Views from Medina Road

So I actually took a day's vacation off work today to catch up on some overdue listings pages on the website, including the Classics Reprint page, which hadn't been updated for a while partly because the pace of new books that fit that category has been sadly slow for several months now.

The past week has been busy anyway, what with formatting the Locus recommended reading list, and setting up the online Locus Poll & Survey ballot -- which will go live in a few days, probably, after various parties have finished vetting the drop-down choices in those categories -- magazine, publisher, editor, artist -- not determined by the recommended reading list itself. We try to include all plausible candidates, but always manage to miss a few, if email response is any indication.

Meanwhile, I'm intending to revive a compilation of *other* best-of-year lists, from newspaper and non-Locus Sf sites, as I did regularly up until a couple three years ago. I've already 'blinked' a number of these -- lists from Amazon, SF Site, Entertainment Weekly, etc. -- but now intend to compile them, see which books are mentioned most often. Not to undercut the Locus Rec Reading list, of course; only to supplement it. That should be done in another day or two.

Also meanwhile, I'm happy to report that Hewlett Packard has been very responsive to the hardware problems with my laptop, as I mentioned a few posts ago. I reported the problem via their website, they sent a shipping box (an empty box, delivered via FedEx), I packed up the laptop in the box and left it at a FedEx drop-off site a week ago Saturday. On Wednesday there was a FedEx tag on my front door about a delivery requiring in-person signature. It wasn't until Saturday again that I managed to take delivery at a FedEx facility over by the Van Nuys airport... They replaced and 'upgraded' (though I'm not sure what they meant by that) the entire screen and hinges -- and also, alas, reinitialized the hard drive to factory delivery conditions, wiping out the few settings I'd left, having already deleted all my personal data and uninstalling all my software. It's like having a completely new laptop, except for the visible wear on the keyboard from 10 months of prior use...