All's well that ends well

I had a dreadful start to the day today. My bus failed to show up. I got to th ebus stop at about five to eight for a bus which should have been at five past and by twenty past there was still no sign of it. The only bright spot was looking up to see someone waving at me from a car and realising it was Laurinha (yet to see luckyJim on one of his morning cycles though).

Fortunately when I called Roz to tell her of my nightmare and how I was going to be late for work, she offered to take the car instead of bussing it in and somehow, despite picking me up at twenty eight minutes past eight, got me int work for ten to nine.

After that work wenty pretty well, I got a couple of unexpected extra hours which is all extra cash when it comes down to it.

It wasn't until I got home I hit my next snag. For my CS3 seminar on Wednesday I have to do a demo of the updated merge to HDR feature so decided to try and get some shots for that while Maddy was at Judo. As a result I headed down with my tripod and my remote switch to try and get some nice interior shots of the 11th century church down the village as it has some reasonably nice stained glass windows which I thought would be a great subject for HDR. Unfortunately it was shut. I messed about with the tripod tryuing to get some other stuff to use and while it worked ok none of it made for a particularly spectacular final shot.

Anyway, I was upstairs on the computer tinkering with the shots when the door went. It was our next door neighbour wanting to dig through the pile of his books he has stored in one of our cupboards as he had promised to send someone copies. While he was here he reminded me that his new book was out and enquired whether I had a copy. Since I hadn't he popped next door and grabbed me one.

Since I got a freebie I thought the very least I could do was give him a plug. This is his tenth full novel, he's done a couple of novellas and a kids book too. All his books are sci-fi with a similar sort of feel to Iain Banks' sci-fi books in terms of imagination. I think they share a lot of the same influences as they are old friends.

I have to admit I bought his first novel purely because I knew him. The rest however have been bought because he writes fantastic stories with a great ssense of humour too. If you either like sci-fi, have remotely leftish inclinations or just like a good well thought out story I'd recommend you grab a copy of one of his books.