What I'm reading right now.

In the fiction category, I'm going through Robert Wilson's "Instruments of Darkness". It's about a British expat in West Africa looking for a missing person amidst intrigue ranging from sheanut trees to dead bodies in swimming pools. Reading the book makes me want to see on a veranda in 105 degree heat and drink whisky on the rocks. All of the European characters are portayed as half crazed drunks trying to hide some deep secret, escape the past or both.

Also I'm reading "Joel on software". It's a collection of articles that Joel Spolsky has written on his website He has some good ideas, one of them being practing your writing skills my updating your blog regularly.

I was talking to Woodie today about his cabin on Lake Wawasee in northern Indiana. He was telling me that he has to close his place up for the winter but wants to keep the heat running so he can go up there over the Holidays and use the place. We were talking about ways to monitor the temperature remotely and I suggested purchase a large digital read out thermometer, mount it on a wall and point a webcam at it. He could just log in from work check his webcam and note the temperature up at his cabin. It would be a hi-low tech solution. Or you could employ some sort of image recognition software that could actually "read" the temperature post it to a database and fire a trigger if the value got below 60 degrees.