I’m amused by the idea that Winterkalte ‘Maximum credible accident’ leaking from my headphones at the office sounded like birds chirping….its very good coding music but it doesn’t sound much like birds from inside the ‘phones.
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
Happy sound, reprise
I think I’ve finally figured out what the happy sound was…its Skype on the mac telling me someone has come online, which all makes sense.
There are some things I should tell you about before they get lost in the mists of time. I took a day off to head up to the Manuskript gig in Cambridge a couple of weeks back. This is why I go to gigs, sometimes everything just clicks, everything is right and the people are great, the show is great, theres a buzz in the air. It doesn’t happen very often but when it does its wonderful. I can’t really describe it but you know it when it happens.
And then, last friday, the management of the Water Rats get a *BIG THUMBS DOWN* for trying to run another event the same night as BMovie. I somewhat object to venues thinking they can run two events in a night anyway, it feels like profiteering, at least its not as bad as the Underworld where they kick you out for 10 so the club can start. However the waily indie kids weren’t really my cup of tea and, given I had to go catch my train early anyway, I decided to cut my loses and make a break for it – if I stayed I would have gotten just two or three songs before it was time to leave anyway. All in all quite a shame, if thats going to be a common feature of BMovie nights I’m going to have to stop going, it turns into too much waiting and not enough music to be viable for me.
Meanwhile I seem to be burning bridges faster than I’m building them – I wish I had the energy to drive some things more forcefully.
Book review: NLP The new technology of achievement by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner
I chose this book after someones response to my gentle mocking of someone reading ‘NLP for dummies’ on the train – its not a subject I knew much about. Well, I thought I didn’t know much about it. Reading this book though is like reading a collection of many other management and personal development books, there isn’t much in the way of new material here (for me at least, perhaps if you’ve not read so many of those books it might be fresher).
The book is structured around a series of thought exercises to take you through the process of accentuating positive aspects of your life and distancing yourself from the negative. The gist of it is to connect yourself (in your memories and imagination) with good things about your life, and reduce the importance of the bad things.
While I think NLP is a nice structure for learning to be positive about yourself this book concentrates too much on getting accolades from people it has helped and not enough on useful information about how to make it work.
Who should read this book? Anyone who feels like they are stuck in a rut and hasn’t already read a lot of management books.
I’ve just scared myself by noticing that I’ve now had this journal for 10% of my life, thats just over 3 years 7 months, sometimes I hate having a brain that thinks about things like that. So anyway heres a review of my year:
“Well thats one mystery solved. I woke with a shock last night, so much so that I jumped out of bed.”
“Four jobs I’ve had: postman, clockmaker, industrial spy, arms exporter”
“We arrived at the base around lunchtime, I’m not sure its the first time I’ve ever been on a military base, but certainly I’ve not been required to sign in to a museum for a very long time.”
“Following my interview last week I’ve accepted a verbal offer for a job based near Fulham Broadway, in London.”
“The slouch started with an abortive run to a pub near the station – so we ended up milling around at the station, allegedly the site of the biscuit incident, for a while, awaiting the arrival of anyone unfortunate enough to have been trying to use the trains from Stanstead or beyond…they’d been replaced with buses.”
“This morning I was trying to catch the tube to Earls Court – I was waiting on the blue line platform, they were having signalling problems so things were running a bit slowly and there were a lot of people about.”
“Back online again now. And I’ve eaten too much cheese over the last few days.”
“I board the district line at Fulham Broadway for my journey home.”
“Kiva takes Prosper to another level. I like both of these sites – they both provide an interesting view on people helping other people out.”
“As is typical technology mocks in suspicious ways, playing me the mad capsule markets just as the heavens opened upon my arrival in worthing.”
“What a beautiful spring morning? A touch of frost in the air, enough to wake you up but not enough to make you cold.”
“I’ve just bought a book containing a section on “poking: effectiveness and danger of reprisal”, complete with a graph and everything.”
Book review: A mathematician plays the market by John Allen Paulos
“He figured the odds. And they still beat him”
This book follows the authors self destructive love affair with WorldCom shares as they fell from grace. And describes some of the lessons he learned along the way. I spent about half the book being annoyed by his incorrect grasp of some of the statistics he was quoting, he later redeemed himself by offering some useful insights into the herd instincts of the market. Especially his explanation of the paradox that either fundamental or technical trading is most effective depending on the other being believed by the majority of members of the market – it was something I’d never quite understood, being very much on the fundamentals end of things myself. I was amused also by his debunking of six sigma management aims as being statistical anomolies rather than actually a viable business plan.
For a book about economics it is reasonably accessible, but a good grounding in mathematics or statistics would be a useful tool to understand what he’s talking about.
Who should read this book? If you’ve got a good understanding of schoolboy mathematics and an interest in how the markets work but not much in the way of knowledge about them you will get a lot from this book.
(this brings me up to date on the pile of books in the ‘read but not reviewed’ state, the intention is to keep this state reasonably empty in the future)
Linkblast
Jack Handys Christmas Lego Adventure
Postal service of the damned^wsaved
Art or arse? – not the answer I was expecting (worksafe text based gooogletoy)
Book review: Cause Celeb by Helen Fielding
The heroine of this book, Rosie, had managed to annoy me by the end of page two by sleeping with someone obviously deeply inappropriate. She started the book as such a vacuous waste of skin and air that I considered giving up on her but although she was irritating I felt I had to find out what happened next. Fieldings writing style, although not deep is very more-ish. Besides, Rosie couldn’t be *that* empty, surely?
I’m glad I stuck with it. Through the book she has two lives, the other is as a dynamic and in-control decision maker in a refugee camp in Africa. There is an interesting contrast between her two lives, which is highlighted when people from one of them see her in the other.
There is also some nice social commentary on how celebrities play the publicity game and the public is manipulated into desired feelings by the media.
Who should read this book? Well, its not a very manly book, don’t bother if you’re looking for action or technology, but if you like your romance a little thought provoking this would be a good read.
Book review: Purity by Shaun Hutson
I have something of a soft spot for Shaun Hutson, his writing style is utterly disposable, theres no depth to any of his characters or stories, but somehow I still find it all rather compelling. Its a long time since I read any of his books.
This sees him more in a crime thriller genre than the trash horror I remember of his earlier books, it follows the attempts of a radio talkshow host to find a murderer who appears to be preying on various lowlife people of the city.
I’m not sure theres a lot I can usefully say about the book without giving away too much information…if you like Hutsons earlier work this is a little more mainstream, but its probably worth a read, if you don’t know him there are probably better authors out there for this sort of thing.
A snapshot from the road
I was driving the M25 near Heathrow, the signs showed an accident ahead but it was not busy so there wasn’t a queue. The wheel had fallen off a stretch limo, which had pulled onto the hard shoulder resting on a smoking stub. I wondered what story the foreign passengers would take back home.