I finished Cyteen the other day. I really enjoyed it. It was kind of weird how it turned from a drama into an action thriller in the last few chapters. And someone who I didn't even see as a bad guy turned out to do some horrible things at the end, which left me just a bit incredulous. I read a book once, I forget what the title was, but it was about how to do various things. For instance, there was a chapter on how to pick the best supermarket checkout line, stuff like that. There was also a chapter on how to write a mystery. The idea was that, when you finally reveal whodunit, it should be a surprise, but it should not be just totally random. there should be little clues, things people can look back on and see that it fits that this particular person dunit. While Cyteen isn't precisely a mystery (it does have some mysterious elements), I think the same holds. I didn't feel that there was anything to look back at to see that this guy really was bad. Still, a satisfying book, and I'd certainly read more books of hers.

For my nonfiction book, I picked up How Nature Works, by Per Bak. I think I got it the same Christmas I got the last nonfiction book I read. I've only just begun, but it's basically a book that tries to explain complexity, things like catastrophes, fractals, 1/f noise, and Zipf's law. It has this all-encompassing theory of complexity called self-organized complexity. I don't really have a grasp on it yet, but we'll see how it goes.

Read a little Sandman before going to sleep last night. Turned off the light, glanced at the clock, and it was my favorite time, 12:34. I ended up taking an earlier bus today, in order to make sure I have enough time to both get the work done I want to get done today and go shopping. I think I should be fine, even if I don't take off early. We'll see how work goes. I have a full day of entering "issues" into a spreadsheet. It's fairly dull, but I actually kind of like this kind of dull work, since it's something I can learn to be efficient at. When I finish that, I have a few things to proof, but nothing big.

Soon, very soon, I'll be done with all of the first proof of my last project, and I can then more safely move completely off of it. The first round of proof takes some knowledge of how we've been doing things. The later rounds of proof mainly just focus on making sure the changes that were asked for in the first round were actually made, which anyone can do.

And the co-worker is only here through the end of next week or something like that. She may continue to work here on weekends, but the point is that I'll never have to see her again. Whee.