Thoughts for Today

I have been reading more of The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie. This book would be quite a hard book to review. The reason is that he is taking real events and history and changing it into fiction with a magical realist style. Not only is he reimagining historical events and people and recounting them, he is also adding in elements of the strange like magic tricks, philosophy, mysticism, humor, and language tricks.

The book contains an extensive four page bibliography of historical citations. Many of these cover witchcraft, the Osman's, Renaissance Florence, Machiavelli, Botticelli, the relations between the Medici, and the Mughals and many other arcane subjects.

In addition to works in print, he cites several websites. Some of these are on Akbar, the great Mughal king. For example there is a site on Persian literature in translation, http://persian.packhum.org/persian and the Gardens of the Mughal Empire http://www.mughalgardens.org/html/music01.html

This provides for a truly incredible reading experience, unlike anything else which I have ever read. I have not seen such an extensive bibliography in most fiction works.

I have learned a few things about social networking sites. One of these is that social networking requires a tremendous amount of bandwidth which is often not supported by the companies just starting out. I have seen outages and overloads at all the social networking sites I have used. All of them. As these social networks expand, they need to constantly increase the amount of bandwidth and memory which they are using.

Technorati has had trouble supporting favorites, Twitter has run into too many people, Blogcatalog has run into excessive amounts of people on their servers. The latest trouble has been with Entrecard, one of their servers blew and there was a fire. http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=90185 . I do not blame anyone for this. Social networking is much more data intensive than most people imagine.

If you are going to join and use social networking, join three networks and expect two to be working at any given time. Reliability seems to be highly random. A lot of these services are new and will be experimenting with their computing needs.

On another note, I played around with Shelfari a little bit more today. I added a few children's books The Butter Battle Book, Where the Wild Things Are, and Peter Rabbit to my shelf. I also posted a few comments in the groups.

I finally removed Technorati from my blog. I added Twitter instead. I don't know if it is just a flight of fancy. I was not happy with Technorati's function.