I've not been around much

Moved house, so no broadband for a month while virgin.net decide that the obvious way to ensure people stick with their service is to require 30 days notice for any change of address. And my laptop's WinXP setup stopped deigning to boot up (I blame the rather hideous convolutions I got into trying to get both my and my housemate's Palms to sync to different data on the same machine), so I've had to reinstall from scratch and thank Lacie for backups. There's something odd about the radio environment around this new house; very poor TV reception, my mobile phone drops out every minute or so, wireless LAN has trouble getting from my bedroom to the living room just below.

And for the last week or so I've been busy with The Tempest, Playhouse Theatre Cheltenham, playing 24th April to 1st May. We have a fine feisty Ariel, a majestic Prospero and a Caliban with the sort of voice you get from a pack of cigarettes for every meal and a bottle of whisky for every breakfast. I'm the assistant lighting person; my housemate Ed is actually doing the lighting, I get to hold ladders, cut gels, focus lanterns, miss cues (quite a lot of those tonight; I'll plead in mitigation that I'd not used a lighting board before, and that I was working from a rather vaguely marked-up script), and operate the lighting board for some of the shows (starting Tuesday; wish me luck ...).

It may be because the last work I read about theatre was The Golden Globe by Varley, but somehow it strikes me as an art for which almost arbitrary technical means could be useful assistance (though, of course, one run on budgets where technology isn't really available; enthusiastic technical types working unpaid at the top of very slightly wobbly four-metre ladders are so much cheaper than little electric motors for three-axis control of lantern orientation). Maybe in professional theatres you do get lighting boards which let you click on a light on the lighting diagram to turn it on and off, rather than "oh, pink centre stage is light #40, isn't it?"

The theatre work is fun, though it's eaten evenings and weekends since Easter (and since well before that for Ed); I suppose the question is what else I'd have been doing in the evenings and weekends. The answer is probably playing Deus Ex 2, a game that I'd been anticipating since finishing Deus Ex in October 2001; amateur theatre is certainly more socially useful, and the sight of a cue kicking in just right to show the fairies that had been posing unseen behind the gauze is rather more rewarding than discovering that all the events in Trier had been orchestrated by a conspiracy of the Illuminati.

Oh no, more books

I think all I can deduce from my recent reading is that I like picaresques; the books I've enjoyed most included

• Pandora's Star by Peter Hamilton (baroque space opera, half a duet though you can't really tell until ten pages from the end)
• March to the Stars by David Weber and John Ringo (the Imperial Marines have crash-landed with the Prince at A. The nearest space craft is in a highly-guarded hostile spaceport at B, antipodal to A, on a planet full of jungle riddled with high-energy predators, and civilisations of aggressive nine-foot horned bipeds. Plot ensues; this is the third volume of the result)
• Niccolo Rising by Dorothy Dunnett (wonderfully complicated character interactions across the length and breadth of 1460s Europe; all I know about that period is the War of the Roses, from a year of history lessons at school, and the War of the Roses is dim background noise in the bits of the series I've read so far)
• Ilium, Dan Simmons. Hugo nominee. Post-Singularity, robot characters in an empty solar system rage against the gods who are occupying themselves by re-staging the Battle of Troy at the foot of Olympus Mons. Humans as pampered toys, of wanton gods or no gods at all. Again the first half of a duet.

27 others in the last three months - full-time employment does cut into even a well-developed book-reading habit.

Any recommendations for recent books? I'm impatiently awaiting The Last Light of the Sun by GGKay, I read Newton's Wake by Ken Macleod and found it rather too much like everything else he's written recently, I read The Confusion by Neal Stephenson and was confused.