Don Khuth Chronicles

I haven’t bought any new books for a while so I am looking into get some more. I stopped by the book store today to see if there are any new books out that I might enjoy. Sadly to say, there aren’t many but a few of them did catch my attention. Yes, I do judge a book by its cover. If the cover doesn’t catch my attention, I’m not going to pick it up to read the synopsis.

If the book was good, I would assume that the author would take the time to come up with a good title. The book cover doesn’t have to be eye catchy because it has some pretty colours on it. It has to have something to draw my attention to the book.

When I was in the book store, about four books caught my eye. “Theatre of the Mind” by Jay Ingram, “The Book of Fate” by Brad Meltzer, “Secrets From The Vinyl Cafe” by Stuart Maclean and “Wild Fire” by Nelson Demille.

“Theatre of the Mind” takes a look at the state of consciousness and attempts to answer a few questions about the brain. “Can we be conscious of our consciousness? What does consciousness feel like? Is it really a stream of steadily flowing thoughts, images and feelings, or something else altogether? What happens in those lapses during highway driving, in which you have no memory of the last 10 kilometers? How is it that most of what goes on in our brains is actually unconscious? And, in the end, do we even need our brain?” The cover of this book is nothing special. I only took a look at it because I saw Jay Ingram’s name on it. I’ve watched him on the Discovery Channel and few and I’ve also read some of his articles in the local newspaper but I’ve never read any of his book. When I picked up this book and read the synopsis, I was interested in reading the answers to the questions that was posed.

“The Book of Fate” is a novel about a strange event that happen which didn’t make sense. A Presidential aide helps the President’s old friend into the limousine. By the time the limousine ride ended, the friend was dead and the main character’s face was disfigured from a bullet to the face. “Trying to figure out what really happened on the worst day of his life will lead Wes on a chase that takes him back to that long-ago July 4th, back to a decade-old presidential crossword puzzle, back to ancient Masonic symbols hidden in the street plan of Washington, DC, and even back to a two-hundred year old secret code invented by Thomas Jefferson.”

“Secret from the Vinyl Cafe” is about, well, secrets. Everyone has some sort of secret and this book is about those secrets. The secrets that no one dares to tell anyone else. It sounded like an interesting read so I picked it up as well.

“Wild Fire” is about a conspiracy to detonate a nuclear in two major cities. The plot is said to be very realistic because the author incorporates real technology and real government organization into the stories. It sounded interesting and the cover looked cool so I bought that one as well.

I was planning on buy the books at Coles but I thought maybe I could get it cheaper online. So that’s what I did. I search for the four titles and played around with the prices. When I found each title, there was a link to the used book section where I could get the books for cheaper, a lot cheaper. The only book that didn’t have a used version was “Secrets From The Vinyl Cafe.” The other books were selling for less than 50% of the original cost.

The price of getting the books used is $81.87. At first that seems rather high since a few of the books were less than $10. I took a closer look and saw that the reason why the total price was so high was because of shipping. I was being charged $6.95 for each book. I was paying just over $25 for shipping alone. So I decided to compare that price to the price of buying the books brand new.

Surprisingly enough, the cost of getting all the books brand new was $5 more. When I buy them used, it was being shipped from three different sellers. If I buy them brand new, all of the books are coming from Chapters. Also, I was eligible for free shipping because the total came out to be more than $39. Since I was only paying $5 more than the used book price, I decided to get all the books brand new instead. This way, all of them will be arriving at the same thing.

I prefer to buy the books online because you get more savings. When you buy the books in store, you can probably get 20%-30% off the cover price. But when you order online, there’s a chance that you can save an addition 10%. On top of that, I have a membership with Chapter Indigo which allows me to save an addition 10% on top of the discounted price. I don’t know why I’m buying more book since I still have a few others to finish up. I guess I’m addicted to buying books.

Is it just me or do people’s computers fail in pairs. Every time I have to fix someone’s computer, someone else’s computer fails as well. For the last year, I’ve always had to fix two computers at once. I don’t have time to fix all these computers but it seems has if there aren’t any more computer guys around.

Right now, I’m fixing my uncle’s computer because Windows doesn’t want to start up. For some reason, it doesn’t want to load after the boot up screen. It repeatedly restarts itself on its own. I don’t know why the computer does that. My best guess would be that it cause some sort of virus and that virus corrupted a system file. But I can’t get into Windows to find out so I have no other choice than to reinstall windows.

I don’t want to format the computer because I don’t want to lose anything. I’m too lazy to take the hard drive out and back up it up on my computer. Formatting is the last thing I want to do with other people’s computer. It would be easier to format the computer but people don’t know how to make a back up of their files. I tell them to save their files on a different partition but that’s all Geek talk as far as they know. It’s hard to explain computer issues to someone who doesn’t understand the language. Even though it’s English, it sounds like a whole other language to them.

The thing I hate about having to reinstall Windows is that I lose all the software that was installed. I don’t know why Windows doesn’t just overwrite itself and leave the program files alone. All the software that are stored in the “Program Files” folder are still there after the reinstall but you can’t run any of them. They should write the operating system so that it will detect the files in a folder and just run it. That would make things so much easier. I wouldn’t have to waste so much time reinstalling all the software.

Reinstalling Windows seems to be hard enough for some people. There have been times when I have to reinstall Windows a few times before it would work properly. Format after format, Windows somehow fails to boot up correctly. I don’t understand that part since the install was a fresh one. It’s as if it detected the old install of Windows somewhere on the hard drive and just decides not to boot up.

After a successful re-install, there’s no guarantee that Windows will operate properly. After I re-installed Windows, it seemed to work fine. But then a few hours later, my computer would restart on its own without warning. It’s things like this that makes me not want to fix my computer in the first place. My main computer has been down for almost a month now. The new LCD monitor that I got is just sitting there. There’s a whole upgrade that I need to do as well but I’m getting lazy. A computer guy’s work is never done.