MyVerbalOutlet

I wasn’t going to go anywhere near another Wheel of Time book because from my point of view the wheels had come off it a long time ago. No one involved in the Wheel of Time had lived up to their responsibilities not the publisher, author, or editor. The storyline got so out of the author’s control it had gotten up to eleven books and the end was nowhere in sight. When I heard that the author Robert Jordan past away after completing the eleventh book I figured that I would never read the conclusion to the story. However Robert Jordan knew he was ill and found another author to finish the series.

Brandon Sanderson had a written a stand alone debut novel Elantris and followed it up with the Mistborn Trilogy. I ended up reading all of Sanderson’s books and I loved them all. Sanderson is an imaginative writer who brings new approaches to the fantasy genre. If I hadn’t enjoyed reading Sanderson’s books as much as I did I would not have bought “The Gathering Storm”.

With Brandon Sanderson authoring the story now this was the Wheel of Time as it should have been written since book four of the series. There is much less of the overly verbose world building that plagued the Wheel of Time series. The female characters aren’t the one dimensional caricatures Robert Jordan turned them into. Brandon Sanderson did what needed to be done in “The Gathering Storm” he pared the story down and moved the plot forward.

The plot focused much more on the main character Rand something that has been missing from the storyline. Robert Jordan included so many minor characters in the books he wrote that giving them story time meant less time for the characters who drive the plot. Reading a Wheel of Time book by Robert Jordan had become an exercise in frustration because he wasn’t moving the plot forward. Sanderson balanced the story very well by developing the main character and the main supporting character’s stories. I read “The Gathering Storm” in a week and loved every minute of it.

“The Gathering Storm” isn’t the final volume of the Wheel of Time because there was no possible way to wrap up a story as big as the Wheel of Time in one volume. There are two more books to follow after “The Gathering Storm” and I am now looking forward to reading them and finally finishing The Wheel of Time.

I moved my site to a new VPS provider and I am pretty happy with the performance so far. I also fixed the mod_rewrite issue in the process so links work on my site now.

I am putting this here because it took me way to long to find this information today.

Reference Links for this information:
[custom-validation-attributes]
[msdn]

To create a custom DataAnnotations validation attribute inherit from ValidationAttribute and implement IsValid.

public class CustomAttributeName : ValidationAttribute
{
    public override bool IsValid(object value)
    {
        bool validFlag = false;
        // perform validation here
        if (validFlag)
            return true;
        else
            return false;
    }
}

In the Model Validation Meta class use the custom validation attribute like this.

[MetadataType(typeof(EntityMetadata))]
public partial class Entity
{
    public class EntityMetadata
    {
        [CustomAttributeName(ErrorMessage=" [Required] ")]
        public object FieldName { get; set; }
    }
}

I had quite a wonderful weekend. The weather was unseasonably warm for November, Saturday was almost 70°F and Sunday was 75°F. I raked a lot of leaves over the two days so I feeling kind of sore right now. Saturday the wife and I got out for dinner alone and that was real nice. One thing that is hard to remember to do is to slow down and not feel rushed when the kids aren’t with us. We did a little shopping and then we home and watched movies until we were falling asleep on the couch.

A friend of mine pointed me at a new PC game called Torchlight. Torchlight is a lot like Blizzard’s Diablo games which I loved. I have been playing Torchlight since Friday night and I have been having a total blast.

Sunday the Bears showed they really need to rework the offensive line as well as the defense. I think the reason why the Bears are having so much trouble running the ball this year is they aren’t opening up any lanes for the runners.  Its great we have a good quarterback finally but if the offensive line can’t open any holes to run and they can’t block well enough to give him time to throw the ball we don’t have much hope. The defense has suffered several key players being injured so its really a suboptimal group on the field. For a Bears fan to see the defense play so badly is a heart breaker. The Bears are 4 and 4 now and I don’t see the hope of much improvement over the rest of the season.

I watched the demo video at engadget of the new Motorola Droid phone. I must say I was pretty impressed. Droid won’t get me to switch from my iPhone for serveral reasons. I love the multimedia functionality of the iPhone, the apps and games I use, and easy sync/management with my home computer.

However there are several features of the Motorola Droid phone I would love to see on the iPhone.

• A combined inbox view for email accounts
• The new Google Maps for Mobile software
• The doc and car doc accessories and the automatic mode change

If the iPhone had the new Google Maps for Mobile and a car dock I would order that right now.  The home dock for the Motorola Droid is really cool to.

I hope some competition drives Apple to continue to make the iPhone the best mobile device.