My Sci Fi Novel

Ok, So our workplace has a wonderful system where we have a shelf where people bring old books that they have read that anyone can just take and read and put back. Well, finding out about this I chose Michael Crichton's Prey. I have read Timeline (and saw the poor make of the movie) and have heard Noah rant about how good all of his works are. Anyway, yesterday I was really tired and was about to go to bed, but I decided to pick it up. Well I got through the 1st 100 pages or so before I decided I would be kicking myself too much in the morning and I need to go to bed. And believe you me, I am a slow reader. Crichton paints a vivid picture of a near future that could very well happen. One thing I love about his writing style is that he has great detail on both technology and human relationships. Ok, so he hits the mark a lot closer with technology. He actually explains, very logically, how this Sci-Fi technology could actually work. I mean just having it is fairly cool, but if it is all lights and bells it means much less to the reader. As far as relationships, he has many of the parts of relationships there, but they are a mixed bag that would not likely happen in reality. Excess drama that leads to nothing, lack of drama where there should be some. And I do not think that he properly paints the difference in the way men and women interact. The first huge chunk of this story is about a jobless husband becoming a stay-at-home day while his wife works the corporate ladder to become an exec of a major tech company. Basically, Criton hypothesizes that the corporate environment is what makes your stereotypical man, not his inherit nature. The husband's inner dialog strictly follows the stereotypical female housewife mindset. For example, there is a 1 page conversation between him and another guy about the benefits of Pampers vs. Charmin for absorbency, seepage and overall quality. Amazing - I do not think that nurture cannot change our nature as much as Crichton paints, but the foil is probably intentional to entice the user to question our standard conclusions. And this theme is also evident in his critic of modern technology. Somewhat outlandish scenarios, that are logical, but would not happen in the real world. Anyways, so far I give the novel 4 stars with a slight hint of caution about a couple instances of bad language. Definitely better than Timeline (so far) for the true Sci-Fi fan.
Anyways, this past week has been fairly good. I was able to get together with some guys from church to play tennis and just hang out, and I got to catch up a bit with some of my family. Soon I will get to go to Alan Patrick's wedding down in New Orleans followed by a wonderful trip to Atlanta to see all my peeps down there for Thanksgiving.

My Downtown Raleigh

So this past weekend my Dad came to visit me and see the surrounding area. Well, I have never really had a good reason to visit downtown area so this was a perfect opportunity. We decided to go downtown and try out the Science and Space museum. So overall, the downtown area is very scenic and historic. There are not a large amount of commercial businesses downtown. This is nice since the streets are not all jammed with excessive traffic and scant parking. So we were able to park right next to the museum and walk right in. And the museum itself was free. There were four floors of exhibits in all. Now granted, this place would be much cooler a decade ago, but it was still nice. We were looking at google maps with the hybrid view to try to find this place, and all of the downtown area has excellent resolution pictures. You can make easily make out cars and even some smaller objects. There was one picture in the museum of the entire NC coastal region where you could not even make out a large island very well. Naturally this was impressive in the 90s but nowadays google is my museum and library. Sigh. Well anyways, I think next time the art museum would be a good choice. Or the planetarium. Anyways, there were some great exhibits like the gemalogy exhibit was very cool. And, outside of the museum they have a huge sandcastle in the shape of a truck. And it was about the size of one too. They brought in 16 tons of sand for this thing. Also, downtown we stopped by a motorcycle rally in Raleigh they were having. Tons of bikes of all kinds. We finished up the evening with some excellent Mexican food and watching the Aviator (great film- very sad). All-in-all a good time in downtown.