I'm trying to clear some of my backlog of old "read this" blog posts... so I ended up purchasing some books...

• Getting Things Done
• Purple Cow
• Permission Marketting
• Free Prize Inside
• Pragmatic Programmer
• Death by Meeting
• Five Dysfunctions of a Team

An interesting mix of marketting, team building, software, and personal development... should make for some good reading when they get here.

Just finished reading How Would You Move Mount Fuji?... An interesting book (with lots of quotes from Chris Sells <G>)

I never got a huge amount of puzzle questions, and I tend to not like giving puzzle questions to candidates... I like much more technically oriented questions, I tend to interview developers mostly, so I stick to coding questions as much as possible. Of course the challenge there is coming up with good questions that candidates haven't heard before...

Apparently I need to read Competitive Advantage according to Lutz, of course he also said it was a great cure for insomnia :)

Hmm... but this would require me to have the time to read it... or buy it...

Just noticed I didn't post my current book... John Adams by David McCullough. So far it is very well written and engaging. Unfortunately I'm so wrapped up with my work that I have continually been shortening my coffee/read time in the morning... i'm down to less than 30 minutes...

I'm about 100 pages into it - probably the thing I like best is the feel of the book. The small details about oil lamps on the streets and Abagail Adams churning her own butter gives you a sense for what things where like then. Even thought books like Lies My Teacher Told Me seem to indicate that everyone was a fraud-and-evil-yet-history-books-make-them-heros (the FAEYHBMTH syndrome), this book seems somewhat balanced - although obviously a big fan of John Adams.

First, looking at my blog I just realized how long it took me to read this.

Next... some history...

I've got a long list to work on, but unfortunately I didn't have it with me when I went to the bookstore tonight. So, I picked up Fast Food Nation, something my wife and I have both been wanting to read for a long time.

Finished Lord of the Rings the other day... Bill (friend with no Blog) that gave me a great list of books, gave me another list... I've shortened the description, but here it is...

US History

Brothers Founding:  Each chapter covers a discrete part of US history (involving the founding fathers) showing how differing philosophies and compromises molded our country.   Great writing…very easy to digest…fascinating stories.  Chapters include a discussion of the Aaron Burr/Alexander Hamilton duel, negotiations that led to Washington DC being made the capital, the “hidden” slave debate, etc.  I believe that this was either a Pulitzer or National Book Award winner.  I bought the hardback a year or so ago, but I’ve seen the paperback – for cheap – at Costco in the last month or so.

John Adams:  Excellent, very readable biography of John Adams.  Interesting to read this after seeing Zinn characterize all the founding father’s as wealthy businessmen (not that Adam’s was poor by any means…but he had to watch his income!)  Between the stories relayed in Founding Brothers and here it’s a wonder our country survived its infancy.  This book was last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt:  Teddy Roosevelt did more before 30 (hell make that 20) than a dozen normal men in their lifetime.  Again…I don’t care that Zinn pitches him as a “war monger” there’s a lot more to the story here.  This is a dense book so you might want to take the others first, but it’s a great read.  There’s a sequel that covers his presidency (entitled Theodore Rex – I’m a quarter through that).  Rise won the Pulitzer a dozen or so years ago.

NOTE:  If you go down the path above…I’d recommend the goal of tackling 2 presidents a year!  There are a ton of great biographies of the presidents and you get the benefit of learning general US history as well.  This project will take you the next 25 years.

Nothing Like it in the World and Undaunted Courage:  Okay…so Stephen Ambrose has taken some lumps as a historian but so what!  These books are fun and informative.  “Nothing Like it” is about the construction of the transatlantic railroad.  Undaunted Courage is about the journeys of Lewis and Clark.  Both recommended.

World Events

From Beirut to Jerusalem:  Excellent, excellent, excellent viewpoint on what’s happening between Israel and Palestine.  Sadly it’s out of date regarding recent events since it was written about 10 years ago…but the fundamental information regarding WHY these people hate and distrust each other is still valid.  Written by Thomas Friedman who was a New York Times correspondent (winning 2 Pulitzer Prizes for reporting) in the middle east for 10 years.  Although Friedman is Jewish I think he gives a very fair & impartial treatment to the subject.

The Cult at the End of the World

Fun

Orchid Fever:  Very quick read on the weird and wacky world of Orchid collecting and breeding…filled with smugglers, deceit, and Indiana Jones type adventure (all true!).  Interesting that one of the world’s most famous Orchid smugglers is in the movie “Adaptation” that was just released.  Not sure how the 2 are related – just goes to show that the weird stuff you read today is tomorrow’s popular media!

The Professor and the Madman:  Another quick read…this time on the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.  Turns out that one of the key goals of the OED was not only to catalog all of the words in the English language – but to include passages showing the different usage of the word over time.  For these passages, the editors wanted the earliest published reference.  To accomplish this task they asked the public to submit these references.  One person sent in something like 15K slips of paper…of which a huge number were used in the OED.  When the editor tracked this person down it was discovered the author was an inmate at an insane asylum (held there for a terrible murder!) 

Hinge Factor and What If?:  Different books that cover similar ground.  Hinge Factor looks at famous battles and tries to discern the pivotal issue that determined the outcome.  What If? speculates on what would have happened if famous battles had turned out differently.  These are both fun and a quick read.  There’s even a “What if? 2” but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.

Finished 1421 today. Very interesting read. The author is very pleased with himeself, but overall does a great job conveying his view of the facts. He often tries to point out that he might not be 100% correct, but he makes a great case for the 1421~3 treasure fleets of China visiting every continent (including Antartica!).

I find it interesting that one of the things that bothered me about this book is his depiction of Christopher Columbus. From my other reading I am fairly convinced that Columbus (and most people in the 15th century) knew the Earth was round. In addition, when Columbus returned home he knew he reached the Americas. In his journal he wrote so much. Menzies acknowledges that Columbus knew about the Earth’s shape (in fact, he had maps guiding him, Menzies says), however Menzies claims that Columbus thought he reached China.

I was talking about this book with my in-laws (my father (in-law) lent me the book). We got on the subject of the obviously wrong portrayal of Columbus that school children are taught and I brought up Helen Keller. According to Lies My Teacher Told Me Keller was mostly know to her contemporaries for her radical socialist views. Sure she had triumphed over her disabilities, but her most important contribution was around political activism. Today none of that is taught to children. My brother’s question was simple – Why?

I don’t have an answer.

Back to 1421. The book was a little dry, and I got tired of Menzies continued attempts to convince the reader that he had enough credibility to write and research this topic. I still enjoyed the book. The evidence is quite interesting, and there are lots of side stories that are really intriguing – like the Bimini Road. Menzies contents that the road was constructed by the Chinese to beach their huge junks and then be able to float them again after the repairs.

I don’t think anyone can really disagree that the Chinese were millennia ahead of European culture and science. Guns, Germs and Steel has some interesting data about why the Chinese advanced so much faster than Europe, but Diamond credited the diversity of Europe as to why they ended up winning out over China. Menzies has a different view, in that a single event in 1421 (or 1422?) where a freak lightning strike that leveled the Forbidden City and sent China into a isolationist period as being the tipping point for China.

The amazing thing that I find about 1421 is the just the concept that a single event could have so changed the course of history. Even if there was no truth to the story, the plausabity of the story is compelling. If lightning hadn’t have struck we most likely would have seen China shore up it’s positions in North and South America, New Zealand, Australia, Africa, and India. It wouldn’t be too hard to imagine that the Chinese, and not European people would have colonized the world.

It should be interesting to see if Menzies is validated – as it would surely mean the rewriting of a lot of history books.

My father-in-law lent me a new book to read - 1421: The Year China Discovered America. Its about how the Chinese came to the Americas long before Columbus... not a big revolution (especially given my recent reads of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Lies My Teacher Told Me").

Currently reading Live from Bahgdad by Robert Wiener. I have the HBO version Tivo'd, but I'm waiting to finish the book before I watch it. It must be amazing to have a job where you literally have to put your life on the line. Makes me a lot less stressed about making a big presentation to management. :)

I know it has become trite to say it, but Tivo is one of the world's best technology product.

Hmm... kinda finished Fear, however i ended up just skimming the end. I agreed with a bunch of Glassner's general ideas (media over hypes things and misses core issues) however at times he seemed to go over the deep end. Potraying a mass conspiracy against large groups of people. He makes a case for a consipiracy (in effect) between the White House and media companies to hype illegal drugs as an evil thing. I agree that the illegal drug use is probably a smaller issue that abuse of legal drugs, but I don't buy that there is a consipracy. Glassner fell short of actually saying it was a blatant conspiracy...

Anyway, it was still a good read and had lots of good contrary facts against illegal drug abuse, crime rates, teen pregnancy, airplane crashes, and road rage as the biggest fears we should have. Glassner is obviously strongly against guns, which were probably the single most consistently blamed evil in the book.

I have always felt the evening news over dramatizes everything (Windstorm 2002, etc.), and I guess the nice thing is that this book validates my bullshit detector. Net result - don't trust mainstream news.

Interestingly enough, it looks like weblogs might be a good source of information... at least according to the Microcontent News site.

In process of reading The Culture of Fear. Interesting book, however I was a bit suprised to find such a strong left wing bent. I believe myself to a financial conservitive, but a social moderate. I always like to read a wide variety of opinions - another reason that I liked Zinn's work so much. I'm not a socialist, but I still liked the book.

In my new education of weblogs and what is really happening out there, I came across the google bombs, warchalking, and other fun. Pretty cool stuff. I really like the stigmergy article that Sam Ruby pointed us all to. Oddly I can't retrace my steps to how I found it, but Microcontent News has a great set of google bomb articles.

Question of the day: Why does the "Mars" explorer not support an actual history list? (Note: Mars is the codename for the MSN Explorer program that hosts IE inside of cooler looking chrome).

Just finished The Nudist on the Late Shift. Another interesting book from the corporate list. Eventual I'll figure out what the overall theme of the bookes are. What is the larger message they are trying to convey? ... or have I just watched one too many X-Files episode.

Spent a big chunk of today playing 6 player Halo over at a friend’s house. That game is so amazing. We talk a little bit about the idea of video games being a spectator sport. Not a new or novel concept. In fact there are people getting paid to play video games today. There are, of course, professional testers and play testers, but then there are also those people paid to play massively multiplayer games (like Everquest and Ashron’s Call). I have a friend that was given free online time with AC if he agreed to tutor people online. The interesting thing was that there was a team meeting for a large division at work where there were probably 100 spectators watching a Halo tournament. How long until there is an arena? :)

Finished the weasel, but guns is taking longer. A very interesting thing in guns is the idea of history in the large. I remember reading the Foundation books (well, some of them) and in that (if memory serves) Asimov has this concept of future history. That you can basically predict the behavior of the human species over a long enough time. In the book they perfect this technique and can really predict the future. In guns Diamond talks about history using these broad strokes of time. He talks about “short” time spans being 1,000 years. Distances are measured in the time it takes for ideas and people to populate an area, saying that the Americas were populated in a short 8,000 years from the time the first people came across the straight.

There are some great passages in the book where Diamond talks about the fact that historians can’t agree on a reason for why certain people adopt technologies. He lists of a litany of alternative ideas, and then states that since no one can agree, and there are so many options, that this can be seen as a random occurrence and therefore he can look at this in the large scale. Heh heh.

Another very interesting part discusses the creation of written language. He has a really interesting narrative about a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah that invented a written language for the Cherokee around 1820. Sequoyah had seen English writing, but didn’t understand it. He saw the value, and therefore created his own version. Makes what we all do each day seem like a bit trivial – did you invent written language today?

On a final note, we are thinking of buying a new house. We just refinanced, but given the low interest rates and our desire to start a family in the next year or so is making it seem like a reasonable option. Our agent sent us a bunch of listings tonight. We aren’t in a great rush, or really convinced that we should do it, but we’ll see…

Interesting book suggestions from doug purdy… a guy I work with that I didn’t know was into politics.

Reading Guns, Germs and Steel, but decided to pickup a few new books… some I haven’t even had recommended to me. I’ll write up the whole list later, but I did start digging into Way of the Weasel by Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame)… pretty freakin funny book. A bit scary though, because for the first time I found what looked like a Microsoft quote in the book. We need to evaluate the company a little bit when “Schedule Chicken” is quoted as a great Pointed-Haired-Boss tactic, and something that happens frequently at the ‘soft.

On the subject of complete ignorance, I had a debate with some coworkers about why seasons change. I was (it turns out) on the loosing side of the debate – it doesn’t have to do with the earth’s elliptical orbit. Sometimes I am completely shocked at my lack of intelligence. The debate was going something like “the tilt of the earth causes the seasons because part of the earth is farther away than the other” and I respond with “no, the earth has an elliptical orbit which causes a much greater distance change that the angle of the tilt”. We were both right and both wrong. Nasa has a great site that explains (for a 4 year old) how the seasons work, and that it is due to the angle of the light rays hitting the earth. Oh well, at least I learned something new today.