It Rains In Triplicate

Who brings drums to a knife fight?

So I’ve been listening to books on tape on my drive to and from the office. I just finished re-reading Dune and started on Children of Dune. Some thoughts:

What does Paul actually want? Does he want the jihad? If not, he really uld have stopped it. i.e., made a backroom deal with the spacing guild, spoken plainly, etc.

Why does the spacing guild allow the jihad? While the spacing guild has a dependency on the spice, they have an absolute monopoly on space travel. Had they made the decision to do so, they could have disallowed the jihad to continue, perhaps through sacrifice, but it could not have happened without their consent. i.e., a coordinated effort could have killed lots and lots of the jihad armies by blowing them up or stranding them in deep space.

Given that so many of the organizations (bene gesserit, spacing guild, medicine, perhaps others) rely so heavily on the spice, why did they wait until the absolute last moment to try to recreate it elsewhere? You would think it would be the first thing they would have started to do when they realized the dependency.

Why is the spice mining awarded as a fiefdom? Any owner of that fief was tremendous power, which puts it at a significant advantage over everyone else. You would think that there would be a coalition and workers would be shipped in who are fiercely loyal and not just whatever native help may be at hand.

If water poisons the worms, and the worms are needed for spice, why do they keep talking about terraforming the planet so it may rain?

As an aside, the version I’m listening to (from audible.com) alternates between a decent voice cast, with separate and distinguishable voices for each character, and a single old guy who tries to do all the characters. It is annoying and distracting.

Moved my /content directory from my firewire RAID to my drobo

Moved my drobo to my macmini

Pointed itunes to my macmini’s drobo drive

Installed mozy (http://mozy.com) on my macmini and bought a 5$/mo account

Status now reads “Uploading 20,038 files (1098.6 GB)”

Rate: 214.8 Kbits/sec

This is going to take a while …

So by default, you can’t add amazon kindle or mp3 store items to your wishlist. There is no wishlist button.

However, amazon provides a “universal wishlist” javascript bookmarklet that will let you do that at http://www.amazon.com/gp/wishlist/get-button/ref=cm_wl_ov-get-button

I knew I should have switched majors …