Of web browsers and writers

A couple of things. today. First I am listening to the audio book of Neal Stephenson's "snow crash" finally. You know for a IT guy I should have read it years ago. The first thing that strikers me as lazy (and yes I am committing heresy in the geek world by questioning the all great Neal) is that his main character's name is Hero Protagonist. Oh come on. can we get really lazy here? Yes I am listening to the abridged version but the writing is failing to generate the mental images that good books do. The other thing I am getting annoyed with is the overuse of profanity. Come on it's for strong impact and in your face attention grabbing... dropping the F bomb every 50 words gets childish. Granted the audibles version of the book is not read well and they add in cutsie sound effects that I find annoying. There are good parts to the book, but some parts are simply not up to the hype the writer gets from people. I do not understand the intense hype some writers generate or get thrown at them simply because they take a normal mystery story and put "technology" in it. these technodrama's are interesting but barely worthy of the sci-fi label they get. it's like watching the "Hackers" movie. everything is wrong technically but glamoured up for your enjoyment. This book is very formulatic and could easily be an old Sherlock Holmes story by simply changing the setting backwards 100 years.

Secondly one of my favorite underdog web browsers is now 100% free. Opera is 3 times faster than firefox and much MUCH smaller. I may be switching to it at home simply because of the raw speed it has. and this one is also immune to spyware and web viruses like firefox. check it out, you might like it.