LiveJournal down

LiveJournal was partially down over the weekend thanks to that DDoS attack against the social networking sites that's been going on for the last few days. Apparently if you weren't one of the people in the fallout zone you may not have noticed anything at all, but for those of us who were, the emergency backup status page's bland reassurance that it was just occasional timeouts was more than a little irritating. livejournal.com has been completely unreachable from my IP address from sometime on Friday until this morning. They did eventually update the status page to reflect reality late on Saturday afternoon. :-/

I'm not even going to try to catch up with my flist, as I am still unpacking books. Another five boxes to go...

July book log

Okay, I give up, I'm not going to get time to write something I can call a review on July's book. So it's book log only. What I read in July:

PD James -- A Mind to Murder

Second of the Dalgliesh series. The administrative assistant at a psychiatric clinic is murdered, in circumstances which make it clear that the killer must have been one of the people legitimately in the building that evening. But as Dalgliesh sifts through the stories of those people, he finds a multitude of possible motives, and a woman who was apparently liked by none but also hated by none. As usual with this series, the book is as much about exploring the personalities and interactions of the people as about the hunt for clues.

A Mind to Murder at Amazon UK
at Play
A Mind to Murder (Adam Dalgliesh Mysteries, No. 2) at Amazon US
at Powells



Miscellaneous fanfic

I'm picky about fanfic, and I don't really like reading long pieces on a computer monitor (I was always a paper zine fan). But towards the end of the month I finally had some free time, and decided to work my way through some Torchwood fanfic on the LiveJournals of a couple of people who write reliably well and to my taste. I pointed at a couple of the stories -- you can find my recommendations using the "fic rec" tag on my LiveJournal and DreamWidth accounts.

getting rid of books

Pertaining to a conversation on irc yesterday:

I *think* these links will take you directly to the named collections on my LibraryThing account.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/JulesJones/disposedof
These are the ones that I've owned but disposed of. I created the category when I started unpacking the many, many boxes of books from storage, and realised that it was time to be realistic about whether I was ever going to read them again. Some of them have already gone to the local Oxfam bookshop, but the ones that are likely to do better on the charity bookstall which waveney runs in con dealer rooms will be going to Dorset next weekend. In the meantime, if anyone else wants them, you have a few days to collect or pay postage.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/JulesJones/forsale
The ones that are or might be for sale. If I'm serious about getting rid of it ASAP, it's already on Amazon, but there are others in that collection to remind me that they're worth enough money to bother putting them on Amazon afterwards when I do get around to reading them.

ETA: I've just created two more collections
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/JulesJones/toselllater
These are the books that I expect to put on sale once I've read them. "For sale" should now be just the ones that I'm willing to sell right now.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/JulesJones/todisposeof
The books that I've weeded out but are still here waiting to go. At the moment it doesn't include all the books that are available for collect or postage -- check the "disposed of" list as well, and ask me if it's already gone.

Twitter

I got tired of being nagged about Twitter. Have some inane chatter as I unpack the boxes of books.
http://twitter.com/bookfetishist