Category: Books

I read this audiobook written by Thomas Sowell and narrated by Tom Weiner from Audible.

"Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses."

Read that sentence above a couple of times, it took me awhile to realize just how true and important it is. I learned from this book that government interference in a free and open market is the source of most of the world’s economic pain. I believe the world would be a much better place if everyone understood the lessons contained in this book.

Do yourself a favor, find this book and read the summary that is the last chapter of the book. You owe it to yourself and the community you live in.

From the publisher:

The fourth edition of Basic Economics is both expanded and updated. A new chapter on the history of economics itself has been added, and the implications of that history examined. A new section on the special role of corporations in the economy has been added to the chapter on government and big business, among other additions throughout the book.Basic Economics, which has now been translated into six languages, has grown so much that a large amount of material in the back of the book in previous editions has now been put online instead, so the book itself and its price will not have to expand. The central idea of Basic Economics, however, remains the same: that the fundamental facts and principles of economics do not require jargon, graphs, or equations, and can be learned in a relaxed and even enjoyable way.

I rate this book a 10 out of 10 and a must read for anyone.

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 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.

Our room was very nice with a King sized bed and a large soaking tub, but the view was not very appealing.

While I was at the conference, Bobbie took advantage of the beautiful swimming pool and spa. She came back each day raving about how wonderful the spa was with people waiting on her hand and foot. One day she had her hands “done” and the next her feet. I think she really enjoyed herself.

For the weekend we moved downtown to the Golden Nugget on Fremont Street. I chose this hotel because of their amazing swimming pool and their wide array of poker tournaments.

We spent a lot of time at the pool and I must have gone down the slide 20 times or more. In the middle of the pool is an aquarium full of fish and a handful of sharks, and if that is not cool enough, there is a water slide that twists its way down through the middle of it. A few times I was able to slow myself down and actually see the sharks swimming around me on my way down. It was a lot of fun.

On Saturday morning I played in a sit-and-go poker tournament with 10 players, I placed 5th, which was ok as it was my first time playing poker with strangers. Sadly I did not get a chance to play any other poker.

In between we visited the strip and spent time at New York New York, where I played some blackjack; the MGM, which is undergoing remodeling and is a total mess; Caesar’s, where we watched the animatronic show; the Bellagio, where we watched the fountain, ate at the buffet, and had some desert. Bobbie also visited the Coca-Cola store and the M&M museum.

We also visited the Pinball Museum where I got to play Xenon, my favorite game from middle school, and Getaway, a game that I played for many hours while in boot camp. Bobbie found a Doctor Who pinball machine that was a lot of fun.

Saturday night we got to see the Penn & Teller show at the Rio, it was an amazing show and we had a great time. We even got our program signed and pictures taken after the show.
And, we also stumbled onto the World Series of Poker at the Rio. We watched some game play from afar, took some pictures of the final table, and bought some souvenirs. Didn’t see anyone I recognized, but I didn’t look very hard.

The Smoking!

The only really negative thing about our trip was the amount of cigarette smoke. Everywhere we went we were assaulted by the overpowering stench of cigarette smoke. I laughed pretty hard when I saw the non-smoking section in the M Resort casino, in total it was 9 slot machines placed between a wall and bar area that allowed smoking.

The only non-smoking places we found all week were our hotel rooms and the room at the Golden Nugget where they held the tournament.

The smoke was so bad that I would think real hard about returning to Las Vegas for a vacation.

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 plan on listening to the 5th book in a month or so, hopefully I will still remember what happened in this book.

From Wikipedia:

The War of the Five Kings is coming to an end. Robb Stark, Joffrey Baratheon, Renly Baratheon, and Balon Greyjoy are all dead, and King Stannis Baratheon has gone to the aid of the Wall, where Jon Snow has become Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. King Tommen Baratheon, Joffrey’s eight-year-old brother, now rules in King’s Landing under the watchful eye of his mother, the Queen Regent Cersei Lannister. Cersei’s father Tywin is dead, murdered by his son Tyrion, who has fled the city. With these two men gone, as well as no longer having to deal with Joffrey, there are no more checks on Cersei and she is essentially Ruling Queen of the Seven Kingdoms in all but name. Now that Cersei finally stands at the height of power and her enemies are scattered to the winds, in a grim irony it quickly becomes clear that she is incapable of wielding the power she has killed and manipulated so many to acquire, and she spirals into self-destruction.

Meanwhile, Sansa Stark is still in hiding in the Vale, protected by Petyr Baelish, who has secretly murdered his wife Lysa Arryn and named himself Protector of the Vale and guardian of eight-year-old Lord Robert Arryn.

I rate this book a 6 out of 10 as long as you have read the first 3 books, don’t read it without reading the others first.

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.

At DragonCon 2011 I attended a couple of panels where actors from the show discussed their experiences. Questions from the audience referred to the comic book a lot, as in almost all of the questions were either about what it was like to film the show in the Atlanta area or about how the show differs from the comic book’s story line.

As a part of my iPad comic book exploration I decided to give The Walking Dead comic a try and see if the story is as good in comic form as it is on TV. To my delight the comic is even better than the TV show.

The plot and premise of the comic and TV show are the same, but I think the comic book is a lot more realistic. The most glaring point to me is that the comic does not shy away from the “Z” word like the show does, the show calls them “walkers” which is just silly and painful to hear.

Also, the comic book is much more open about the day-to-day frustrations felt by the characters. They show a lot more stress, have many more mental breakdowns, and are reacting to their situation in a way that I find more realistic than the aimless wandering they appear to be doing on the TV show.

The comic books are well illustrated, the dialog is great, the pacing is near perfection, and the tension feels real.

P.S.
I recently attended Timegate, a Dr. Who and Stargate fan convention in Atlanta. I attended a panel on The Walking Dead with Michael Cowart, Mike Faber, Leo Thompson who opened my eyes to the idea that the comic and TV shows diverging is not a bad thing. It will provide opportunities for surprises and allow characters to develop in different and hopefully interesting ways.

From AMC:

Based on one of the most successful and popular comic books of all time, written by Robert Kirkman, AMC’s The Walking Dead captures the ongoing human drama following a zombie apocalypse. The series follows a group of survivors, led by police officer Rick Grimes, played by Andrew Lincoln (Love Actually, Teachers, Strike Back), who are traveling in search of a safe and secure home. However, instead of the zombies, it is the living who remain that truly become the walking dead. Jon Bernthal (The Pacific, The Ghost Writer) plays Shane Walsh, Rick’s sheriff’s department partner before the apocalypse, and Sarah Wayne Callies (Prison Break), is Rick’s wife, Lori Grimes. Additional cast include: Laurie Holden, Steven Yeun, Norman Reedus, Jeffrey DeMunn, Chandler Riggs, Iron E. Singleton and Melissa McBride. Guest stars include: Lauren Cohan, Scott Wilson and Pruitt Taylor Vince.

From Image Comics:

An epidemic of apocalyptic proportions has swept the globe, causing the dead to rise and feed on the living. In a matter of months, society has crumbled: There is no government, no grocery stores, no mail delivery, no cable TV. Rick Grimes finds himself one of the few survivors in this terrifying future. A couple months ago he was a small town cop who had never fired a shot and only ever saw one dead body. Separated from his family, he must now sort through all the death and confusion to try and find his wife and son. In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally begin living.

I rate the TV show a 7 out of 10 and the comic books a 9 out of 10. Both are a must for fans of the zombie genre.

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.

A couple of years later I found a book named “Gnarl!” which is full of short stories that combine fiction, science, and. Several of the stories I had to reread over and over again to feel like I understood them, a few I eventual gave up on ever understanding. I really enjoyed being challenged by those stories; it may have been the first time my mind was stretched in that way by a book of fiction. Good stuff.

The easiest way I can describe Hollow Earth is Tom Sawyer meets Edgar Allen Poe in a story written by Jules Vern. At its heart this is an adventure book about a boy in 1800’s America traveling with his boyhood companion who happens to be a family slave beginning in rural Virginia, making their way to Richmond, and then into the center of the Earth and back out the other side.

I enjoyed reading this book, but it did not draw me in the way other Rudy Rucker books have. The pacing was slow, the dialog did not always flow, it just didn’t work for me.

From the publisher:

In 1836, Mason Algiers Reynolds leaves his family’s Virginia farm with his father’s slave, a dog, and a mule. Branded a murderer, he finds sanctuary with his hero, Edgar Allan Poe, and together they embark on an extraordinary expedition to the South Pole, and the entrance to the Hollow Earth. It is there, at the center of the world, where strange physics, strange people, and stranger creatures abound, that their bizarre adventures truly begin.

I rate this book a 5 out of 10 and recommend it to any fans of Rudy Rocker, for those unfamiliar with him I recommend reading Gnarl!

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.

Walter Isaacson had unprecedented access to Steve Jobs, his family, his friends, employees at Apple, and a lot of other people in Steve’s life. I don’t think any author has ever had that kind of access to a person like Jobs.

The details in the book are amazing, if you have an interest in the history of Apple and want to know much of its history, then this book is for you. If you are looking for a memoir, I don’t that will ever happen. Steve Jobs just wasn’t that kind of person. Maybe he didn’t have the type of personality that would let him share many of his real emotions. And maybe he just didn’t have the emotions and feelings that many people do.

There is so much in this book, I am still processing a lot of it.

At the moment my favorite insight from the book is about how Jobs used prototypes and mockups to determine what would work best. It was done with the iPhone, iPad, and even the Apple stores. I hope companies everywhere listen to that, quick prototypes put in front of users and decision makers early and often will save time and money and lead to better products every single time.

From the publisher:

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

I rate this book a 9 out of 10, anyone interested in biographies, computer history, Apple Computer, or Steve Jobs will absolutely love this book.