Vote for the Most Romantic Story (Poll & Giveaway)

GIVEAWAY CLOSED

Indigo Books & Music has stated the following books are perfect for Valentine's Day because they are a love story that's as great as your own.  To make it more fun, I've included a poll so you can tell me which book YOU think is the best love story. To make it even more fun, voting (and commenting that you voted) will give you an entry into a giveaway to win whichever books is winning on Feb. 14. *Giveaway is Canada Only*

I really need your help. As a nonfiction reader, I've not ready ANY of these books although I've been interested in reading a few of them. So I certainly don't know which one is the Most Romantic or Best Love Story.

Here's the list of books and info on each. The poll is below it all. AFTER you vote, comment saying that you voted (you can include which book and why if you want, but not mandatory) to be entered. Your email MUST be visible in your profile or on you blog or you must include it in the comment. If I can't contact you, you can't win! You can vote, even if you don't live in Canada! You just don't need to comment.

Indigo Books will be shipping the winning book to the winner. Voting closes Feb. 13 11:59 PM EST so that the winning book and giveaway winner can be announced on Valentine's Day.

The List: (all links are to Chapters/Indigo Website, no affiliation)

The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
The story of Clare, a beautiful art student, and Henry, an adventuresome librarian, who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-three and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because Henry finds himself periodically displaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing.


Outlander, Diana Gabaldon
In 1945, Claire Randall, a former combat nurse, is back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon-when she innocently touches a boulder in one of the ancient stone circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is a Sassenach-an "outlander"-in a Scotland torn by war and raiding border clans in the year of our Lord...1743. Hurled back in time by forces she cannot understand, Claire''s destiny in soon inextricably intertwined with Clan MacKenzie and the forbidden Castle Leoch. For here, James Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior, shows her a passion so fierce and a love so absolute that Claire becomes a woman torn between fidelity and desire...and between two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives.

The Notebook, Nicholas Sparks
At thirty-one, Noah Calhoun, back in coastal North Carolina after World War II, is haunted by images of the girl he lost more than a decade earlier. At twenty-nine, socialite Allie Nelson is about to marry a wealthy lawyer, but she cannot stop thinking about the boy who long ago stole her heart. Thus begins the story of a love so enduring and deep it can turn tragedy into triumph, and may even have the power to create a miracle...

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs--yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

The Princess Bride, William Goldman
A true fantasy classic. William Goldman describes it as a "good parts version" of "S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure." Morgenstern's original was filled with details of Florinese history, court etiquette, and Mrs. Morgenstern's mostly complimentary views of the text. Much admired by academics, the "Classic Tale" nonetheless obscured what Mr. Goldman feels is a story that has everything: "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles."

Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
For the protagonist of this peerlessly observant first novel is Sayuri, one of Japan''s most celebrated geisha, a woman who is both performer and courtesan, slave and goddess. We follow Sayuri from her childhood in an impoverished fishing village, where in 1929, she is sold to a representative of a geisha house, who is drawn by the child''s unusual blue-grey eyes. From there she is taken to Gion, the pleasure district of Kyoto. She is nine years old. In the years that follow, as she works to pay back the price of her purchase, Sayuri will be schooled in music and dance, learn to apply the geisha''s elaborate makeup, wear elaborate kimono, and care for a coiffure so fragile that it requires a special pillow. She will also acquire a magnanimous tutor and a venomous rival.

The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje''s Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal,and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.

The History of Love, Nicole Krauss
A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother''s loneliness.  Leo Gursky is just about surviving, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he''s still alive. But life wasn''t always like this: sixty years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. And though Leo doesn''t know it, that book survived, inspiring fabulous circumstances, even love. Fourteen-year-old Alma was named after a character in that very book. And although she has her hands full--[...]--she undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family.

Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
The narrator’s great-aunt Tita is the youngest of three daughters born to Mama Elena, the Tyrannical owner of the De la Garza ranch. While still in her mother’s womb, she wept so violently-as her mother chopped onions-that she caused Mama Elena to begin early labor, and Tita slipped out in the middle of the kitchen table, amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon became a way of life, and Tita grew up to be a master chef. Each chapter of the novel begins with one of Tita’s recipes and her careful instructions for preparation.



Chocolat, Joanne Harris
When the exotic stranger Vianne Rocher arrives in the old French village of Lansquenet and opens a chocolate boutique called "La Celeste Praline" directly across the square from the church, Father Reynaud identifies her as a serious danger to his flock. The priest says she'll be out of business by Easter. To make matters worse, Vianne does not go to church and has a penchant for superstition. But she begins to win over customers with her smiles, her intuition for everyone's favourites, and her delightful confections. Her shop provides a place, too, for secrets to be whispered, grievances aired. Vianne's plans for an Easter Chocolate Festival divide the whole community. Can the solemnity of the Church compare with the pagan passion of a chocolate éclair?

Vote Here (You MUST comment after you vote to be entered into the giveaway!)



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Check out moreValentine's Day Gift Ideasfrom Indigo Books (Chapters/Indigo)

IPv4 addresses are gone: cap and trade

The transition to IPv6 will produce glitches: no need to hurry

The IPv4 addresses began to be distributed approximately 40 years ago. Today, they're essentially gone.

This incumbent arrangement to identify the computers on the network by a sequence of 4 bytes (usually written as four.integers.below.256) may distinguish about 256^4=16^8=2^32 i.e. over 4 billion hosts which would be considered a large number of computers in the 1970s. Well, it's not too large today: in fact, it's smaller than the world population.

As recently as yesterday, the global Internet had 7/256 (fraction) of the IP addresses available. However, as expected, the Asian distributor of the IP addresses received 2/256 (fraction) of addresses from the global distributor today. This means that only 5/256 (fraction) of addresses were remaining. And there's a rule that once this happens, each continental supervisor receives one of the five remaining ones. In other words, the IP addresses have been depleted at the continental level.




For a few months, the continental distributors will be capable to spread the remaining IP addresses they have been assigned: there are not too many. On 8th of June, 2011, the leading Internet companies will celebrate the World IPv6 Day during which they will try to launch all services in IPv6 and encourage the users to access the Internet via IPv6.

Today, the percentage of traffic using the new IPv6 format is about 1 percent.

The depletion of the IP addresses is no disaster, of course. The Internet won't collapse. The limitations may be circumvented by many tricks. However, the Internet cannot grow in the simple old way. Instead of forcing the companies to use dozens of assorted tricks to circumvent the limitations on the number of available IP addresses, it seems easier to ultimately switch to a new system that gives us much more room for breathing.

The IPv6 addresses are viewed as the canonical replacement of IPv4. Instead of 2^32 hosts, they may distinguish 2^128 hosts = 3 x 10^{38} gadgets. That's approximately equal to the mass of the Solar System in micrograms, so if you convert the Sun - and the rest of the Solar System - to devices connected to the Internet and each of them will weigh at least one microgram, you will have enough IP addresses. ;-)

So if you use an IP address to identify each baguette you buy in the supermarket, the seller must be careful to recycle most of the IP addresses once the baguette is eaten - otherwise we could run out of the IPv6 addresses, too. If a new IPv6 address were used for every "event", 10^{38} would still be enough to cover the life of the civilization until the death of the Sun but it would not be too many, especially because IPv6 is built with the expectation that by generous clustering, the system may waste a vast majority of the available numbers.

Physics intermezzo

The large number 2^128 of IP addresses has already been attacked by the World Union of Kooks and Crackpots. Mr John Horgan said that such a large number was "ironic science" because you may never falsify the statement that another person has an IPv6 address: to do so, you would have to try 2^128 IP addresses one by one (at least Mr Horgan isn't capable to think of another strategy) which is impossible.

Mr John Horgan and Mr Lee Smolin have criticized the landscape of IP possibilities because it undermines the moral values. Having a large number of IP addresses is as immoral as as speculation in subprime mortgages, as Mr John Horgan figured out. You may always kill someone if you have an IPv6 address because there exists another copy of you with a different IPv6 address who hasn't killed anyone.

These criticisms by Mr John Horgan and Mr Lee Smolin, directed against the new book by Brian Greene, were not joined by their colleague in vitriol, Mr Peter Woit, because the latter is employed as a dirt eater by compassionate Brian Greene himself.

But back to the IPv4/6 addresses

The addresses will get exhausted in a few months and the pressure to open the new living space will be increasing. Most of the key Internet companies will be ready. However, many other companies and regular users may be partly screwed because they may need new routers to deal with IPv6 etc. The transition to IPv6 won't necessarily be problem-free. In fact, I am confident that the number of problems will be vastly higher than what we saw during the overhyped "Y2K problems" in the year 2000.

So several World IPv6 days may be needed to see that a vast majority of the Internet - and especially the key services - will be able to deal with IPv6.

I guess that it will be impossible to turn IPv4 off as early as in 2011, for example. The IPv6 Internet will exist simultaneously with the old one for some time. New IPv6 users without IPv4 won't be able to access services that only have the old IPv4 and vice versa (the opposite case is unlikely because there is no reason for important services to suddenly abandon the support for IPv4).