Author Archives: James - Page 42
Five Days in January by R.T. Lowe [Book Review]
The Felix Chronicles: Five Days in January by Lowe My rating: 4 of 5 stars Five Days in January is the second in the Felix Chronicles series and follows on from where The Felix Chronicles: Freshmen left off. Five Days in January Felix and his friends return in early January for the new semester, amid a backdrop of world-changing events. One of the aspects of Five Days in January that intrigued me was the development of Felix as a character. Initially Felix annoyed me, he was killing casually. The internal monologue though showed that Felix was starting to feel uneasy about this. Allison and Harper encouraged him though, keeping him steady and ensuring that he didn't lose the plot. As Five Days in January progresses Felix changes. As do the other main characters. The world around them is getting more…
The Serpent’s Root by M.J.Logue
The Serpent's Root by M. J. Logue My rating: 5 of 5 stars The Serpent's Root is the fifth in the Uncivil Wars series. Hollie Babbitt, Russell and Luce Pettit find themselves in Cornwall in 1646. The King's Army surrenders and they're hoping for an easy summer. However they find themselves laying siege to a castle. The Serpent's Root They've brought their own Cornishman home with them, Captain Kenelm Toogood. However they quickly discover that to the locals Cornwall isn't part of England. While most of the Cornish fight for the King, this is an expedient to get their own ruler, not a loyalty to the crown. Even Toogood seems to have divided loyalties, even though is fellow Cornish kicked him out when the Parliamentarians were defeated at Lostwithiel. Like the rest of the series The Serpent's Root is more…
Time Heals No Wounds by Hendrik Falkenberg [Book Review]
Time Heals No Wounds by Hendrik Falkenberg My rating: 4 of 5 stars I really enjoyed reading this. A new author for me, and although I read the odd bit of crime fiction I don't read it as often as I read other things. Time Heals No Wounds The story is mainly told through the point of view of Hannes, an elite sportsman who is also a police officer. Bored with routine police work he requests a transfer. Time Heals No Wounds is his first assignment as a detective. There are interludes with unspecified other characters. Some tortured dream sequences, and also from Merle, a woman being held captive. These hang together very well, and provide clues that I only recognised when I'd read all the way to the end. The story is internally consistent. There are plenty of hooks to keep…
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Themself moving host
Themself is now on a Linode. I've been having some problems with Themself maxing out on disk space of late. Usually I've been fixing it temporarily by deleting emails and making local archives of older emails I want to keep. So the long term solution was to move to a bigger hosting plan. Linode If you've not heard of Linode I'm not surprised. I hadn't until I'd gone looking for a cloud based server. Originally I'd planned to use an AWS instance because they have a free tier. However fun it might have been to hone my cloud devops skills I just didn't have the time for it. AWS needed me to apply my whole range of technical architect skills to design the service. Frankly running a WordPress blog and a postfix mail server doesn't need that level of ;…
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Immigration and Brexit
I've stood on the UK Border and welcomed tens of thousands of people to the UK. I've also refused entry to a much smaller number of people. As well as that I've had jobs in strategy and doing workforce planning. It gives me an unusual insight into how the system works. The one thing that has struck me, and why I'm writing this article, is the high level of nonsense being bandied about. I don't personally see the UK having an immigration problem, but our immigration narrative is wildly distorted and nowhere near the facts. Immigrants to the UK from the EU make a net contribution to the public funds. In fact all legal immigrants make a net contribution. You'd not get that story from listening to politicians. Also you'd miss that we can make the borders and immigration system…