Wednesday, January 05, 2005
It lured me in
Sigh.
I should know better than to walk into a bookstore with a wallet full of money.
Especially a really good used/new book store near a college campus.
Fortunately for my wallet, I went after work, giving me less than an hour before the store closed. That tends to limit the amount of monetary damage that I can sustain.
But since the place does sell used books, there are some good deals to be had if you don't mind digging, and I don't mind digging. One of the books I picked up (used) was The Connection Machine by Danny Hillis, creator of the massively parallel computer from the mid-80s. Sure, the architecture is twenty years old and the company that made it, Thinking Machines Corporation, is now defunct, but just wait, another few years and you'll start seeing the home computer become more and more parallel. It's a common theme in Computer Science—stuff done two or three decades past in super computers works its way to the home computer (multitasking? 60s. GUIs? 70s. Networks? 80s. Microsoft just repackages these things as “innovations”).
And speaking of architecture, I also picked up Norm Abram's New House by Norm Abram, and House-Dreams by Hugh Howard, fueling my interest in building architecture of the more homely type. I've had this interest in architecture for some time now, and back when we had cable HGTV was one of the regular stops on the TV dial (hey, they were used books! They were cheap!).
Fortunately for me, the store was closing so I only ended up with those three books.
Now only if I can avoid going by there tomorrow evening …
