This is a review for the Mistborn series from Brandon Sanderson, covering both Mistborn, The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages.

I'm the kind of person who gets annoyed quickly by even small inconsistencies in plot, world setup, and character behavior. Yet I found this book thoroughly enjoyable. There is a fantastic big story ark spanning over all three books, yet every single book also stands well on his own. The way magic works in the Mistborn triology …

Rackspace is rightfully praised for its use and development of open source technologies like OpenStack. However, I have had some rather shocking experiences when contacting their technical support. What I have seen was in fact sufficently bad for me to feel the need to document it here as a warning for others. The bottom line is, all support agents I was in contact with had minimal expertise (which is disappointing, but not that unusual), but (and this is the truly …

This is a review for the second book in the Koban series by Stephen W. Bennett.

Apart from a few incongruities I liked the first book of this series ("Koban") a lot and was looking forward to the sequel. Unfortunately "The Mark of Koban" fell short of my expectations. Instead of improving upon the few things that didn't feel quite right in the first book, the sequel feels a lot less thought-through.

The story can easily be summarized as follows …

This is a review for the first book in the Koban series by Stephen Bennett.

This review may sound rather critical, so let me begin by stating that overall, I enjoyed the book a lot. However, there were three issues that really disappointed/annoyed me disproportionally. So when continuing to read, keep in mind that these are really the only negative points that I noticed, i.e. in every other aspect the book is great.

The first issue that really …

This is a review for the first book in the Rho Agenda series by Richard Phillips.

I've stopped reading this after the first ~20% of the book, so the following may contain spoilers from up to then. That said, in my opinion most the story is so predictable that reading this is really not going to ruin anything for you.

So, what happens? Well, the book starts with a just-graduated postdoc setting up an experiment on a crashed ufo. Apparently …