This will be the last post on this address.  I have moved my feed to my home server as posted below.  As of February 1, 2007, the feed is also being served from Feedburner at:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/UsingHagen

PLEASE UPDATE YOUR ADDRESS!  I hope to see you there!

My wife and I watch the TV show The Unit every week.  It is a great mix of military drama and human interest that makes the show a good marriage saver.  Inside Delta Force is the book that the show is based on.  It is interesting that the show never mentions the fact that is Delta Force involved, which is probably for the best due to the way Hollywood has inaccurately portrayed this unit in the past.

This is an autobiography of Sgt Major Eric Haney, one of the original members of Delta Force, from the time of his selection to his retirement.  Obviously, there is not much detail about actual missions accomplished, as I am sure many of them are still highly classified.  But the selection and training stories were riveting enough.  He also included the best description of the Iran Hostage Rescue attempt in 1980 that I have ever read.  His insights as one from the inside was remarkable.

Inside Delta Force is an excellent read from a citizen soldier in our time.  He spends very little time discussing political motivations, disgust of superior officiers or denegrating fellow combatants except where integral to the story at hand.  I really enjoyed this read and recommend it to anyone that is the least bit interested in Special Forces during our generation.  It is a very interesting insight behind the scenes of many of the big news stories in the '80s and '90s, especially the Beirut Barracks attack, Panama, Grenada, and the Iran Hostage incident.

If you have tried to write trace info from an ASP.NET page, you know how useful this can be for debugging.  If you have tried to write to trace from another tier, you might have found it too difficult.  I did; until now:

To write to the current context trace (hint, hint), simply use the following call:

System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Trace.Warn(szCategory, szTraceMsg);

Yep, that's it.  So simple, yet so hard to find.  Now you (and I) know.

Ok, maybe I can't run my blog on my home server.  ASP.NET 2.0 across the wire may be too much for it.  It runs my other 2.0 apps OK.  I just don't want to spend money for this!

 Forever Peace is not the sequel to The Forever War, but could be a prequel, except that the conclusion might prevent that from being a possibility.  Of course, the partial expectation that it was linked to TFW was the reason I read this book.  It is not, but still we read on.

The story is one of a soldier in nouveau America, at war with Latin America.  I cannot remember the political names of the factions, and it is not really important.  As most modern combat soldiers of the time, he is only part-time.  His "day job" is professor of physics at a Texas university.  The tech factor of the story is the human-machine interface, or Jacking, that is used to control remote combat mechs hundreds of miles away, instead of risking the lives of the soldiers themselves, although the mortality rates of the operators is shockingly high.  Julian, our hero, becomes disillusioned by the constant conflict and, after a horrifying event, tries to commit suicide.  Surviving that, he becomes involved in a secret plan that could eliminate war and inhumane behavior forever, by ironically using the interface in his brain for his combat service.  And as a fun side-plot, he gets to attempt to save the universe from a science experiment gone wrong, while being stopped by a fanatical religious faction that makes Opus Dei look like a preschool.

A bit trite, I think, this story is not nearly as original or subtle as The Forever War.  I did enjoy the first half of the book, though, as it was not heavily loaded with obvious agenda.  We all understand that war is bad, let's get over it and write some good fiction, okay?  Not a bad book, but I won't read it again, and can't really recommend it to anyone, unlike the first.  I don't think I will be reading Forever Free anytime soon either.

This is the new home of using.  It is hosted on my own server at home that I have ultimate control over.  However, it is getting old and may be a touch slow.  Also, Cox is kind enough to block port 80 so I have to run in on port 22.  Of course, this will block all of my friends at AGP, sorry guys, but is just fine at SFI.  The URL is:

http://www.hagennet.homeip.net:22/Blog/

I picked up The Forever War last spring based on the recommendation of John Scalzi.  Specifically, it was required reading for the characters in Scalzi's book The Ghost Brigades.  I am very glad I did.  This may be one of the most cosmologically accurate sci-fi space battle novels ever written.  Cosmology as in the study of vast tracks of the cosmos.  It certainly is the most accurate I have read.  The way in which Haldeman treats the interstellar distances and the time-distortion are central to the main plot and he handles them very well.

The Forever War is the story of one soldier thrust in the middle of an interstellar conflict that from his perspective doesn't last very long at all.  But in the time stream of Earth, the war lasts more than a millenium.  Because of the enormous distances that the military must travel, near light speed velocities cause great time dilation to the crews.  Each mission lasts hundreds of years, but is only weeks in their perception.  The plot is centered on the war, but the real story is the feelings of loss and displacement that the soldier experience when everything they know is centuries gone every time they return.

I suspect this is another antiwar novel.  However, it is subtle enough to not be a problem.  I enjoyed the story and have also read its not-really-a-sequel Forever Peace.  Joe Haldeman's style is different than most sci-fi writers in my opinion.  He seems much more formal and precise, more "educated" even, but not to the point of distraction.  His work is actually pleasurable just to read.  For reference:  I stopped reading Steven King many years ago because his style degraded to the point I couldn't force my way through the words to get to the plot anymore.

I am terribly behind on book reviews.  I finished Forever Peace a couple days before Christmas and am almost done with Inside Delta Force.  I also will post Forever War, the not-a-series forerunner of Peace that I read before Red Mars.  Mars took so long to read that I got out of the habit.  For reference, Mars took 5 months, where Peace took 3 weeks and IDF will only be 5 weeks.