A happy birthday to the amazing Omaha

Omaha's birthday was this Sunday. She enjoyed the 90 hours of Barney Miller DVDs that I bought for her, ate chocolate the kids got for her, and generally relaxed. We went out to dinner at a good steak place.

Not much else to say. It was a quiet weekend all around. It was supposed to snow, but we never got more than a little dust.

My wife, the super-geek.

This weekend, Omaha did an amazing thing: she dismantled the dishwasher and re-assembled it with a new heating coil and a new logic board.

The Whirlpool Elite we've had for ten years has been slowing down, and a couple of weeks ago the heating coil broke. So she ordered a new heating coil and with it came a new circuit board-- apparently, the manual says they have to be replaced as a unit. The old coil was a circle, this one was more of a vague arrow shape.

In the process of dismantling it, she discovered that a tiny gap between the faceplate and the tubplate had let steam leak behind the front panel, and the mold in there was more than a little gross.

The only thing she asked me for was help on dealing with a fuse in the front panel that was not part of the circuit board. The manual wasn't clear on whether or not the fuse wasn't needed with the new circuit board or not. The illustration shows it attached to the circuit board as it's being inserted, so I encouraged her to put it back.

After all that, power and water re-attached, it worked. It worked... oddly. Instead of a countdown, the timer face shows a ticking clock hand now. We're not sure what that's about. But with it cleaned out and well-maintained, it actually does the dishes much better than a week ago.

See, my wife is awesome. She can fix broken major appliances. We don't have the equipment to tackle the freon in the dying compressor behind the refrigerator, but I doubt that'll stop her from trying.

Cat Star Chronicles, Book 2, Warrior, by Cheryl Brooks [book review]

tl;dr: If you're a man, or a writer, don't read this. Just... don't. I can't speak for women who don't write.

A friend of mine recommended the Cat Star Chronicles to me a long time ago. After all, I write catboy/catgirl smut, I should be able to enjoy some of it. So let me say off the bat that I tried, I really did, to enjoy the second book, Warrior, and in that I have failed utterly.

Here's your basic plot: In a science-fictional universe, our heroine lives on a world that has turned its back on technology. She knows her world has a starport, but nobody goes there, and in fact people teach their children that the stars, indoor plumbing, books, vaccinations, and decent communications are for crazy people. Sane people lead, and subject their children to, short, brutal lives in a sub-gunpowder world of furs and swords. She's also a "witch," which is the author's poorly-reasoned shorthand for someone with psionic powers, including talking to animals and setting stuff on fire. A supporting character drops off the romantic hero-- a cat-man supersoldier who's ill with an unspecified problem. The witch is supposed to heal him, at which point the supporting character will come back and claim his slave.

I fully believe Cheryl Brooks is a woman, rather than a man masquerading as one. And as a man, I was offended from the very first sex scene: his penis is large, prehensile, knubby in just the right way, and worst of all, exudes a pre-seminal fluid, the scent of which is a perfect aphrodisiac to humans, and the taste of which induces orgasms. It's wish-fulfillment of the worst sort. Every sex scene thereafter is built upon these premises; our characters aren't so much in love as she's addicted to opiates he exudes.

After their mutual compatibility is established, the supporting character comes back to reveal that something terrible has happened, and he needs the unified tracking skills of the witch and the cat-man to right a terrible wrong. What follows from this is a far, far too wordy journey through the snow to a distant keep and a final battle. Worse, the witch character, despite her rejection of all things technological, has the Weltanschauung of an American coastal liberal who's never thought too hard about her ethical and moral choices. She talks and she talks, often in tell-don't-show form, to the reader and the characters, pointlessly retreading the same ground in chapter after chapter. The epilogue is a piece of breathless, "Reader, you won't believe what happened next!" nonsense. I kept re-wording whole scenes in my head to show myself that important plot points could be revealed in dialogue and action without "as you knows" in front of them. An experienced writer could have done it easily.

Cat Star Chronicles: Warrior reads like an ex-valley girl hauswife decided to write something vaguely like the Kushiel series, only without education, voice, or wit. If you're a man, you'll be insulted by the hero: He's a cardboard cutout with a massive strap-on dong dripping a mixture of Astroglide and meth. If you're a writer, you'll just be insulted.

Non-fiction EPUBs: Terrible quality

I don't write nonfiction, but if I did, I'd be offended at how bad the EPUB 2.0 editions of various ... For Dummies books are. I recently bought two, Genetics for Dummies and Bioinformatics for Dummies, and the translation from paper to digital is awful.

Subsection headers are frequently cut off. Images are rendered poorly, and (at least on the Nook) do not zoom. Worst of all, the index is corrupt. Although the table of contents seems to work fine, when you advance through the pages with the slider, all they ever say is "Introduction" and "There are 174 pages left in this section."

Nobody quality tested these books. Look, just because they're advanced topics unlikely to sell millions of copies does not mean you can afford to skimp on them.