The blog of Steve Root

  • Dark Space (Marianne de pierres)

    I picked this book up for two reasons; 1) It is Book 1 of “The Sentients of Orion” and I decided if there is more than one volume it can’t be too bad or the 2nd wouldn’t have been published. 2) The publisher is Orbit, they’ve published a lot of the other books I’ve read and I’ve always been happy with them.

    The story takes several different strands of life and weaves them together as a planet goes from quiet backwater to invaded warzone. By the end I started to get into the story but that was far too late for me to rate this as a book I’d read again. I think the the problem was the Italian theme. The whole society uses Italianesque words frequently and I found it hard work to understand and get into the story. At one point I considered leaving the book unfinished but I’m glad I did get to the end of it. Will I get book 2? I wont go hunting for it, but I’d read it if I had nothing else. Rootie Rating 1 out of 5 – it wasn’t for me.

  • EMC 81 Logs

    i-ab61e493018c15f1dd9626a96c6360ff-emc.gif
    The last 3 sunday nights I have run an online gaming event (it’s called warbirds). If you played you can see how well you did by following the “read more” link, before then here are the top 10 player scores and the overall game statistics.

    Player/th> EMCs Flown Died By Count kill count Assist Count damage total Launches vlist
    gun-as 3 1 3 3 14322.51 8 Bristol-F.2b,Ju88A-4,109E1A0,40MMAAA,Bf-109G6
    olepup 3 1 3 1 300 5 Bristol-F.2b,HurricaneI,HurricaneIIC
    biffas 3 1 2 2 9 SE5A,SpitM03F,SpitVb
    oldgit 3 1 2 0 9351.13 7 FW-190A4,109E1A0,Bristol-F.2b,Ju88A-4,He-111H3
    -broz- 3 1 0 3 1201.85 10 109E1A0,Bf110C-4,Bristol-F.2b
    deeday 3 1 0 3 6 SpitM03F,SE5A,SpitVb
    lakman 3 2 5 1 12 SE5A,SpitVb,SpitM03F
    -dada- 3 2 3 4 20252.25 7 Ju87D,Bf110C-4,109E1A0,Bristol-F.2b,Ju88A-4
    -egor- 3 2 3 0 8 SpitVb,SE5A,SpitM03F
    chough 3 2 0 4 7 SpitM03F,SE5A,HurricaneIIC,HurricaneI,SpitVb

    Players per Frame

    logid COUNT(DISTINCT player)
    EMC81-1.log 67
    EMC81-2.log 71
    EMC81-3.log 80

    Count of players in EMC (over all frames analysed)

    COUNT(DISTINCT player)
    131

    (more…)

  • Spam wars – I get ignored, but will they ignore the courts?

    Spam wars are about to get interesting….

    Yesterday, I started a small claims court action against a company to have them pay for the spam they’ve been sending to email addresses I run. I didn’t take this action lightly. I had asked them to stop by email, I had asked them to stop by phone, I had asked them to stop by Fax.

    In the email, I said that if they send any more I will be charging them 50 per email. When two more arrived a month later I phoned them and they claimed not to have received my email, so I told them the content and I also faxed it. They promised on the phone not to send any more, but less than 24 hours later I got 4 more. All their emails claim not to be spam because they are sent manually… seeing as most of them come in the early hours of the morning, I can give them the benefit of the doubt by guessing they keep strange working hours.

    The paperwork has gone, I’ll post information here as time allows.

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