I came across Max Brook’s “The Zombie Survival Guide” book while surfing reddit where I read that Bras Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment had secured the rights to another of Brooks’ books; “World War Z”. Actually, this happened all the way back in 2007, but sometimes news travels slow – at least it often takes a while before I notice things. I like Brad Pitt, at least as an actor, I have to admit that I don’t know him personally. But he is probably a likable fellow. I also enjoy zombies, but not the fast moving ones you find in Left 4 Dead, I prefer the slow ghouls you can see in movies like the excellent Shaun of the Dead*. Why? Because it’s possible to outrun, or maybe even outwalk them quit easily. The fast ones tend to kill you.

Max Brooks’ zombies are like that: Outwalkable. And when I imagined Brad Pitt in an action movie with outwalkable ghouls, I decided that I wanted to read the book before I saw the movie for once. Even though there is no actual movie being made right now, and there might very well never be, the book could to our to be entertaining. Brooks wrote “The Zombie Survival Guide” before “World War Z”, and even though the books are not directly linked with each other, the guide contains very detailed information about the zombies in “World War Z”. Because of that, I decided to read the guide first.

“The Zombie Survival Guide” is written as just that, a zombie survival guide. What to do and not to do when the living dead starts roaming the Earth. It’s entertaining at first, with a lot of detailed descriptions about the ghouls, how to behave during various classes of zombie outbreaks, what weaponry is the most efficient, and probably the most important thing to know of them all: How to kill a zombie.

I’ll save you the cost of buying the book: You can only kill a zombie by destroying the brain. Decapitation will not be sufficient as the head will continue to function without the body. So destroying the brain is the way to go. Apart from that, use commons sense and you boyscout knowledge. After about 100 pages, I got tired of reading – the book had turned into just a guide and nothing more, the entertainment value was minimal. So I skipped to the last one fourth of the book, which describes recorded zombie attacks. This part of “The Zombie Survival Guide” serves as a good warm up to “World War Z”.

My recommendation is that if you want to be prepared for the inevitable zombie war and need a great book about protection from the living dead, then you should buy “The Zombie Survival Guide” and learn it by heart. If you on the other hand want an entertaining book about zombies, you should look elsewhere and just skip ahead directly to “World War Z”.

But do you dare to be unprepared when the living dead walk the Earth?

*What, you haven’t seen this movie yet? Then do yourself an favor and rent it right now. What the hell, go ahead and rent every Simon Pegg movie you find.

After I finished “Song of Susannah”, I moved from fictions to facts for a while. Diversity is good for you. I read through the second edition of “Effective Java” and right now I’m half way through “The Pragmatic Programmer”, a book that should be mandatory reading for everyone involved in software development. The Pragmatic Programmer was written 10 years ago, but most of what the book covers still apply today.

To spice things up a little, Hallvard recommended that I read “The Road”. You’ve probably heard of or even seen the big screen adaption featuring Viggo Mortensen. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world where we follow two unnamed characters, the Man and the Boy. An unexplained catastrophe has destroyed civilization and killed off almost all life on Earth. The days are gray as the sky is covered with ashes while the nights are pitch black. The two move south on The Road, with a vague hope of finding warmth and other people.

The Man and the Boy, father and son, spend their days walking The Road, engaging in short conversations with each other. They roam through abandoned houses they come across, looking for whatever might help them survive and reach the coast. Every now and then they encounter other people on The Road, but these encounters normally just last for a page or two and then the Man and the Boy move on south.

In the beginning of the book, we get small flashbacks to the days before the unexplained cataclysm and the years following it. One paragraph early on in the book describes the moment when the catastrophe happened, but does not follow up and I find myself wanting to know more and wishing that the book had taken another path at that point. I want to know more about what caused everything, and the rest of the book becomes a hunt for hints about the past. Unfortunately, few are found.

Following the Man and the Boy becomes a bit repetitive after a while. They walk the road, run out of food, look for food, find some food and then repeats the process. All this is of course a very good description of what life at the road would have been; a constant fight for survival where your only focus would be to move on south and to find enough food to be able to do it. There is, however, a good reason why the book is only 300 pages that you will read through in an afternoon: More pages and the whole thing would have become unbelievably boring in the end.

The Road will entertain you for a while, but when you put the book you probably won’t feel you’d missed out on anything if you went for a walk that afternoon instead. The book has received rave reviews across the board, and I have to be honest and say that I am a little disappointed after finishing it. It once more goes to show that you should not read reviews before you read a book, watch a movie or listen to music – make up your own mind about things without first hearing other people’s opinions as they often color your own opinions a lot. At least I think that’s what works for me.

In other words, if the same is the case for you, reading this review was a really bad idea.

* I wouldn’t be too surprised if I’m sitting in front of a computer the day I finally buy the farm.

But something even better than reading a Stephen King book is to watch Neill Blomkamp’s movie District 9. I’m pretty sure this is the best movie I’ve seen so far this year, and I won’t be surprised if no one will make a better before the year ends. Unless that movie 9 or maybe even Up can match it, that is. They’re very different movies, though.

Anyway, let’s get back to District 9. It all started with a short movie called “Alive in Joburg”, directed by South Africans Blomkamp and his friend Sharlto Copley. Because of Alive in Joburg, together with other work by Blomkamp, he was offered to work with the movie adaption of the Halo video game together with Peter Jackson. Unfortunately, the Halo movie was put on hold because of lack of funding. But this got Jackson and Blomkamp talking about other projects and result of that discussion is District 9. Here’s Alive in Joburg from YouTube:

If watching Alive in Joburg doesn’t make you want to run to the nearest cinema and watch District 9, I’ve taken the liberty to copy/paste an excerpt from the plot summary on Wikipedia:

In 1982, a large alien spaceship stops above Johannesburg, South Africa. Reports suggest that the ship became stranded after a command module separated from the ship and dropped to Earth, nowhere to be found. After cutting their way inside, an exploratory team discovers a large group of unhealthy and leaderless arthropod-like species. These alien creatures, derogatorily referred to as prawns, are taken from the ship and housed in a government camp inside Johannesburg called District 9, which soon turns into a slum. In the first decade of the 21st century, Multinational United (MNU), a private military contractor, is placed in charge of policing and relocating the now 1.8 million aliens to District 10, a new camp 240 kilometers northwest of Johannesburg.

Brilliant stuff. When you didn’t think it was possible to come up with a new idea for a movie, it just suddenly happens. At least I’ve not heard of any movie plots like this one.

District 9 starts out as a documentary, but after a while it changes genre into a full blown action movie. Writing more about the plot could spoil some of the movie for you, so I’ll shut up now so you can actually go see it. So, in the end, this is not much of a review, but the main message I’d like to get through here is that you should really, really see this movie.

By the way, if you suddenly get a strange crave for cat food after you’ve seen District 9, fear not – it happened to me as well.

The 1000HE is a 10″ netbook with the latest Intel Atom N280 processor, 1GB (can be replaced with 2GB if necessary) of RAM, a 160GB hard drive and all the other bells and whistles you’d expect from a computer these days.

The netbook comes with Windows XP Home Edition installed and that works well. The N280 isn’t a power horse, though, and it will start to struggle a little when you open Flash-intensive sites, like online newspapers tend to be. I didn’t test video, but some reviews I’ve read say that most video formats should work OK, except for 1080p HD video where it’s likely that you will experience some frame dropping.

A major selling point for the 1000HE is the advertised battery life of 9.5 hours. I’m not really sure if 9.5 is realistic, mainly because I’ve not had the computer turned on for that long yet. But since I started using it on Saturday, I’ve only plugged in the charger once. The 9.5 hours of battery life are also dependent on how good the power saving features of the operating system is and I’ve installed Ubuntu in favor of XP. According to what I’ve read on the all-knowing interweb, battery usage with Ubuntu tends to be higher than when using XP. But if I’m able to use the 1000HE for at least 8 hours straight at normal use without the need for an external power source, that’s more than enough for me.

Some people have problems with netbooks because they tend to have rather small keyboards. So far I’ve not had any issues with the 1000HE’s keyboard, but I’ve got small girly hands, so that might be the reason why it didn’t take long adjust my writing style to it. Noise, or rather the lack of, is important to many people. As for fan noise, the 1000HE is very quiet under normal use, the fan is almost impossible to hear. I’ve not tried to run CPU intensive operations to really get it going, though.

At 1.45Kg (3.20lbs) and with the dimensions of 266mm (W) x 191.2mm (D) x 28.5mm~ 38mm (H), the netbook should be quite portable. Exactly how portable I don’t know, because I haven’t brought it with me outside of the apartment yet. But it’s portable enough to be used when laying on the couch and sitting by the dinner table. Like most laptops are, too, I guess.

Of course there are a couple of things that could have been better, but I suspect that they are related to me using Linux and not XP. Flash, for instance is a nightmare, at least Flash video streaming. Even though the CPU load is not too high, there is a constant audio/video sync problem and that makes Flash video more or less useless. The built in web camera also struggles in Linux, with a crappy frame rate. In XP it worked much better. The final thing that is not working very well on Linux is the audio level. Even at maximum volume, the audio from the speakers is hard to hear in a semi-noisy environment, like when the TV is on. It was a little better when using headphones.

But all in all, the Asus Eee PC 1000HE is a great choice if you’re looking for an ultra-portable computer for basic everyday nerd tasks.

A few days before Spore was released, Wright gave an interview where he said that he was afraid all the hype was bad for the game because people’s expectations would be too high. He might have been right, but with the previous hugely successful titles, it’s no wonder his releases are anticipated.

Spore tries to be a lot of things at the same time. Wright had originally wanted to call the game SimEverything, but changed it because he wanted to release something without “Sim” in the title for once. The main theme of the game is evolution, and I find it strange that it’s not being sold with a warning sticker in some parts of the U.S. since the theory of Evolution is just the ramblings of a mad man and all that.

Spore is made up of five mini-games. You start out as a cell, and you have to eat and fight your way up the food chain. Designing the cell is done by the player, everything from shape to colors and patterns. Your cell slowly turns into a water creature and when it’s large enough, it crawls on to land. You then enter the creature stage, where you are presented with a creature designer with a lot more options than the cell designer. The basic concept on each stage is the same – by completing mission you gain points and the points can be used to enhance your creature, which in turn makes it possible for you to take on more powerful creatures. Whether you want to win them over by socialising and making them happy or crush them with violence is up to you.

Gameplay through the various mini-games is about as advanced as you would expect. As a cell, you just move around with the cursor keys. During the creature stage the controls is a bit more advanced and the complexity of each mini-game will increase as your creation advances through time. After the creature stage, there’s the tribe stage, then you move on to the civilization stage and finally it’s about time to explore the universe in the space stage.

It was when I got the civilization stage that I finally felt I was playing a proper game. The first three stages felt like an introduction to the real game. One of the main aspects of Spore is the very impressive design tool. Om different stages you can design your own buildings, vehicles and space ships. The designer is extremely complex and the same time incredibly simple to use. What would normally take hours using ordinary design software can be designed in a matter of minutes by your mother. If designing is not for you, there’s also a large library of pre-made designs you can use in the game. Unfortunately, by not using the designer, you will miss out on a lot of what this game is about.

That was the case for me, I just didn’t want to spend a lot of time playing around with shapes and objects. I’ve now entered the space stage and I must say that I really hope this stage intrigues me, because the rest of the game has completely failed to keep my attention. I bought the game on release date, played for a few hours, then didn’t come back to it until a week later. It might be that, because of the simplicity of the first three mini-games, Spore would be more suited for The Sims players than SimCity players. I can’t help but think that maybe the space stage should have been released as a separate game entirely, and that the four other stages could have been released as Spore for a younger audience.

Spore was a great idea, but it lost some of its momentum during development. From what was supposed to be an advanced life simulator it has turned into a set of schizophrenic mini-games that don’t influence each other except visually. Now I’m looking forward to Will Wrights next game, because the odds are it will be a lot better than this one.

Look, ma, I didn’t mention the controversial DRM at all. Because it’s got nothing to do with the game per se.

Some of author Isaac Asimov‘s books are regarded as science fiction classics. His most commonly known work is probably “I, Robot”, not because it’s a great book (I’ve never read it myself, so I can’t tell), rather because it resulted in a movie with the same title starring Will Smith. His work has inspired a lot of people, like the Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese new religious movement that carried out the Sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subways back in 1995.

In “Prelude to Foundation” we meet Hari Seldon, a young, up-and-coming mathematician who has developed the theory of psychohistory. After having presented his theory at convention on Trantor, the planet where the Emperor of the 25 million planets Galactic Empire resides, he is summoned to Emperor Cleon who thinks psychohistory can be used to keep him on the throne. But Seldon refuses to help the Emperor and argues that psychohistory is just a theory that might never be practically usable. Through “Prelude to Foundation” we then follow Seldon as he tries to stay two steps ahead of Eto Demerzel, the Emperor’s right hand, who desperately tries to catch him.

All this sounds like a potentially great science fiction book. But I can never get the hang of Asimov’s style. It’s slow and old fashioned. The books suffers from the Gladiator‘s disease. Too much chit chat, not enough momentum. Asimov wastes page after page by describing how Seldon tries to convince every single person he meets that psychohistory is just a theory. I can understand why this is important to Seldon, but as readers we know this already and do not have to be reminded all the time.

I recommend that you stay clear of “Prelude to Foundation” if you are considering this book as your introduction to Asimov’s “Foundation” series. Jump straight to book number two, which is actually the first book – “Prelude” was written 37 years after the first “Foundation” novel was release. That book is also considerably thinner, 200 pages less that “Prelude”. If you’re lucky, this might mean that Asimov manages to keep things flowing. If you have already worked your way through all the “Foundation” books except for this one, and liked what you read, Prelude might not be your worst choice, though. I, for one, is not writing Isaac Asimov off completely, and has “Foundation” laying on my night stand already.

So naturally I was a bit skeptical when I picked up Chasm City. The reason why I bought the book in the first place was that it was not part of the same series as Revelation Space, but the events of Chasm City still takes place in the same fictional universe as Revelation Space – and if it’s something Alastair Reynolds is very good at it’s creating thrilling, fictional universes.

Chasm City starts out well and Reynolds is keeping a good pace through most of the book, he is only side stepping once into what might resemble the ramblings of Revelation Space and for only a few pages. Unlike Revelation Space, most of Chasm City is written in first person with the occasional jumps back in time with stories told by a third-person narrator.

There is no requirement that you have to be familiar with Reynolds’ first book to enjoy Chasm City, but it’s without doubt a plus if you do as it enables you to enjoy all the more or less intricate references to Revelation Space.

The reviews of Kane & Lynch raised a lot of controversy. A reviewer at GameSpot was allegedly fired because of the review he wrote and the low score he gave the game because it didn’t look good when the publisher had paid GameSpot tons of money for heavy advertisement for the game. Reviewers who liked the game and gave it a good score have been labeled as “sell outs” by some members of the gaming community. Because, obviously, it’s not possible to like a game even though the majority of other people don’t. How stupid would that be?

So you can probably understand that I was a bit skeptical when I went out and bought this game. After reading the reviews, I decided I wouldn’t do it, but then I read a lot of comments from gamers saying that if you ever saw the movie Heat and liked it, then Kane & Lynch would be literary right up your street.

I have now played through most of the game and has yet to be disappointed. Sure, I’ve been frustrated at times, but that’s because I’m a terrible gamer, unable to adapt and learn from my previous mistakes. That means I often have to play the same level ten times before I get it right. There, I’m man enough to admit that my mistakes are solely my own, not caused by “buggy levels”. Sure, the graphics are not that of Half-Life 2 and the controls and camera movement can be somewhat confusing at times, but it’s still tons and tons of fun playing the game. By the way, if you don’t like the gore, you can turn off the blood – stop complaining about something you can easily control.

The intricate story of Kane & Lynch will take you around the world to see some really good looking sites. In one of the levels you’re in a huge night club with perhaps 300-400 other people. In all my years of gaming, this is the first time I’ve seen a crowded place that’s actually crowded. Getting around is a mess because of all the people and when someone starts shooting at you it gets really interesting. I saw Collateral, didn’t you?

Personally I wouldn’t mind playing a Kane & Lynch sequel, but since I’ve not played through the entire game yet, it’s of course possible that things will happen to the characters that makes that impossible.

Not surprisingly, you begin Episode Two where Episode One left off. In a classic Half-Life game start, all your gear is gone and you’re stuck. Of course you’re able to get out of the sticky situation rather quickly or it would have been a very short game. Thanks to the incredible level design and atmosphere created by Valve in Episode Two, you sometimes just want to run back to where you started, where you could see the sun and there was no monsters.

It’s hard to write about Half-Life 2: Episode Two without spoiling anything. I just recommend that you play the game.

Pros:

• The screen is the first thing that makes you go “wow”. It’s large, bright, the multi touch feature works great and Safari can be used in landscape mode simply by tilting the iPhone.
• The second thing you notice is the iPhone’s speed. It makes most other high-end handsets look like turtles. It’s extremely responsive and immediately does what you tell it to do.
• The interface and the applications are easy to use and mostly intuitive to understand.
• The battery life seems good, at least when you consider the large screen, the speed and that I’ve had Wi-Fi turned on all the time.
• The iPhone synched without a hitch with Address Book and iCal on my MacBook Pro.
• The Wi-Fi works great, I had no troubles when connecting to the wireless router and wireless repeater in my apartment and a public network downtown.
• Safari works great as a web browser when you’re on Wi-Fi and have all the bandwidth you would normally have on a computer.
• Google Maps is installed as a separate application, great stuff.
• Safari has QuickTime support, meaning that you can stream and watch QuickTime movies, for instance all the fun stuff from Apple Movie Trailers.
• The large screen is great for on-the-go video. I ripped an episode of American Dad with Handbrake, it played flawlessly and looked great.

Cons:

• There is no GPS, supposedly because it uses too much battery power. With an option to turn it off when it was not needed, that wouldn’t really have been a problem, and with a GPS, Google Maps would be the only GPS solution you’d ever need.
• I was unable to get the iPhone to pair with my MacBook Pro using Bluetooth, but it could be that I broke something during the unlocking process.
• You can’t install 3rd party applications (before jailbreaking it, that is).
• The user has no access to file system (again, that is before jailbreaking the phone). This is a real pain in the ass, even though you will never need access to any of the system files, you should at least get access to a directory where you can save files and downloads.
• You can’t save attachments you receive in e-mails.
• You can’t send attachments with e-mails. I guess that’s natural when you don’t have access to the file system.
• It’s not possible to download files with Safari.
• There is no MMS support.
• The camera has no video support, only still photography.
• There is no copy/paste option when editing text, which is a real bitch when you for instance have something in an SMS you want to mail to someone.
• The iPhone does not support user profiles (meeting, outdoors, etc) with different sound, volume and vibrate options depending on where you are. All you can do is to turn the sound on and off and turn vibrate on and off.
• You can’t modify sounds except for the ring tone sound (the text message sound can be changed in version 1.1.1).
• There is no drag and drop of files from the music library to the iPhone in iTunes, you have to create a playlist and tell iTunes to synch that. Very inconvenient. It’s possible to drag and drop from iTunes to an iPod, so why not the iPhone?
• There are no to-do lists, you’ll need a 3rd party application for that.
• The camera has no options whatsoever.
• You don’t have the usual T9 typing, and the auto correction feature does not work as good as T9.
• It’s not possible to upload files to a website from Safari since there is no access to the file system. The button is there in the web form, but it’s disabled. This means that I can’t use the iPhone to upload new Moblog entries.
• Due to a major design flaw, it’s not possible for me to use my Koss Sporta Pro headphones and I suspect that the same is the case for Koss’ Porta Pro and a lot of other headphones. The connector just won’t fit. Using the provided Apple ear plugs is not an option as ear plugs suck ass.
• Browsing using GPRS or EDGE can be quite expensive if you’re not on a unlimited data plan since everything is downloaded directly from the sites you’re visiting without any compression. Opera has a much better solution where all the data is sent through proxies and compressed to a format the Opera Mini browser understands. Maybe we’ll see Opera Mini for the iPhone one day.
• There is no 3G, but is it really a con?

It looks like the Jesus phone has a lot to be desired on the software front, but hardware-wise it beats pretty much every other phone available today. If Apple is able to add the missing functionality and iron out the worst wrinkles through firmware updates in the future – and the hackers are able to keep up so I can update to the latest firmware on my unlocked phone – the iPhone is likely to turn into thePhone.