Books

“Huh. Looks like rain.” Indeed. We had a catastrophic flood this summer, and as we sit we’re still at about 40" of rain for the year. Average annual is about 35", and most years we’ve lived here, it’s been more like 25-28". Any way you slice it, it’s been a good year for rain. So off-and-on today, it looked like low clouds, bright sunshine, thunderstorms, and everything in between. Book: Embers of War So after I couldn’t retain the will to live (see next review), I switched over to Gareth J. Powell’s excellent “Embers of War” book, the first of a trilogy ...

This is going to be a boring review. I listened to this audiobook, got to the end, found it so utterly unsatisfactory that it deleted itself from my memory. That’s Katabasis for you. Let’s begin: I have a soft spot for Hell. I read the Cliffs Notes for Dante’s Inferno when I was 10, then the actual work many times since I was mid-teens. Orpheus, Hades Town, you name it–I like people’s takes on Damnation. ...

So, on the advice of @QuinnyPig on Twitter, I’ve started listening to “The Phoenix Project” on Audible. In overview, this is a narrative allegory of an IT project gone wrong. I’m up through Chapter 5 as I write this and I’d like to posit a couple things the protagonist is doing wrong. This is one of those books that managers, CIOs, CTOs, and directors will read and treat as Holy Writ, so some perspective seems an order. ...

Meta This chapter alone is SDE Mentoring 101. Many of my mentees through the years have struggled in these areas, and improvement is often following these principles, whether by design or by accident. This is a “soft” skills chapter, yes. Later ones get much more technical. However, most tech ICs (and managers) don’t struggle with technology; we struggle learning these lessons ad-hoc, through experience. – Harold, 08 January 2020 Foreward & Preface They don’t talk down to you. They don’t assume you are an expert. … They take you as you are–programmers who just want to be better. ...

I’m muddling through Thinking Fast and Slow. Much of it sounds like a the Wah-wah sound from a Charlie Brown teacher. Or, if you like, Unikitty talking business However, about once in a chapter, there’s a revelation that’s obvious yet profound. Here is a summary of one: “Extreme outcomes (both high and low) are more likely to be found in small than in large samples” Zzzzzzzz…wait, what? Okay, let’s have an example: ...

The laying-down of the phone continues to bear fruit, except at my waistline which seems to be expanding in direct proportion to my distance from having a woobie smartphone. First up, Neal Stephenson’s tome Cryptonomicon. While written in 2002, this epic work (1168 pages paperback, though I read the kindle edition) presaged much of headlines circa 2013: Cryptography, the emergence of ’technocrats’ who seem to be running the world, and the importance of finding one’s humanity amid it all. ...

I sit here in office 249, staring down the last work week of the year, the Meghan McCain tome Dirty Sexy Money winking at me. Outside, the temperature hovers at 17 F, as arctic air chills most of America. Yes, I blinked, and the weekend was over. So, what happened? First, I saw Despicable Me with Maria Thursday night (yes, a little Daddy/Daughter time). Wonderful film, even if the tickets cost us $3 and the concessions cost $19. I laughed a lot, and Steve Carell is a genius. I’ve subjected Whitney to my (bad) Gru impression since Friday. ...

Finished reading this book Saturday night It was an interesting tale of an entitled, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) whose life completely unravelled in his late 50’s. This true story follows Michael Gates Gill, son of Brendan Gill of The New Yorker magazine fame, graduate of Yale, member of Skull & Bones. Gill’s never worked a real job in his life–he moved from Yale to a prestigious Madison Avenue ad agency, living a jet-set life and leaving his kids behind. As he entered his 50’s, he got downsized and went home (for the first time, really) to a wife he didn’t know and children who grew up without him. He descended further, carrying-on an affair with a younger woman and fathering a child at 60 years old. Then his wife left him. Then his ad clients stopped calling him back. ...

I thought it odd that when I checked-out Rich Dad, Poor Dad as a book-on-tape from the library that the first cassette was not rewound. Nor was it at the end of a side…it seemed as though someone had stopped in the middle of the tape. None of the other tapes were that way. Then I found out why: This book is complete crap. I suffered through half the tape, then took the book back. The author kept spouting platitudes like “Poor people work for money, Rich people have money work for them,” wrapped in some saccharine false anectdote format. ...

Dave Ramsey has recommended it on several occasion… Chris - Jan 2, 2008 Dave Ramsey has recommended it on several occasions, so I added it to my “to read” list a few weeks ago. Looking for something to use a Borders’ gift card on, I started going through that list last week to decide which book to get. After reading some reviews on Amazon and elsewhere about the book, I took it off the list. Seems like you’ve confirmed my assumptions from those reviews… Thanks for the warning about it. ...

Our church Wednesday night group is reading Making Room for Life. The book extols simple living, but not in the systematic, hair-shirted way others have. Instead, it takes some biblical principles as axioms and wraps modern problems around them. The main axiom is the “Hebrew Day”, which you could also rename the “Agrarian Day”. That is, a daily schedule defined, as its name implies, by daylight and darkness–daylight is for productive work, darkness is for rest and individual/communal recuperation. ...

I’d have to take the “radical” option - move to a … Jeff Roberts - Jun 2, 2007 I’d have to take the “radical” option - move to a condo where the only chores are indoor ones, and where my neighbors are right in my face, since we’re all going to be so neighborly anyway.

Snow Crash Consumed this book this weekend, and it was a great mind-F***, similar to the first time you watch “The Matrix”. Where to begin? The central character, Hiro Protagonist (You have to admire a man with the stones to call his protagonist Mr. Protagonist!), lives in a dystopian future overrun by corporations, in which the world is split in two–Reality is, well, the real world, and the Metaverse is the hipper virtual world where everyone has avatars and can interact via being ‘Goggled-in’. ...

Erik suckered me into reading another of his slightly-off books: Gil’s All-Fright Diner Pretty neat, little book, read over 2 hours in 2 days. The premise is essentially a folksy, redneck buddy tale, but these two buddys Duke and Earl (yeah, ask Erik says, “You gotta know something’s up when the two main characters are named Duke and Earl”), they happen to be a Werewolf and a Vampire. Redneck Werewolf and Vamipire… ...

This book bothers me, but it’s not book’s fault. Yes, like most self-help books, it’s overwritten and it restates the obvious – you have to learn to say ‘No’, even if you’re a Christian. This is similar to other self-help genres: You must live within your means to stay solvent, and eat less while exercising to lose weight. It’s not like these things are rocket science. Thing is, I have boundary issues, but for a weird reason: I’m very, very selfish. For most of my life until I became a Christian, if something benefitted me or made my life easier, even if it was WRONG, I could rationalize it. This lead to me being a friendless, fat, whiny, sociopathic, self-righteous sot. Envision Comic book guy, and you’d have me, circa 14 years old: ...

Dropped the beamer at Paul’s foreign auto (2nd street & MLK ) and then walked the 2.5 miles back to Lexmark in about 30 minutes. Good exercise for my pulled hamstring and just good “me” time. Read John Eldridge’s Wild At Heart over the weekend I must say, REALLY challenging book, written like a bad Freshman Composition paper. How shall we convince our audience to get off the couch and be real men? Let’s quote a bazillion “Real men” and make constant appeals to emotion. Let’s move from that to some Dave Ramsey-esque personal anecdotes that (obviously) apply to everyone out there. Let’s speak of broad vistas, of mountain climbing, kayaking, and other rather extreme sports. Did some of John’s buddies die doing those sports? Yep…but hey, that’s the point right? Life’s an adventure, not a burden. ...

As I sit at my desk on a sunny day, I’m contemplating Murphy’s law, which states that whatever can go wrong will, at the worst possible time. :-) today, would seem like that day. I came in this morning to merge and commit some changes to the library, and then do about 3 hours of administrative/clerical stuff that needed to be done, helping out my programmers as needed. Yeah, about that… ...

went on a book-reading bender from 3-8 today and read all of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 600+ pages at a sitting can cause brain warpage, so forgive me if this rambles. Also, this probably has SPOILERS, so don’t read on if you want to read the book for yourself. Now in his 6th year at Hogwart’s, Harry’s moved past pissy adolescence into likeable pre-adulthood. Ron, Hermione, and the other Gryffindors are learning about life and love, all while the wizarding world explodes with death and intrigue as Lord Voldemort reigns again. ...

A book on loan from my friend the Mac fiend, this is the first in a series by Roger Zelazny, and it’s a quick involving read at only 176 pages. The guy’s terse and vivid and the action never stops, but I found the basic premise to be so much Fantasy that the characters were hard to get into. Basically, the idea is that there’s one “true” city (Amber) and that all the other universes and dimensions are “shadows” of that one. Amber’s ruled by a central monarchy, and that monarch has died (or…something…). Anyway, the remaining 9 boys and 6 girls of his brood all fight it out to see who can recapture the throne. ...

Just finished David Owen’s dense-yet-inspiring biography of Xerography and its inventor, Chester Carlson, entitled Copies in Seconds In his first few chapters, Owen tries to imbue his fascination for the ordinary (to those of Generation X and afterwards) office copier. Frankly, his treatment of the development of copying is boring. I don’t care about scribes, Gutenburg, or Ditto machines. He spends inordinate prose on the distinction between “copying” and “duplication”, and why the idea of ‘copying’ is so important. ...