Just finished Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night. The 217 page novel is about the world of an autistic English teenager named Christopher adept at math and intensely logical but unable to express emotion or understand humor. I found the tale riveting, and the last half of the book from its climax through the falling action of his journey to London to find his mother reinforces how scary modern life is. ...
Just got through with Dashiell Hammett’s famous The Maltese Falcon, the prototypical and oft-imitated detective novel. It’s a quick read, at only 217 pages, with good characters, some murders and a little mystery. Overall, I didn’t like it…long way to go for an elliptical story and characters I didn’t care about.
I’m struggling with this latest technical book I’m reading, J2EE Development without EJB Basically, it’s hard to digest, with lots of high-level enterprise construction pieces, but not much to hang it on. I’ve never built applications the way the author has for the past 5 years, so things he finds as a matter of course, I don’t intuitively understand. I’m blogging about it, basically so I can try to synthesize what I’ve read in the book so far. ...
Josh, take note: I finished a Dave Barry book, Boogers are my Beat It’s a bit of fluff, but militantly so: Barry sets us straight at the beginning that he sometimes does journalism, sometimes does reality, but most often prefers the hilariously mundane. His columns about his Miami-fried hide landing in Grank Lakes, North Dakota during January had me laughing for minutes at a time. Still he can be serious: His essay about Flight 93 was worth the price of the book alone. ...
Got back on the Book-reading bandwagon the past few days, this time with a technical slant: Pattern Hatching: Design Patterns Applied This book is sort of a meta-meta-patterns book, that is it’s a book about a book about patterns. You see, computer software is a science of building abstractions; at the lowest level, computers execute a series of instructions, one after another, at blazing speed. If you group these instructions together from start to finish with one purpose, you have an algorithm. If you factor-out common parts of several agorithms, you have subroutines, functions, or procedures. At this point, you’re two “levels of abstraction” away from the way the computer actually works. ...
This has been probably the best literary week of my life, at least since I left college: I’ve read two software books and one pure pleasure book, a light football-theme paperback called The Way We Played the Game. The book describes football in a small Michigan town in 1903, when it really was a deadly game: No pads, no face guards, no hard helmets, no neutral zone, no forward pass. It was a pure running sport, with a few lateral passes thrown-in. People died all the time from internal injuries, concussions, and the game itself was probably the most violent ‘sport’ since the ancient Greek pankration. ...
I’m reading Evan Thomas’s eponymous biography of John Paul Jones (“Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy”) and came across a passage that reminded me of the phrase in English that I hate most of all: Elders and Betters As in, “Respect your elders and betters,” the corollary to the phrase “Children should be seen and not heard”. I have no problem with the ‘respect your elders’ piece, but ‘betters’ irks me. I hold, and always shall hold, that there is no one in this country intrinsically ‘better’ than anyone else–No lords, laidies, dukes, vicars, or kings, nor pope. ...
Lots of randomness today: Learned that the reality TV phenomenon is likely to continue, as it’s sheer economics: Whereas scripted programs must be rerun in order to recoup production costs, networks can make a profit on a single showing of a reality program (no pesky writers or actors to pay…). I wonder how long it’ll take us to get to the “Jumping For Dollars” scene in The Running Man, where some hapless contestent grasps for $100 bills as Rotweilers nip at his heels. ...