Daniel R.

On Wednesday the second two books of the Millennium books arrived. I've been obsessively absorbed by them since. Thankfully I'm now done so I can get back to all the others things I should have been doing these past few days.

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The action teeters on the absurd at times but only slightly distracts from this page turning sequel. Salander is back with a vengeance and takes center stage as the story of her fleshes out wonderfully.

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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A marvelous conclusion to the Millennium trilogy. Many of the loose ends I found distracting in the earlier books were combined into a cunning mix of espionage, journalism, and hacking that found a dramatic satisfying closure.

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Tags: books

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 9:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After getting the latest update to Firefox (3.6.4) yesterday, when I was debugging some Flash code this morning, my debugging session got disconnected in the middle of looking at some variables. Returning to Firefox I was greeted with the following:

This was the new plugin crash detector. Only problem was I didn't want it to kick in while I was debugging. Thankfully a little searching on the net turned up a solution. Through Firefox's "about:config" mechanism you can disable crash detection for certain plugins. In my case Flash is NPSWF32.DLL. Flipping the "dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npswf32.dll" property to false fixed the issue:

Tags: debugging firefox flash

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the things that I love about vacation is the additional time I spend reading. I'm less likely to fall into my standard trap of turning on the television to watch a movie and since I usually don't travel with a computer am not tempted by Netflix. Some unexpected delays on my return flight gave me a chance to finish the couple of books that had been sitting around my desk at home that I brought with me and also start on the Millennium series that was recommended to me again by others on the trip.

The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
At times the story felt formulaic but blended the elements enough to elevate it to a good read. The realm traveling Travelers intrigued me the most and kept my interest throughout the book, but I would have liked to get more of a hint about their bigger picture before diving into the other books of the trilogy. Otherwise the book is fairly adventure driven with the standard cast of overly expert protectors and overly confident antagonists.

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The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
An engaging story that weaves in elements from other books set in Revelation Space while exploring the lives of Prefects patrolling the Glitter Band. The story builds on technologies and settings previously described while introducing an investigation of a serious crime, new weapons and creatures, and ties together previously unrelated events. A great addition to the Revelation Space universe.

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A mesmerizing investigation story with some of the more interesting and flawed characters I've read. At times the story digresses, which while helping to define the characters, I found distracting the from main storyline. It's possible these events are explored more in the later books of the trilogy but as such made me feel the story was incomplete.

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Tags: books

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've had the same phone plan since I switched to a G1 back in Oct of 2008. I have a grandfathered time and text voice plan and an unlimited data plan. As a result unless I'm traveling and incurring roaming charges, my "Monthly Recurring Charges" have been the same for the last 18 months. However, during that time the "Other Charges" and "Taxes & Surcharges" have gone up from $3.86 to $6.47!

Here's a little historical breakdown:

The recent changes in State Sales Tax is confusing me the most. It's like they changed what they collect sales tax on. Anyone else seeing strange fees?

Tags: taxes tmobile

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 9:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)