I continue on with Steven King. The fourth book in the Dark Tower series is called "Wizard and Glass" and is mostly backstory where King flushes out the history of Roland, the Gunslinger. In it I happened across this new word: pestilential. Pestilential, according to Dictionary.com, means among other things, "annoyingly troublesome" or "pernicious; harmful". Jules Verne uses the word in chapter 13 of "Five Weeks in a Balloon" as follows: "Only a few scattered huts could be seen through the pestilential mists." A google search indicates that many use the word to refer to either disease or religion (perhaps because of biblical references to plagues).

On the dashboard front, I've been looking into TagClouds recently. Tag clouds are those groups of differently sized words that one often finds in blogs, where the size of the word indicates the relative proportion of entries tagged with that word to the group as a whole. This article by Scott Mitchel describes a method of creating tag clouds using ASPX and is pretty good. I thought his mention of using standard deviation to avoid skewing is an important point.

For the past week I've been on my own while my wife and children visit her family and instead of doing what I should do (which is get outside, get some exercise, get some sun) I find myself inexorably drawn back to the computer in my office.

I've been working on a couple of projects of late: Version 2 of my SQL Server Auto-Dictionary (of course) is coming slowly to a close (needs some debugging, needs a few more reports, needs some kind of install and I sure would like for it to talk to remote servers via a web service but that may be version 3).

Another version 2, that of my survey tool, has been pulled forth from the ether. Just a few more jolts of intellectual electricity for it and I'll be able to tell Ted that "It's alive, it's alive!"

Finally that web site that my wife wants for her business--well, I've started work on the virtual gears and pulleys that will allow her to maintain it in the way that she wants.

I've also decided to reformat and reinstall the operating system on my primary computer. Before doing so, I wanted to do a full backup and so bought a 500GB Western Digital MyBook external drive. I actually have about 400GB to back up which is fortunate because this 500GB drive actually arrives as a 465GB drive (formatted capacity).

It's also not the busiest bee in the hive. I started the backup about 30 hours ago and I think it's only about half-way complete. I don't think the drive is going to be as useful a backup mechanism as I had hoped. I'll try it again after the reformat/reinstall though. There may be something amiss with my computer that a reformat/reinstall will rectify and that will lead to faster transfer speeds (is windows desktop indexer *really* off?)

The Dark Tower series by Steven King has really pulled me in...it's a kind of mini-vortex so ferocious that money for new books in the series (there are 7 of them, in total) is sucked out of my wallet, into the wire and over to audible.com in NJ.

Yesterday I completed book number three in the series, which is entitled "The Wasteland" and ends with a great sequence where the heroes do battle with a godlike locomotive. The weapon of choice in this battle is the riddle. I haven't read a lot of Steven King in my life--a few of his books of short stories (Skeleton Key, Different Seasons) but the one or two full length books that I tried to read turned me off (Christine, The Talisman). Perhaps the difference here is that the voice of the narrator helps keep my interest through the slow parts...

The descriptions of the places in the Dark Tower series are vivid and colorful: deserts, abandoned houses, fields of flowers, seashores. The descriptions of the gunslinger himself are especially captivating. I still find myself constantly finding comparisons with Blood Meridian. The aloof loner is a such a central figure in American culture and mythology, conjoined and inseparable from the culture of great open empty spaces and the west.

I read this BusinessWeek article today about the work of Martin Wattenberg, a data visualization expert. The article includes a gallery of charts some of which show data in very interesting and unique ways. I think Edward Tufte would approve.

I particularly like the highway vs city mileage chart that opens the montage and think this is something that might be of use in a digital-dashboard-type setting. I've seen this type of chart in other places and think that it could be a powerful way to display relationships. For example, one could use a chart of this type to show something like late shipments vs volume of shipments to customer vs number of shipments vs product category.

I also like the way that Wattenberg crafts his charts. All of the featured charts have an interesting ascetic, especially (IMHO) the NameVoyager and
Many Eyes charts.

There is another BusinessWeek article that describes a web-based tool created by Dr. Hans Rosling to show the relationships between per-capita income and life expectancy. The most interesting aspect of Rosling's chart is his use of animation to show change over time.

So I continue to read Blood Meridian. I've only about an hour remaining, then I'm done. It's a bit of an ordeal--the book is so damn bloody and dismal but I find that I'm thinking about it a lot. It's well written and provocative.

Here is some background on the book, and some reviews:
The Wikipedia entry
A New York Times book review
Another review, from Salon.com

I keep thinking back to Steven King's GunSlinger. There's no room for him in McCarthy's west. How about the GunSlinger vs McCarthy's Judge? How about King's Man in Black vs McCarthy's Judge?

And how would the Judge behave in a modern world? He might do quite well. He could travel to Iraq, where murder is cheap. Note that in Blood Meridian the Judge chose to travel to the west where there was a desire for someone with his proclivities. I don't recall any references to the Judge's past. McCarthy seems to keep it deliberately vague and seems possible that he could have left behind a life in some eastern city.

I noticed that, according to IMDB, Ridley Scott is producing (or will produce) a movie based on Blood Meridian. Ebert notes that "The Proposition", a movie based in the Australian outback is similar in theme to Blood Meridian. "The Proposition" sounds from Ebert's review to be almost unwatchably brutal and if Scott's adaptation of "Blood Meridian" is at all true to the book it will unwatchable, I think.

I've finished the first two books in Steven King's "Dark Tower" series and enjoyed them. Before I continue onward with the Gunslinger into the remaining five books in the series, I decided to take a break and so am now reading "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy. It's eerie how similar "Dark Tower" and "Blood Meridian" are. Both tell the story of a journey and are set in violent, dusty times. Meridian is like a photograph though with none of the cliches with which Dark Tower abounds.