Sometimes I think this site is turning into a Book Review site instead of a technical site.  And in support of that concern is Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, book 2 of the classic Heechee Saga of Frederick Pohl.  While Gateway is a very different read, the second of the saga promises to be a bit odd, but more mainstream than its predecessor.  And is just so.

We join Robinette Broadhead again, but only as one of the primary players in the story.  More closely we follow the expedition to another artifact dubbed the Food Factory located in the Oort Cloud.  The expedition indeed finds a food processing facility but cannot get it to move closer to inhabited space.  They also find a surprising inhabitant:  A teenaged boy stranded there since birth.  Or rather stranded there and at another location they call Heechee Heaven.  And there the surprises are even greater.

The Heechee Saga is nearly as important to Science Fiction as the Foundation Trilogy and 2001 and its sequels.  If you read Dune and the Ringworld stories, you should read these.  But having said that, the books really are not that great to read.  The stories and the ideas in them certainly are, however, and has shaped much of modern SciFi.  At least in my mind.  Even 30 years later, I still think the AI entities in the books as pretty accurately modeled.  And his treatment of the vast distances within our own solar system is very refreshing.  I am really enjoying re-reading the series, although, I don't believe I have ever read the remaining books.  I am doing so now, but have also picked up some other material as well, so it may be awhile.

UPDATE: When writing up the sequel, I noticed I posted the wrong title for this book. It is now corrected.

Everytime I need to render date and time to a DateTime field, I have to scour the Internet to figure out how.  Well, here is how:

If you need to get hourly statistics on your website, select and group by the following metric:

TO_LOCALTIME(QUANTIZE(TO_TIMESTAMP(date, time),3600)) AS Hour

This will properly combine date and time and offset by the correct timezone to a single datetime field recognized by most data parsers.  And it will look like this:

2009-01-21 12:00:00

It shouldn't be too difficult to change that to minutes, seconds, periods, whatever you need.

And so, today we begin the four years of our Great Nation's biggest electoral mistake.

I truly hope I am wrong.