Stephen King's "The Gunslinger"

“The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows. - 

Just finished the first book in the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. It's a bit of a unique book as I find it hard to give it a genre, maybe a fantasy/western? Overall, not a bad book, it was my first S. King novel and since the books I've read lately have been so big it was nice that this novel was a bit more compact. The chapters were short and the book had a pretty good tempo. I'd recommend this book to anyone looking for a relatively quick read, it's not a heavy book but you do have to keep track of a bit to follow the story. I've also read that this is being made into an HBO series, so that could be very good. I guess George R R Martin's series was such a success for them that they want to find some other book series to milk. This is probably a good pick for that, although I would have preferred something like Dune. I know there are several attempts at Dune out there, but none were well done.

Overall, it's a decent read. I'll definitely pick up the other books of the series at some point. It gets a 7.5

Joe Abercrombie's "Best Served Cold"

"Sometimes you must take one life to spare more, and when those times come, sentiment helps nobody." - Shenkt

Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold - I just finished reading Best Served Cold, after hearing so many good things about this young fantasy author, Abercrombie. I thought the book was pretty decent, it is a fun and gritty fantasy novel. The plot is essentially a "Kill Bill" set in a medieval Italy like setting. Quite interesting and a bit different from other fantasies I've read. I was expecting a violent and graphic novel and it was. It has lots of fights, bad ass characters and even weird sex. It may sound like too much, but it is written almost in a comical way, so even though the scenes aren't often funny, Abercrombie manages to make it sound funny in a very dark and twisted way (at least for me), which was good, even if it eventually got old. The book is fairly long and the "humor" didn't work the whole way through, but that might have just been me.

One criticism I have with the book though is the fact that I didn't necessarily care about any of the characters. Not to say that there weren't interesting characters in the book, but no one was good enough that I cared whether I would see him at the end or not. So much so that my favorite character didn't survive the story and I didn't necessarily care too much.

I'm definitely considering Abercrombie's First Law trilogy at some point. I've heard good things about it, and it takes place in the same world as this novel, so that could be fun.

Overall, it's worth a read if you want to read something fun and violent. I'll give it a 7.0

Firefox slowness on Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10

I've been experiencing a very annoying slow browsing experience on my Firefox but I've found a fix for it. Type about:config in the address bar and hit enter.

from there you should see a list of configuration lines. Look for the following:

- network.dns.disableIPV6 

- network.http.pipelining

- network.http.proxy.pipelining

on all of these click with the right button and toggle them from false to true. Lastly look for

-network.http.proxy.pipelining.maxrequests

change this one from whatever is there (2 in my case) to 8

I hope this helps.