February 8, 2009

Science-Fiction/Fantasy Books for People Who Don't Like Science-Fiction/Fantasy

Despite Hollywood’s best efforts to persuade you otherwise, genre fiction isn’t all about spaceships, robots, elves and wizards. It’s about the expression of ideas and concepts too broad to be contained by the rules, regulations and boundaries of our known experience.

Here’s a list of some of my favourite works of speculative fiction that should appeal to the more literary minded reader:

  • The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • The Separation by Christopher Priest
  • The Bridge by Iain Banks
  • Beloved by Toni Morrison
  • Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
  • In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster
  • The Time-Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
  • A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
  • Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
  • The Scar by China Mieville
  • The Owl Service by Alan Garner
  • The Children of Men by P. D. James
  • The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
  • Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
  • The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanti Laski
  • The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  • Sacrament by Clive Barker
  • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
  • Automated Alice by Jeff Noon
  • The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
  • The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
  • The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
  • Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland
  • The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes
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February 6, 2009

eVGA 9800GTX+ bites the dust!

I suspected something wasn’t quite right with my eVGA 9800GTX+ the moment I first bought it (September 2008).

Crysis came free with the card, so that was the game I used to christen my new custom built system. One in every three sessions the game would freeze up, to such an extent Ctrl-Alt-Del would have no effect. A hard reset was the only way out of it.

At the time I just put it down to a buggy game, but the problem continued with other games. The common denominator appeared to be the more visually intensive games, but after a couple of months the problem began to occur on the Vista desktop, or while in applications such as Firefox, foobar2000 and TweetDeck.

Now it’s February 2009 and the freezes are escalating in number. I think I counted about 10 today alone. It would seem my card’s days are numbers.

Thanks to those who’ve offered advice when I’ve brought up the problem elsewhere, but I’ve extensively explored every other possibility. The card doesn’t overheat (the problem will occur while it’s idling at 40 degrees), my PSU is a reliable Antec model with more than enough wattage to supply all my components. I’ve stress tested my CPU, RAM and hard drives. I’ve tried alternate drivers. I’ve bare-boned it and the problem will even occur in Safe Mode with all external peripherals unplugged.

I’ve put my old eVGA 7950GT and 7600GT cards back in the system, each for a week at a time, and kept the computer on 24/7 during that time. Not a single freeze/lock-up/crash during that time. As soon as the 9800GTX+ went back in, it froze up a few hours later.

I had exactly the same problem four years ago with an XFX 7800GT. Same symptoms and everything. Returned it to Newegg, got the eVGA 7950GT in return and never had a problem again.

Sometimes, video cards just have duff circuitry.

Edit: Wow, had another lock-up about 5 seconds after posting this entry.

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