I am not a Koan!

No Doors, No Windows: A Novel is a lot different than Joe Schreiber’s other 2 novels – Chasing the Dead and Eat the Dark. Those were very action-oriented, mostly plot with some Stephen King-esque nods to character development. No Doors, No Windows: A Novel is quiet, slow, and small-town mystic atmospheric, also reminiscent of King. It also reminds me of Straub’s Ghost Story and A Winter Haunting by Dan Simmons. No Doors No Windows is especially enjoyable is you enjoy Gothic-ish modern ghost stories.

Two really great horror stories that do what good horror does so well: makes you think about dark places, and then, slow and majestic and horrifying, takes you there.

Going the Jerusalem Mile – Chaz Brenchley
This story is as obsidious as it is insidious. My wife and I share a peculiar approach to religion: it scares the bejezus (excuse me, that’s my pun you’re stepping on) out of us. The only horror movies that scare her involve religion. Religion frightens me the way a shadow would – it’s presence at the best of times is unnerving; but if it moved toward me, I’d have a heart attack. This is a story about religion, obsession, and it’s final perfect form: worship.

The Machine of a Religious Man – Ralph Robert Moore
The voice and characterization in this story turn something simple into something just plain ole sad. Nothing worse than plain ole sadness.

Both can be found in ‘The Years Best Fantasy and Horror 2006‘, and likely a few other places as well.

If you have a Toshiba laptop, there’s a good chance it has a Realtek RTL8191SE Wireless LAN 802.11n PCI-E NIC or some minor variation of same. Realtek apparently doesn’t make it very easy to find drivers for linux for this card – the person who posted the driver said he got it from Realtek, and I don’t have any real reason to doubt that. It works for me, in any case. Here are the steps I took to be able to use WiFi on my Toshiba Satellite P505. YMMV, so feel free to give a thorough read of the problem and solutions available at the Ubuntu help/bug forums. The driver tarball is available to download from that thread. rtl8192se_linux_2.6.0010.1012.2009.tar.gz (1.3 MiB, application/x-tar)

only load the driver module to kernel and start up nic.
1. Build up the drivers from the source code
make
2. Copy firmware to /lib/firmware/ or /lib/firmware/(KERNEL_VERSION)/
cp -rf firmware/RTL8192SE /lib/firmware
or
cp -rf firmware/RTL8192SE /lib/firmware/(KERNEL_VERSION)
Note: This depends on whether (KERNEL_VERSION) subdirectory exists under /lib/firmware

3. Load driver module to kernel and start up nic.
./wlan0up

And now back to writing.

It seems like using wp code snippets used to be more intuitive, from what I remember. I could be wrong. I wanted to show my blog categories in the sidebar, but I didn’t want to have an unstyled label so I could add my own, without having to add anything to the stylesheet. After some googling, here is the path to better category display for minimally styled blogs:

wp_list_categories(‘title_li=’); ?>

Makes sense I guess, but it was annoying trying to figure it out. RTFM Jeff, sheesh.