Positives from the book
For a Woman: challenge your thoughts, wants, desires, constraints.
For a Man: a little insight into what a woman thinks about, wants, desires and what boundaries she is capable of creating and destroying
This novel does not enlighten the reader on female sexuality (but sure as hell enlightens us on Nikki Gemmell's predilections - which, I have to say are clichéd examples of self absorption and navel gazing). This is yet another poorly written example of 'female as victim' fantasy with the main character inflicting masochistic intercourse scenarios upon herself with nameless, neutral strangers as self-punishment for marrying a heartless bastard.
I'd like some insights into the thing that is Woman, so I read it through. And over and over what came through is what this woman really wanted was power and control, but mostly control. I found the author's and/or narrator's view of marriage and commitment as twisted, dark, and fundamentally wrong. The premise of the narrators was that of someone so incredibly vain and selfish that it infected and adulterated her view of what a relationship or a marriage should be: collaborative on all issues and levels. Her oversimplified point of departure for her relationship with her husband was subservience, surrender, and resignation to stagnation. She chose this path for herself, accepted it, and then blamed her husband for the situation she had helped create. He became the oppressive beast, which so handily facilitated the breakaway with the so very horribly trite love affair.
Then the baby came and the immediate and undeniable bonds of service and sacrifice were no longer an issue. I read this carefully, but the same things that made her despise her husband so intensely were the ones that made her love her baby so much.
Ultimately, it all boiled down to control, control, and control. She loathed the sharing of control with her husband, which she manufactured into his non-existent total control. This gave her the manufactured reason she needed to do what she did. But the baby elicited no control struggle--by the end of the book I was wondering what kind of mother she would turn out to be, and how exactly that little baby would grow up, develop and mature. I feared more for the child than for the jilted husband.
Bottom line: Sure, get this and read it, it'll give you some insight, but hopefully not insight into every woman.
The Bride Stripped Bare purports to be the diary manuscript of an insecure, rather jaded, 30-something woman. The preface explains that the diary has been submitted for publication by the author's mother, the author herself having vanished under highly fishy circumstances. (Car found at the top of a cliff, body never recovered. Cops say suicide; Mum thinks she might have faked her own death). The story begins with the author's honeymoon in Marrakech, Morocco. She is happy, in love, blooming. But right from the start we know that all is not perfect. Hubbie is a decent and well-meaning sort of a fellow but he's selfish and inattentive, especially in the sack. Also, we suspect that he might be having an affair with the protagonist's best friend, Theo; a free-spirited sex-therapist who suffers from an unfortunate sexual condition (“Vaginismus”, if you're interested). Gradually, things get worse and the two grow more distant.
Eventually, our ever-nameless heroine meets Gabriel, a handsome - yet sensitive - Spanish boy. Gabriel is a semi-employed actor who we later find out is also a virgin. This has been bad news for Gabriel and a complete disaster for his girlfriends. But for our heroine it's perfect. She has been feeling neutered ever since her marriage, the loss of her career and her desultory sex life. She resolves to instruct him in the ways of woman. The two begin an affair.
Traditional gender roles are inverted and Gemmell uses Gabriel's vulnerability and sexual inexperience as a way of exploring well-worn themes of possession, control and female empowerment. “An idea, beautiful in its simplicity. To initiate Gabriel, to teach him exactly what you want. To create a pleasure man, purely that, the lover every woman dreams of. You'll be in control, for the very first time, you'll be able to dictate exactly what you want. And there'll be no expectation of how you should act.”
Pliant Gabriel opens a door of sexual liberation, and a series of erotic, Houellebecqean-style encounters ensue. There are taxi drivers, orgies, strangers, Gabriel, of course, and an increasingly confused hubby.
So why is it all so silly?
To begin with there's the pre-canned feel of the sexual fantasy: Sex with strangers? Fluffy-chested virgins? Dashing Mediterranean types who talk about their feelings? Please. This is stock-standard stuff for any chick over 30. See Catherine Millet, Germaine Greer and Shirley Valentine.
Then there's the writing. Gemmell has a funny prose style. “Sensuous”, is the way one reviewer described it, and I suppose in part it is. But it doesn't always work. Her practice is to dump long, flowery descriptions on the back of short, spare sentences that can't always bear their weight. The result is a string of breathy, overwrought sentences, which add little in the way of meaning. Thus, the weather is “unclenching” and the narrator feels “fat with content”. Evocative. But of what exactly?
The tone too, is irritating: Brooding, weepy and utterly inward-looking, as though no world exists beyond one's own emotional landscape. To be fair, this is no doubt what Gemmell had in mind - to tell the story of a woman's inner life. But she delves too deep. In the end, the narrator stands guilty of the same adolescent self-absorption that she has supposedly been railing against.
The Bride Stripped Bare may well be the hottest thing in chick lit since Emily Bronte bashed out Wuthering Heights. I'm too boofy to know. But to me it reads like a stern warning to every man who's ever forgotten to put down the toilet seat or switched on the news while his wife was telling him about her day. Indeed, this impression is confirmed by the vaguely menacing dedication that prefaces the book: “For my husband. For every husband.” Gulp. Sleep with one eye open, Mr Gemmell. And if I haven't heard from you by ten, I'm calling the cops.
There are three Dicks at loose in this collection: the dazzler, whose stories feature stunning twists and turns and brilliant extrapolation of the mundane; the pedestrian, where the energy just isn't there and the author's flaws are more evident -- when there's no pizzazz to whisk the reader onwards past the flatness of character and lack of overall richness; and the downright weird.
Dick dazzles us in "Minority Report", where Anderton is head of the Department of Precrime, a policing unit that uses "precog mutants" to spot criminals before they can commit their crimes. When Anderton finds himself up on a charge that he will murder someone it has to be a conspiracy, doesn't it? What else could it mean? Suddenly, there are lots of factions at plays: Witwer, the newly arrived deputy commissioner, keen to take Anderton's place; Anderton's wife, Lisa, tired of him and maybe in league with Witwer; yet others, manoeuvring in the background. Almost with every page, every paragraph, paranoid conspiracies and interpretations of events twist and buck. This is classic Philip K Dick! You can question some of the plot turns -- a bit convenient, a bit too easy -- but it's hard to question the sheer helter-skelter zest of the thing.
He dazzles again in "Imposters", a story centring around questions of identity and shifting perceptions and understandings. No one thinks Spence Olham is really Olham, but he does... They think he's an imposter, a spy for the Outspacers from Alpha Centauri. The shaky underpinnings of reality and our understanding of reality are hallmarks of PKD, as are the frequent points where you pull up short, thinking "how could he get away with that?" or "why didn't they just...?" But the audaciousness of plotting is exhilarating even as it teeters on the edges of believability. What the hell...
"Second Variety" is another good one, although the twists are rather more telegraphed. This is Cold War sf about a war where what remains of UN forces are getting the upper hand by use of lethal robots. Now the Russians want to talk -- but why? This is one of three stories in the collection to have been filmed (by Dan O'Bannon as Screamers) which, with the films made from his novels, makes Dick perhaps the sf writer treated most seriously by the movie industry. But not only is he frequently-filmed, you can see clearly in stories such as "Second Variety" the germs of films like Terminator, with their replicating war 'bots threatening to take on a life of their own with new, improved varieties emerging all the time.
"We can Remember it for you Wholesale" should be familiar as the Paul Verhoeven's film Total Recall. Douglas Quirl is, in his own words, "a miserable little salaried employee" with a wife who knocks him back at every opportunity. He just wants to go to Mars. But he can't afford it and so is left with the next best thing: to have false memories of a visit implanted. If he can't go to Mars, he can remember having been. And from that point on, things get complicated, with the memory implantation process uncovering hidden memories and Quirl's understanding of his self and his past shifting frequently. Great stuff.
"Electric Ant" shows Dick the dazzler at work again. Garson Poole, a successful businessman, wakes up in hospital minus a hand. He just wants to get out of there, but then the doctors reveal something about him that even he didn't know: he's an "electric ant", an organic robot. This leads to something of an existential crisis and provides another wonderful flipping of perceptions as we view this revelation from Poole's perspective: we don't understand our own world, we don't even know ourselves...
In "Faith of Our Fathers" we have Dick getting weird and leaving this reader, for one, far behind. In a 1984-type future Hanoi, with the populace monitored through their TVs, Tung Chien is an official in the Ministry of Cultural Artifacts. When he's handed a new assignment to examine thousands of students' test papers for evidence of political deviance he knows it must be a trap -- a test of his own political values, which are starting to waver. All fair enough, but then he is dragged into the world of their great leader and the plot gets lost in a welter of hallucinogenic meanderings that may well have seemed interesting at the time.
"Oh to be a Blobel!", "War Game" and "What the Dead Men Say" are pedestrian Dick. A war vet struggling to cope with the adaptations he has had to make for war; the testing of a game, produced by potential enemies; a story of what happens after death. All interesting enough premises, but each illustrates how shaky are the foundations of much of Dick's work. In "What the Dead Men Say", death is followed by a period of "half-life", a short amount of time which can be rationed out over long periods in which the dead can be revived -- so that, potentially, they can "live" on for a long time. When attempts to bring back Very Important Businessman Louis Sarapis fail, it's clearly more than mere negligence -- this is Dick, after all. Sure enough, Sarapis starts speaking from beyond the grave. From outer space, in fact... Yet no-one seems terribly bothered, other than those directly concerned in the plot mechanics. Even when entire communications networks -- phones, TV, radio -- are blocked by Sarapis' broadcasts, it doesn't really seem to be a problem. This shows Dick deeply flawed: fiction, whether satirical (or even with outright comic intent - not that this is) or not, still needs to be grounded in a suspension of the reader's disbelief. At his ebullient best, Dick keeps things moving so fast that the reader is swept along, but where this approach fails him all that's really left for the reader is fascination with the workings of his imagination.
Have you got an HP Compaq nw9440 laptop?
They're a great laptop with lots of grunt and a huge screen. And this is exactly why I decided to buy one of them.
These little wonders come with an NVIDIA Quadro 1500M chipset that does all the drawing on your 17" screen. But the driver that comes with the laptop is old and is the only driver from HP that has an installer that works for this chipset.
The HP driver works fine. Well, almost. It works fine for most situations, but starts falling for applications with lots of text. For example, when working with large Excel spreadsheets, I had Excel crash more than 5 times on me in a day. Each time this happens, it was preceeded by certain misbehaviour in drawing cells, rows, or refreshing the display. Let this happen a few times and kaboom!
This calls for a driver upgrade. Surely HP or NVIDIA must have fixed this issue by now. So I searched HP's website for an updated driver with no luck there. Then I moved on to search on NVIDIA's website. And behold, I find a newer release of the driver.
I downloaded the Quadro FX driver for Windows XP and tried to install it, but it failed with this error:
"nVidia setup program could not locate any drivers that are compatible with your current hardware. Setup will now exit."
The reason this installer fails is that it couldn't find the device it was written for. The installer will run for the Quadro 1500 chipset but not for the 1500M. M stands for mobile.
Hum.....
Force installing the driver seemed to me a good solutions. I was desparate to fix the redraw issue in Excel.
Again this did not fix my problem. It did however delay it from happening and Excel was crashing less often.
To plan B. I decided after this failure to download the NVIDIA FX drivers (162.18_forceware_winxp_32bit_english_whql.exe). Similar to its Quadro brother, the installer did not run on the nw9440.
Didn't NVIDIA manufacture and sell this chipset?
Why is it then that they don't provide an updated driver for it?
Let me see, hardware ... software... software for hardware... hummmm. Duuuhhhh!
Well you want a solution. Luckily I've got one for you.
Please note that if you follow my solution here, do so at your own perril. I take no responsibility for any damage or result of taking action based on my blog. If you are unsure of what this procedure does or the effects of it, please do not try to follow it.
If you read on NVIDIA's forums, you can see the frustration of people with this chipset.
http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t26943.html
Well I guss Ill just answer my own question, since it doesn't seem anyone here had come accross this problem.
I called nVidia, and sorry for my flame on this, but I was informed that nVidia doesn't support the Mobile graphics chips (beside the Go serieis).
ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Then why is it that when I download the driver from HP, it unzips and then launches the NVIDIA install package?!!! 
Thats not an HP driver! 
Anyway, Im sure there is a valid explanation for this, but I find it to be silly.
So for anyone who may come accross this problem:
I ended up FORCE installing just the regular Quadro FX 1500 driver from 100.59 (instead of the 1500M).
So far so good, I havn't had a crash yet, but I am still throwing games and apps at it to make sure.
Although Dave suggests a solution in the forum, it did not work for me.
Run dpinst.exe
Then, update video driver, say browse my computer, and let me pick , use have disk, point to the folder the above loaded files which is
windows\system32\driverstore\filerepository\nv_lh.inf
Works like a champ and I have all the resolutions for the display now.
Dave
I couldn't find dpinst.exe nor could I find nv_lh.inf.
What I did find, though, was a file called "nvbl.inf" in the Windows\system32 directory. This file has the parameters needed by the installer. Take the values in "nvbl.inf" and place them in the file "nv4_disp.inf" found in the NVIDIA installer directory. I will leave a link to the file as I have modified it if you want to grab a copy and see what I've done.
Click here to get my copy of nv4_disp.inf
I ran "setup.exe" and now it happily installed.
After a reboot, I loaded up the large Excel spreadsheet I was working on a gave it a try. After 15 minutes of trying, it didn't crash. So I've got my solution, it seems.
UPDATE 1
After a few hours of work, I put my laptop in standby mode and when I restarted it, it seems the issue is back. This time, I noticed bad display with Internet Explorer. When I use the mouse scroll wheel to move up and down pages, it leaves white marks behind. Google search results seems to do it quite often.
Back to searching. This time I was looking for the "NVIDIA_G71.DEV_029B.2", which is the driver name for the 1500M chipset. Found the following link http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1315, but it's dated back to 2006-02-03 21:55:56. Don't want that.
Now from the previous thread I went to http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=8128. Very interesting post indeed. Let's see where this will take us.
From laptopvideo2go's website I got to this easy to follow thread:
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=9243
So far so good but none of the modified inf files work with the latest driver, so back to modifying the inf file manually.
Click here to get the inf file for the nVidia Quadro 91.85 version.
This seems to work.
1. Download the nVidia Quadro 91.85 installer from nvidia's website.
2. Use the modified inf file to replace the one that comes with the 91.85 installer
3. Install the driver
UPDATE 2
30 hours running so far without any issues. Looks like this was the solution.
Hope that it works out for you.
What is Quintura?
Quintura is a search engine, but not a Google or Yahoo! clone as such. In fact, its results are retrieved from Yahoo's directory through the use of their XML API but the presentation of the results is quite intruiging.
As you can see from the snapshot below, the user interface is split into 3 main sections, the top search bar, a left category presentation of the data, and a right search result.
When you enter a search term in the search text box and click on the loop icon, the matches and associated or related categories are displayed in the left part of the screen. To the right you should see a list of links to websites or pages.
When I searched for "hoohee", I got a list of categories from which I selected "free download" by clicking on it with the mouse. The top 4 results came all from this website. Interesting.
I then jumped and tried to search for my free radio automation software, Broadcast Power. The term "Broadcast Power" returned a link from hoohee.com in the third place. So, I tried selecting the different categories from the left to see if I can narrow my search and get to the home of Broadcast Power, http://www.bp2x.com. Couldn't do it by selecting from the categories.
Plan B. Let's search for "radio automation software" then. No where to be found there too, which is fine. This time there was a "free" category. Clicking on this one didn't return bp2x.com, but it did return at the top of the list "R.O.S.S. - Free Software for Radio Automation". R.O.S.S. has a link to bp2x.com. Not quite the same thing, but good enough.
I'm not too sure how to rate this engine. It definitely is an improvement on your standard search engines in terms of user friendliness of data presentation. I like the fact that it does not use flash to present the results, although, admitedly, I fancy nice graphics of some other search engines with flash user interfaces. However, flash powered search sites tend to be a bit slower than their HTML counterparts.
Give it a try, you might like it.
I will blog next about another search engine with an interesting flash user interface.
If you're a C# developer interested in developing a personal finance accounting software, just drop us a line or comment here.
I am collecting interest in this application and wouldn't mind sharing the source code with suitable parties.
Maybe creating a sourceforge project and posting the code there for a start if there is interest.
Let me know what you think.
There are three new albums in the Photos category of hoohee.com.
I have replaced the html photo album code with a flash version. Let me know if this new look and feel is better and whether the speed is reasonable.
Recent photos of Poppy, my dog, were added.
Marina and I went to Cape Schank last week where I took a few pictures. You may be interested in some to add as background images to your desktop. Grab them from the photo album and drop me a comment.
Here's one which I like.
Also, I cut down two 12 meter trees from my backyard. You should see the mess.
We have just upgraded SuperSync to 1.5.0.5.
SuperSync is a free file and folder synchronization application
Download from: http://www.hoohee.com/supersync/Installers/SuperSyncSetup1.5.0.5.exe
Please remove any previous version before installing.
What changed?
1. Fixed a bug with Synchronize All, Batch Synchronize, and Category Synchronize, which was allowing multiple threads to enter a critical piece of code while copying files.
2. Fixed an issue while deleting folder pairs on an inaccessible server. With this update you will be able to choose to delete the folder pair from the list to then delete the SuperSync history from the server manually.
3. Fixed an issue with creating new folder pairs with an empty category name. You are now forced to enter a valid category name before proceeding.
4. Fixed renaming a folder path from an unavailable remote machine to a local one. This was causing an error preventing the user from renaming the folder.
TODO List?
1. Add option to enable/disable deletes or attribute changes from action list
2. Add option to create most used folder pairs for system folders (e.g. My Documents, Favourites, Outlook default folder, etc...)
3. Add an option to disable the help balloon windows.
Where can I get this update from?
SuperSync 1.5.0.5 can be downloaded from this address: http://www.hoohee.com/supersync/Installers/SuperSyncSetup1.5.0.5.exe
Please remove any previous version before installing.
We have just upgraded SuperSync to 1.5.0.4.
SuperSync is a free file and folder synchronization application
Download from: http://www.hoohee.com/supersync/Installers/SuperSyncSetup1.5.0.4.exe
Please remove any previous version before installing.
Now available on:  
What changed?
1. Fixed a bug in the service code which was failing deletes of history files for users when a folder pair is deleted on the client.
2. Added clarification text to the progress dialog box and made it sizeable.
3. Fixed an issue where files tagged for deletion where not found and raised a false error message at the end of a sync.
4. Fixed an issue where read only files where not being deleted.
TODO List?
1. Add option to enable/disable deletes or attribute changes from action list
2. Add option to create most used folder pairs for system folders (e.g. My Documents, Favourites, Outlook default folder, etc...)
3. Add an option to disable the help balloon windows.
Where can I get this update from?
SuperSync 1.5.0.4 can be downloaded from this address: http://www.hoohee.com/supersync/Installers/SuperSyncSetup1.5.0.4.exe
Please remove any previous version before installing.
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Copyright © 2008 Emile Bassil. All rights reserved.
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