Book recommendation: Infinity Beach

I recently read Infinity Beach by Jack McDevitt, and recommend it to anyone who enjoys science fiction.

It is set about a thousand years in the future, when humans have settled on planets in a number of other solar systems but no other life has been found on any of the many planets explored. Humanity has reached the point where everybody can live a comfortable life, but there is no longer any real progress. The main character, Dr. Kim Brandywine, works for an organisation aiming to find extra-terrestrial intelligence but does not really believe that there is any life in the universe beyond that brought from Earth. This slowly starts to change when an old acquaintance suggests to her that the failed SETI expedition in which her sister died may not have been what it seemed. She begins to investigate, and becomes increasingly obsessed with discovering what happened as she uncovers evidence that the four crew of the expedition were apparently anxious to hide something.

Change of address

I moved out of my old flat yesterday, and into a new flat on Kelburn Parade. The new flat is quite a bit bigger (7 bedrooms rather than 3), though the bedrooms are smaller. It is of course much closer to the university. The flat is being run by TSCF, with people from VUWCU and ICF living there.

We do not have a phone currently, and I will not be online as much as usual as we do not have a proper Internet connection yet. For now I have a USB wifi adapter in middle of a parabolic wire mesh dish sitting propped in the window at a certain angle connected to my laptop to connect to the VUW network, then a cable between my desktop and laptop with my laptop routing so I can connect from my desktop. I then connect to SWANS with OpenVPN over that. This all results in a very flaky and unreliable connection.

We are planning to have a flat-warming on 2008-03-01, so keep that day free if you are my friend and live in Wellington.