they can’t retrieve the golden fleece. Percy is also having weird dreams about his friend Grover, who is on a quest to find the God Pan.

Again, the pace of this book is relentless, with Percy and co lurching from from crisis to the next, and it’s relatively short, so quick to get through. I didn’t think it was as well rounded as the first book, but it was still good enough that I bought the next book in the series.

So it was a bit disappointing when the series came to an end with A Darkling Plain. Have no fear though, because Reeve has started work on some prequel novels, the first of which is Fever Crumb.

Set before London becomes a traction city. Fever is found as a baby and taken in by the Engineers Guild and trained as one of them. When a well-known archaeologist requests her for an assignment she is a bit suspicious and rightly so. She has strange memories from before she was born, memories of a time and place before the last uprising, the Skinners War.

As with all of the novels, the ideas are inventive, the characters endearing and the story fast. New ideas, novel twists on the contemporary (simple things like how the names of famous places have been twisted over time) and clever development draw you in and hold your attention to the end. This certainly isn’t a cheap shadow of the main series, designed to please fans and make money, it’s a great story on its own.

I’m looking forward to the next two books (A Web of Air and Scriviner’s Moon).

So, with the help of the of a few unlikely individuals and the suspicious backing on the Patrician, they set about inventing the modern game.

As ever, Pratchett isn’t just writing a story with brilliant and entertaining characters but is using the subject for social commentary and insight. It’s a style no one else seems to play in the same way and it made for yet another maddenly addictive read.

Now, if we can just get him off the YA stuff (the next book is YA, but he had announced a new book, called Snuff, featuring Sam Vimes, my favourite of his characters).

If you have never read a Pratchett novel I urge you to give them a try, they may be classed as fantasy but they are far more than that.

This was an idea pioneered in WWII as a weapon to use against the Japanese.  Although many bat species are endangered today, at the time bats were around in huge numbers (several million in a large cave was not uncommon), which meant they could be used in large numbers for maximum affect without harming the population.  The idea was simple, catch a lot of bats (they were planning on releasing over a million), attach small incendiary devices to them with timers, load them onto a plane and release them over Japan near morning.  The bats would, in the approaching dawn, find a roost and then the timed devices would detonate causing mass fires.

It sounds like something cooked up by a second-rate comic book villain, but this was a real project, known to the military as Project X-Ray.  In fact, it had several test runs.  One with dummy weapons and one, for some reason, with live fire weapons at an airbase in the south-western United States.  It proved so successful it burnt down most of the new airbase and a general’s car.  The problem was it was completely indiscriminate.

In the end, while still working out the kinks, the atomic bomb (Manhattan) project came to fruition and it was decided the bat bombs were no longer needed.  There’s a book on the subject if you’re inclined to find out more.

These were by no means the only animals to be used for military means, in WWII alone there were projects for pigeon-guided missiles, anti-tank dogs and the US Navy still uses dolphins and sea lions.

I’d heard of Altered Carbon from a number of places and it was on my wishlist for a while. So when I was in the mood I added it to an order and finally sat down to read it. I’m glad I did.

Aside from the Earth-based futurism there is also a degree of noir detective thriller as well, another genre I like, so it worked out well and I ploughed through it quickly.

It certainly doesn’t pull any punches, this is a hard edge story filled with sex, torture and all sorts of violence but it’s also stuffed with interesting ideas on what the future of technology holds and what impact they’ll have on society.

More importantly, the characters are well drawn, the plot fast-paced and the action relentless, drawing you in and holding your attention to the last page.

I can understand the similarities in the media to Potter, but they are completely different books with different styles and characters. Not that The Lightning Thief was bad for that. I like Greek mythology, you’d be surprised how much it’s used in the modern world (many of the characters in Harry Potter come from it, for example, even our planets have names directly or derived from it).

One thing you can say is it’s action packed. It doesn’t let up either. Where the latter HP books were long and winding this is short and punchy, racing from crisis to crisis from new development to new development, revealing details all the while.

If you want a well-written, pacey action adventure I’d give it a go.

He doesn’t specify what alternative method he’ll use, just that the publisher route is too slow, expensive and distant. Note that he is not saying electronically, at least not yet, which is good. I think there’s still plenty of room for hard copy yet.

As I’ve said before, I’m surprised someone hasn’t split off already. The typical time to print for a book is (typically) somewhere between 12 and 24 months (that’s 1 to 2 years). Why? Everything is done electronically, why should it be any more than a couple of months to proof, polish, get artwork and send to the printers? There’s some issues with publicity and not overloading the retailers with too many new releases at a time, but years?

via mediabistro

It was only first launched in May 09 and out of beta May 2010. Most non-techies haven’t even heard of it yet. New communication mediums don’t take off overnight, they’d have been looking at decades for a reasonable level of adoption. If they’d pulled the plug on the world wide web that fast it would have barely been noticed by most people.

I liked the look of Wave, though I couldn’t see how I would use it. Collaboration only really seems to work in a work environment, how many times have you needed to edit a document at the same time as your parents?

Likewise instant typing update, who needs it? I like the asynchronous nature of email, it lets me respond in my own time and likewise the people I contact. I don’t use IM at home as it’s too disruptive (if someone IMs me I feel I need to respond right now, I don’t with email).

Some of the other features were good. Playback, for example, and much of the drag and drop, but most people have no need to edit things simultaneously. I suspect many of the component technology will make its way into other applications though.

Our customers are principally two major groups. The first group is sovereign clients – other countries that do not have the kind of access to the ISS that they would like to have, and that want to shape their own space futures.

So when space access, which is largely controlled by governments at the moment, switched primarily to the private sector, who stops just anyone putting a weapon in space?

I’m not talking nuclear warheads, lasers or giant mirrors, the simplest weapon would just use gravity for kinetic bombardment. No moving parts, no exotic materials, no real know-how, just let it go at the right point and it can be dropped anywhere on Earth and is impossible to stop.

So who polices space?

According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants — including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.