There's a big update pending. In fact, I was going to finish the last few pages of Underworld and post about it tonight. But I'm right in the middle of a massive hard drive failure. Massive. So I'm spending the night making emergency backups and hoping my machine doesn't crap out before I'm done. So no update tonight. And possibly not for a couple of months, depending on how long it takes me to get the scratch together for a new machine. I'll keep you kind folks posted on how things are progressing whenever I get a few minutes in front of a public computer.

Just a quick post to let you folks know that I've tweaked the sidebar on the right to better reflect my reading habits and the subject of this blog. I've also redone the "About" page. More tweaks may or may not be happening in the near future. Further updates as events warrant (and yes, I know I haven't posted in a while, but I'm not done with Underworld yet).

Due to a slight snafu regarding dates, I accidentally let my domain expire. But! It is now back in my hands and fully functional for at least another year. Thank you for your patience.

Well, the old database died completely, and I was unable to export the data. What happened instead was that I salvaged the data from static files and spent the last two days reposting them by hand into a new Movable Type installation. The end result is that there should be fewer problems in the future, comments now work like they should, some of the data was lost (one or two posts only, I think), and the archives are no longer where they used to be, meaning that any links to individual entries are now broken (sorry, couldn't help it). I haven't quite figured out how to add all the existing comments, but I do have the data and when I figure out what to do I'll put them back up.

Hopefully I'll be back to posting regularly by tomorrow, and I'm going to take advantage of this restructuring to tinker with some things.

I've inaugurated a new category here: Reading 2007. What I plan to do is blog my impressions, and a kind of review, of every single book that I read this year. Since I read somewhere between 70 and 90 books a year, there will be plenty to read about.

I'm starting out with Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, which is one of the books I was given for Christmas. I started it this afternoon. A few samples already in the wings, in no particular order:

• Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
• Famous Last Words, Timothy Findley
• The Children's Hospital, Chris Adrian
• Uncollected Stories, William Faulkner
• The Autograph Man, Zadie Smith
• The Emperor's Children, Claire Messud
• On Literature, Umberto Eco
• Invitation to A Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov
• Dr. No, Ian Fleming

Comment spam has increased to the point where it's crippling the database and making it almost impossible for me to manage it (although it never reaches you, the reader, or almost never), so I am going to switch over to MySQL. There maybe glitches and data loss because I tend to never do these things right on the first try.

I think I've beaten, or at least almost beaten, the comment spammers with this new MovableType installation. We shall see.

Also, I accidentally deleted some genuine comments in my war against spam, and for that I apologize.

I think the title of this post pretty much says it all, so feel free to post away. Thanks to Zen Masta J for bringing the problem to my attention.

I'm generally not one for things like social bookmarks, but I've become intrigued with Ma.gnolia an interesting little social bookmarking tool, and I'm going to try out one of its features. From now until I get bored of it, my five most recent bookmarks are going to be listed at the bottom of the menu bar on the right.

I know I haven't been blogging in quite a while, and that's mostly because my personal life is still in a state of upheaval and I really haven't had the time or the motivation, so perhaps this will offer my remaining readers something to look at until I'm sorted out again.

Several months ago I read a book by Sheila Heti, called Ticknor. It was a good book that deserves discussion, and I promise that I have interesting things to say about it. Sadly, a profound crisis in my personal life has turned certain parts of my brain, including the part that feels a deep yearning to, well, blog, to mush.

Slowly, but surely, those bits of my brain are solidifying and becoming useful again. This is not to say that the crisis has by any means passed. My coping mechanisms are simply beginning to realize that the problem, though possibly even bigger than it seemed at first, is not completely beyond dealing with. So they are beginning to deal, as it were, with the problem. And no, I won't tell you what the problem is.