Day 89 - 4 chapters into Daughter of Time. Where is this book going?

I have read four chapters of Daughter of Time now. It is going good till now, I have absolutely no clue about the history or England. A cursory reading of the Wikipedia pages of House York and Richard III himself, took care of that (partially). The story itself is going to probably revolve around Richard III, his brother Edward, the two nephews, Tyrell and two of his hench men.

The way everyone has a new story or a new view point to add to the story of Richard III is totally in line with how History is as one chooses to see it. As a friend of mine put it one fine evening, over dinner, “All objectivity is lost when you are reading history. It is not just facts, dates, causes and effects anymore. It’s much more than that.”

Why everyone keeps coming to visit Alan Grant is not broached in the book at all. This is the fifth book in the series, and I feel like there are some presumptions that were made about the reader’s knowledge of Alan’s temperament. How he was good with faces, or only people interested him and not generalisations. The author doesn’t spend too much time on these points and simply brushes past them.

One final note: The endgame of this book isn’t clear to me. It’s a mystery, one that (probably?) can’t be solved in the old fashioned sense of the word. There can be theories and facts that refute those theories, or there can be theories that don’t have any facts refuting them, but none proving that that was indeed what happened. So, where is this book going? That’s an exciting situation to be in. To not know where a book’s plot is headed. A refreshing change!

The Digital Ocean script is almost done now, it can create a snapshot. Deleting the older snapshot though just became a bit more trickier. As it happens, the time taken to create a snapshot is ~20-25 minutes. I never measured it, but it takes a significant amount of time. So, to delete the older snapshot after the newer snapshot has been succesfully created, we would need another cron job, running at a higher frequency that polls for multiple automatically created droplets and deletes the older one if found.

All of this so that billing can be kept at a minimum. I am writing the scripts in Ruby, the second script should be easy enough. I have decided on a pattern for naming the automatically created droplets, so as to not accidentally delete intentionally stored droplets at any point in time.

POST #89 is OVER