Books

Bobbie and I traveled to Las Vegas in June and had a great time. Part of the trip was the Usability Professional’s Association conference, which was really cool, and the other part was pure vacation. We spent 4 days at the [M Resort](http://www.themresort.com/" title=“The M Resort) well South of the strip. The M is an interesting casino; they focus on the locals while catering to conferences. We ate at Anthony’s where we had an amazing steak and at Anthony’s Burgers and Brews, which was just ok. Their buffet is award winning and a couple of locals highly recommended it to us, but we did not eat there. ...

I listened to this story as an audiobook and it took a very long time, like 3 weeks. I made the mistake of reading reviews of this book on Amazon before listening to it, for the most part they were very negative, and they tainted my expectations. What I expected was an even slower telling with even less forward momentum. But what I got was a bit different, it is true that this book and the following book do move slower. Mr. Martin decided to make the individual chapters longer and cover fewer characters in the 4th and 5th books. So it does slow the story down considerably, and I have to say that I do not like it, but the plot does move forward and the events that take place held my interest. ...

I have watched the Walking Dead TV show for a while now, it is a guilty pleasure that neither my wife nor child will to watch, kind of a “dad’s time” thing. I am not a “zombie” or horror film/book fan. I do not like gory movies or detailed gore filled descriptions in books. But after hearing friends talk about how much they liked The Walking Dead I decided to give the TV show a try. I was hooked right from the first episode. The acting is good, the location is my hometown of Atlanta, and the gore is usually not over the top. ...

I bought this book used from Powell’s Book Store in Portland, it is a bit beat up but I think that is fitting condition for this story. I was lucky enough to meet Rudy Rucker at a DragonCon years ago. At the time I did not know who he was but he was on a panel with William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Anton Wilson talking about the future of the future. Out of all the panelist what he had to say the most interesting. Shortly after that panel I made my way through his Software, Wetware, Hardware books, along with a horror story that gave me a week of nightmares. ...

I put off reading this book for what felt like a long time. I heard a lot of negative things about it from various podcasts and blogs when it first came out and I figured I would read it later. After awhile coworkers were referring to passages of the book and quoting it a lot, so I decided I finally needed to read it. I got it as an audiobook from Audible narrated by Dylan Baker and it took me two weeks to listen to all 25 hours of it. Mister Baker did a great job narrating the book, I really enjoyed his performance. ...

With the “new iPad”, aka iPad 3 I decided to give digital comic books a try. As a rule, comics and in fact any graphics that have enough resolution look amazing on the iPad 3, type is super crisp, colors are ultra-vibrant, and the detail is incredible. After some research I decided to buy a subscription to the “Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited” which offers over 10,000 comics for an annual fee. Wow, that sounds great. But sadly it does not work on the iPad, in fact it requires Adobe Flash to work on any machine. ...

Tony Hsieh is an amazing guy with an amazing vision who has surrounded himself with really amazing people. If you have any interest in how a business should be run please read this book. The way Zappos functions really is how I believe a company should be run, not just retail business but all businesses. It can change the way you think at a very deep level and make you very unhappy with the way things are being run by almost every other business out there. ...

This book popped up in my Audible recommendations and it intrigued me. Written by a former FBI agent with business professor and psychologist Marvin Karlins the book is like a quick guide to reading people’s body language. I enjoyed the contents of this book and do recommend it for everyone, not just business people and card players, but if the book was properly edited it wouldn’t be much more than a pamphlet. The audiobook is 7 hours and 24 minutes long and I think it would be about 2 and a half hours long if all the useless repetition and rambling was removed. That would make it a much better book. ...

I listened to this audiobook narrated by Roy Dotrice while commuting and working out. Wow, these books are long, this one is 47 hours and 40 minutes! That is almost 2 full days of audio. According to Amazon the paperback is 1216 pages long. I wont go into any details about the story because I don’t want to spoil anything and if you have not read the second book I recommend you don’t read the publisher’s summary below. ...

I listened to this audiobook from Audible while commuting and working out. I love me some Google. I use Gmail as my only email, I use Google Voice as my main phone number, I use Google search exclusively, I love Google Maps and use it almost daily, I use Google Earth to geotag my photographs, and I watch videos on YouTube almost every day. I think this book does a great job teaching us about how Google thinks as a company and how its founders see the purpose and direction of the company. I also think the book is a very honest look into Google, it exposes many of the rough spots the company has experienced in more detail than many of us know. ...