Stormy's Corner

Book Review: Career Distinction

Personal branding is very important in today's web 2.0 world. In a world where anyone can google you and people change jobs multiple times in a decade, your reputation and brand are essential to your career. If you've never thought about personal branding or you've wondered how to go about it, then you should read Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand. It offers some concrete advise and metrics for setting up your personal brand and measuring how well you are doing. For example, they recommend you google your name and check the number of accurate results you have.  They make recommendations like you should have 5,000-50,000 if you are "a vice president, acknowledged thought leader, highly regarded consultant or subject-matter expert." (I did well on that one, a search for "Stormy Peters" returns 161,000 results where 98 of the first 100 are me.) Their suggestions ranged from creating home pages to public speaking to what type of clothes to wear.

All that said, if you are already an expert in career branding, you might be disappointed. The book is only 192 pages and it's full of white space and quotes. (24 of the pages are either blank or title pages.) And in a lot of places where more detail would have been helpful, they refer you to a workbook that's not included with the book.

In summary, Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand is a great introduction and overview of personal career branding but should be combined with the workbook or they should come out with a Career Distinctions 201.

Book Review: The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need

I enjoyed Dan Pink's new book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need. I was even more impressed with Garr Reynold's slide presentation of the concepts in the book. Garr is the author of Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter) - a style I'm trying to master. Here's Garr's presentation:

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The six tips in Dan Pink's comic style book are:

1. There is no plan.
2. Think strengths not weaknesses.
3. It's not about you.
4. Persistence trumps talent.
5. Make excellent mistakes.
6. Leave an imprint.

Book review: All God's Children. A great book on street kids.

In college, I volunteered at the Covenant House. Every Thursday from 7-10pm we would drive around the worst parts of Houston handing out sandwiches and juice packs to the homeless and letting them know that any homeless kids were welcome back at the Covenant House.

What impressed me the most was how different the homeless adults were from the teenagers. The adults were what you would expect homeless to be like. Some depressed, some hungry, some listless, some drunk, some too embarrassed to tell their kids they were living on the streets, usually grateful for a sandwich or a clean pair of socks. The kids on the other hand were on an adventure. None of them ever came back to the Covenant House with us. They always had someone to stay with, or a car to ride in to Las Vegas, ... places to go, things to see. And they never seemed hungry. Full of hope. And then I would listen to them talk and be just horrified. I will always remember the conversation between two fifteen year old girls, with babies in their laps, talking about the job they had the night before at a strip club. The way they had been treated was inhumane. (I tried  - unsuccessfully - to get all my friends to avoid strip clubs in Houston forever.) Yet these girls just took it in stride. At the time, I thought it was because they were kids and kids had more hope and maybe more strength and flexibility. After reading Rene Denfeld's book All God's Children: Inside the Dark and Violent World of Street Families, I now think it's because they live in an alternate reality, a completely different culture, than the rest of us. Rene Denfeld describes the completely alien culture of street kids in a way that not only made sense but completely matched what I saw. It was fascinating and terrifying.

As a side note, Rene blames many of the agencies that help street kids for promoting the street kid culture. By providing them food and resources they enable the street life - large groups of kids with nothing to do except hang out and create their own rules. Very harsh and violent rules.

The book that changed my life the day I read it

I had just finished reading the The Art of Possibility when I ran into a work acquaintance in the lobby of the hotel I was staying at. He introduced me to someone and said "and Stormy's on maternity leave." Surprised, I said "no I'm not!" (Why would I be at a conference if I was??) He went on to tell me that so-and-so had said that I wasn't really truly back to work, that I worked from home a lot and didn't work full time. I was furious. I thought I knew what was up and it made me mad. I work from home a couple of days a week - and I'm not sure everyone is happy with that - and I don't officially work Fridays. (I do some work on Fridays but I don't get paid for them so that I don't have to work them.)

My first response was to call so-and-so and demand an explanation. However, just having read the The Art of Possibility and thinking the authors had made a lot of good points, I felt like if I called in anger, I would not have learned anything from the book. So I thought about it and tried to apply the ideas from the book to my situation. (Well, first I griped to someone I trusted to handle it well, and twittered about it, then I thought about it.) I tried to think about the interactions between the three of us as a game. I wasn't just a player - I was the one deciding what game I was playing. I realized that I didn't know what so-and-so's motivations were. What I did know was that:

• So-and-so had said something about my work hours or habits to at least one person. For unknown reasons. (Idle conversation, jealousy, excuses, as a good example, ... I had no idea.)
• It was likely that so-and-so would continue to talk about my work hours to people. Confronting him was likely to make him talk about the confrontation and my work hours even more. Not to mention that if his intentions were good I would look petty.
• I work 80% for 80% of my full time salary - I don't on Fridays.
• I don't (or didn't) tell people I don't work Fridays because I was afraid it might hurt my career.
• I had no proof that it would hurt my career.
• My career is going really well in spite of the fact that I don't work Fridays.

So I changed the rules of my own game (part time might hurt my career, keep part time a secret, etc.) and blogged about it. On my work blog. Now everyone knows that I don't work Fridays (most of the time), they know how I feel about it and why. So even if so-and-so continues to talk about my hours in ways that are misinterpreted, my version is out there and has been read by a lot of people. People that I care about and people that are interested in my career and what I have to say. (At least I assume that's why they subscribe to my work blog!)

I think the The Art of Possibility is one of those books you could read again and again and still get new things out of it, so I'm keeping it on my book shelf. It's a short read and I recommend taking the time to read it.

Book Review: Cast in Shadow

Fifty pages into Cast in Shadow by Michelle Sagara, I almost quit reading. I'm glad I didn't as I did enjoy the book. The main character is human but she lives in a world of aliens in the style of C. J. Cherryh. Like C. J. Cherryh's books, the characters seem really alien and it takes a while to figure out their culture. (Which is part of the fun of reading.) Unlike C. J. Cherryh, the alien characters end up feeling human.

I'm not sure if it's because she makes you feel their society so well, that they no longer feel alien or if it's because she shows that even though they have a different culture, they aren't so different from us. I think it's the latter.

Bad leaders need unquestioning obedience

Bad leaders need unquestioning obedience. They don't just want obedience - they actually need unquestioning obedience in order to maintain their power. From A Just Determination:

A good leader doesn't need unquestioning obedience. People follow that leader because they choose to, because that leader has their trust. A poor leader requires unquestioning obedience, because without that, a poor leader will lose all meaningful ability to exercise command.

Think about that the next time you feel yourself becoming defensive.

The same passage (it's a fiction book, BTW) talks about how poor leaders need better followers.

How many books do you read?

According to the New York Times, 8% of us read a book a week - 27% don't read books and 27% read 15 or more books a year.

Book Review: The Company

If you ever worked for or with a big company, you'll find this book Company hilarious.  Things like these will actually make you laugh:

• Endless voicemail forwards: "This is Greg Smith, Gretchen, can you please forward this to my staff.  <beep> This is Mike Jones, Mary, can you please forward this to my direct reports. <beep> This is ..."
• Nobody really knows what the company does or wants to have to explain it to someone else.
• All your "customers" are internal customers.  (I remember a big campaign ... nobody was allowed to call a company team a customer even though we made tools for other teams.)

Company is a funny book and a fast read.  Good entertainment.

Amazon is fast!

I ordered a book on Amazon yesterday and it got here this morning!  I used my Amazon Prime, 2 day shipping.  How can you beat that?

Technology enables art - technology doesn't kill art

Reading The Bookman's Wake I stumbled across this passage where the main character is talking about a hand printing press:

Here he had practiced his voodoo, making wonderful things on quaint-looking equipment, just like this.  I felt a strange sense of loss knowing that someday we would attain technological perfection at the expense of individualism.

Just the opposite is true.  Technology enables more people to practice "their voodoo."  A hundred years ago, if I was interested in publishing I would have had to find a publisher, one willing to teach, travel to them, give up my life, apprentice to them, ... just to learn one trade!  Now if I'm interested in publishing, I just google it on the web and in a few minutes I have a ton of information and a lot of free tools to try my hand at it.  Most of us who are interested in publishing and typesetting will probably remain mediocre - mostly because we aren't interested enough in it to pursue it.  But a few will be great.  Same with photography.  Because of cheap digital cameras and photo editing software, we can all try our hand at photography.  Most of us will be mediocre, but many will be good and a few will be great.  Just look at Flickr.  In the days of film and manual photo developing, few could afford to dedicate enough money and time to photography to see if they like it.  Technology enables people to explore lots of art worlds, to try them out and for those that love it, it enables them, it doesn't hold them back.  Technology opens the doors to more potential artists.

Paperbackswap Tips

For those of you that use my favorite online book trading website, Paperbackswap, I discovered two things today:

• You can only have 200 items in your wishlist.  (Don't worry about me though.  Although I have over 200 books that I still want, I have two whole shelves of books at home that I haven't read yet.)
• You can tell where you are in the queue to get a book.  Go to your wishlist, find the book you are interested in and mouse over the little exclamation point in a circle: .   I'm number 60 in the list of 337 people wishing to get the latest Harry Potter book.

You don't know what makes you happy

Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, says that we are terrible at predicting what makes us happy.  In Stumbling on Happiness he explains how we are terrible at predicting what will make our future selves happy.  For example, we think we want to be skinny and then we are surprised when the future self isn't happy even though they are skinny.  There's a good brief summary of the book in the Washington Post article, C'mon, Get Happy? It's Easier Said Than Done.  If you enjoy the article, I recommend the whole book, Stumbling on Happiness.

It's harder to watch (than read) something you disagree with

That same New Yorker article, Twlight of the Books, says that it's harder to watch a program you disagree with than it is to read an article you disagree with.  I couldn't agree more.

The viewer feels at home with his show, or else he changes the channel. The closeness makes it hard to negotiate differences of opinion. It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.

So as I've written earlier, we are spending less time with people who aren't like us and now we are spending less time with opinions we don't agree with.  What does that mean for us as a society?  Will we become more isolated and more diversified?  Or more similar and less tolerant?  For sure, if we no longer mix diverse opinions, we'll have fewer new and creative ideas.

Literate vs illiterate thinking

Literate people actually think differently (not necessarily better or worse) than illiterate people.  All examples from the New Yorker.

They use different words:

In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.”

They see different types of association:

Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than any conceptual category. One peasant, informed that someone had grouped the three tools together, discarding the log, replied, “Whoever told you that must have been crazy,” and another suggested, “Probably he’s got a lot of firewood.” One frustrated experimenter showed a picture of three adults and a child and declared, “Now, clearly the child doesn’t belong in this group,” only to have a peasant answer:
Oh, but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are working, you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them. 

The illiterates (peasants in this example) didn't like defining or describing things, even themselves.

Asked by Luria’s staff about polar bears, a peasant grew testy: “What the cock knows how to do, he does. What I know, I say, and nothing beyond that!” The illiterates did not talk about themselves except in terms of their tangible possessions. “What can I say about my own heart?” one asked.

Quite interesting.  The whole article has a lot of interesting points about reading and society.

Talk Review: Good Calories, Bad Calories

If you didn't read Good Calories, Bad Calories because you are not into reading nonfiction books or you didn't want to buy it, then I recommend you watch Gary Taubes talk The Quality of Calories: What Makes Us Fat and Why Nobody Seems to Care at University of California Berkeley.  It's a free webcast and he makes some really good points.

1. It's an undisputed fact that it takes insulin to store fat.  No insulin, no fat.  That's why undiagnosed diabetics lose weight.
2. Another undisputed fat: carbohydrates cause insulin, not fat or protein.
3. In many poor societies, the women are obese and the kids are undernourished.  (He gave almost 20 examples.)  Either the women are starving their kids (unlikely) or it doesn't take a lot of calories to be fat.  Those women are fat because they are eating the wrong foods not because they are eating too much.
4. Lack of will power, gluttony and sloth are not the causes of obesity.
5. Kids eat because they are growing.  They don't grow because they eat.  Vertical and horizontal growth are not so different.  People eat because something is telling them to grow horizontally.  They don't grow because they eat.

Gary Taubes' talk is well worth listening to.

The book that changed our lives

For all of you that tried to click through on the book link to see what it was all about, I fixed the link.  Here it is: Good Calories, Bad Calories.

(For those of you that didn't read the previous post and have no idea what I'm talking about:  Frank and I are eating less carbs for health reasons thanks to this book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.)

Gasp! A salad for lunch!

I had a salad for lunch.  I would dare to bet that none of you have ever seen me eat a salad at a restaurant ... because this is the first time I think I've ever ordered a salad at a restaurant.  It wasn't too bad ... especially with the Red Ale to go with it!

This is a direct result of Frank and I deciding to eat less carbs ... all because of Good Calories, Bad Calories. (And the best things I could find on the menu were steak, fajitas and salads.  I got the cajun salmon salad because we've had lots of steak recently and we're having Mexican for dinner.)

Writers don't have to be politically correct

John Scalzi, the author of Old Man's War, pointed me at Nick Mamata's story of talking about his book Under My Roof to a bunch of freshman.  It's quite funny.  The listeners seemed to think that his book would corrupt people:

Explicitly, I was asked several times if I didn't think that a kid might read the book and build a bomb or become a racist or anti-American.

By people that seemed to be having some politically correct issues of their own:

Indeed, one woman went off on a long tangent about making English the official language of the United States — this was of course prefaced with "I'm totally not racist, but" (you know, racist throat-clearing) and then her friend said that yeah, she'd read a study that predicted that in a few years New York would be 75% Spanish and that "we'll be the minority." And I said "We who?" and she said "We, you know, us, normal people." (I shared an eye-roll with the Nigerian and Pakistani students in front of me at that point.)

I recommend reading his whole story - it was funny.  And thought provoking.  Hopefully authors can continue to write the stories they do without having to be politically correct.  The day they have to change their words to be politically correct will be a sad day indeed.

Save your time, skip this movie

If you like stupid comedies and bad horror movies, Planet Terror might be the movie for you.  I don't like stupid comedies nor any kind of horror movie, so I agreed to watch it for Bruce Willis.  If, like me, you watch it for Bruce Willis, here's a tip: watch the movie until you see Bruce's first 60 second scene ... then fast forward to the end and watch his second, and last, 60 second scene.  You won't miss anything in middle.  Trust me.

A much better movie (if you are trying to satisfy a bad horror need when you hate the genre) is From Dusk Till Dawn.  George Clooney and Juliette Lewis are actually in the movie.  It's not bad ... if you're into that kind of dark horror movie.  It might even be watchable if you hate horror movies.

They are both directed by Robert Rodriguez - I really liked the book about his story about how he became a director.  I just realized I never blogged about it!  In Rebel without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player, Robert Rodriguez writes about how he becomes a movie director by just doing it.  He makes home movies with his brothers and sisters and no budgets.  It's a good story even if you have no desire to ever become a movie director.

Sharing books & Amazon's Kindle

Dale Dougherty argues that Amazon needs to allow Kindle users to share their books with friends and family.  I disagree.  I think the model of sharing a physical book is changing to a model of recommending books and rating them. 

• Amazon's rating model has drastically changed the way users buy books.  I won't buy a book without first checking the Amazon rating!
• We are already familiar with the idea of sharing recommendations instead of the object itself.  Most of us recommend movies to our friends but don't actually have the DVD to pass out.
• Most of the friends and family I would share books with are not local.  I'd rather buy a cheaper book, not pay shipping and then buy them an Amazon gift certificate.  They can then either buy the books I recommend or another book that they'd rather read.
• Most of us want instantaneous access to the book or movie we want to see.  If I could download it immediately from Amazon's library and read it this weekend (if the price was right) or wait a week for my friend to mail it to me, more often than not I would just buy it.  This is why I end up buying new books from Amazon instead of used ones.  I subscribe to Prime shipping and I know I'll get the book in two days instead of a week or two!

So while it would be nice to be able to share or resell Kindle books, I think as long as the price is right (to reflect the fact that you can't resell or share them), I think the model will work.

Amazon Kindle is a success!

People predicted that the Amazon Kindle, their electronic book reader, was too expensive to be successful.  Turns out they were wrong.  Amazon is sold out until after Christmas so new Kindles are going for $1000/each on eBay!!  (The Kindle retails for about $400.)

I really wanted to play with one.  I should have bought one, played with it and then sold it on eBay.  I'd then have $600 to buy Christmas presents with!  Or more electronic toys.

One good reason. How to make decisions.

The author of Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (as quoted in Newsweek) argues that we make the best decisions by using one good reason instead of weighing all the pros and cons:

In every case, one good reason has proven superior to data-greedy mathematical equations in making the best choices.

The example he gave was a parent whose child wakes up wheezing in the middle of the night.  One doctor they know can come to the house in 20 minutes but he's not a good listener or they can drive 60 minutes to an unknown doctor who's known to be a good listener.  Although there are four pieces of information, most parents make their decision based on one piece of information: whether or not the doctor is a good listener.  The author argues that the gut feel decision based one piece of information is better than the decision that could have been made by weighing all four.

Too many good books in the world ...

The New York Times just came out with their 100 Notable Books of 2007.  (Online a week before it will show up in print!)  Since I haven't read any of them and I've read a lot of good books this year, I will conclude that there are a lot, I mean really a lot, of good books out there!

Book Review: Good Calories, Bad Calories

If you have ever tried to lose weight or just eat healthy, you must read this book, Good Calories, Bad Calories.  This book changed my thinking about food, health, nutrition and exercise.  I didn't realize how much of what doctors said that I just believed.  I didn't realize that what they recommend is based on little proven evidence.  Or how much contradictory evidence is just ignored. 

This isn't a diet book.  It's a book about the history of nutritional advice.  Our understanding of food and obesity, how it's come about and how it's changed over the past century.  I'll be writing more in future posts but here's what I've definitely taken away:

1. A calorie is not a calorie.  A lot of other factors matter like what kind of calorie, what kind of person, metabolism, exercise, external environmental factors, ...
2. Calories in does not always equal calories out.  Or we are not measuring all the calories in and out correctly.
3. Dietary fat does not make you fat.  Fat is not necessarily better or worse than protein or carbs.  It's not necessarily equal either!
4. Many of our current doctors are 100% convinced of what they know and not really willing to consider radical shifts in thinking.   Like they continue to recommend  eating less calories and exercising to lose weight when it's obviously not working for many people.  (Do you really lack the will power?)

More to come, but I definitely recommend Good Calories, Bad Calories.  You can read a good excerpt written by the author, Gary Taubes, on ABC News.

Electronic books

Electronic books, books that you can read on your computer, phone or other electronic device, have been around for a while but they haven't really taken off.  (I read quite a few when I had a PocketPC.)  Amazon's new device, the Kindle, is trying to change that.  They spent a lot of effort making sure their reader resembles a paperback book in size and weight plus they added features that other electronic readers don't have.  On the Kindle, you'll have wireless access to the entire library of Amazon books.  You'll be able to search for books and download them on the fly.  You'll also be able to read blogs and use Google to some extent.

I can't wait to see one!  Although at $399, I might not buy one right away ...

Update: The Kindle just came out!

Too many good books ...

In case you are wondering why I haven't posted any book reviews lately ... it's because I have been getting so many good books that I've started lots of them and not finished any of them.  I'm currently reading:

• The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World  by Alan Greenspan.  I'm currently listening to this one and it's really interesting but the second half of the book has had a lot of economic and financial concepts in it that are fascinating but sometimes require me to listen twice to actually get what he's saying.
• Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition  I'm learning Ruby, the programming language.  This book is good but not something you read cover to cover in one setting.
• The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life  Very interesting.  The preface starts out explaining why some cities have been more successful than others in the new economy.  Diversity and tolerance correlate very highly with creativity.  Cities that entice high tech workers are also attractive to people with alternative life styles.  Lots to think about.  But not a quick read.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Undead (Rachel Morgan, Book 2)  In my unending search for new good science fiction I stumbled onto the vampire, witch and werewolf subgenre.  I've been enjoying them.  (And I haven't read Book 1 in this series yet as I got this one first through Paperbackswap/Bookmooch.  But Book 2 is good so I will be reading Dead Witch Walking (Rachel Morgan, Book 1))
• Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win  I haven't officially started this one yet but I just got it in the mail today and it's sitting on the table next to me, tempting me ...

So I'll let you know how it goes.

Best book trading site

The New York Times has an article about book trading sites and I was disappointed to see that they choose BookMooch as the number one site and didn't even mention PaperBackSwap.  I am a member of BookMooch and PaperBackSwap so I think they are both good, but I far prefer PaperBackSwap for several reasons:

1. First and foremost, they keep the wishlist in an order.  So if I've said I'm interested in the latest Harry Potter book, when it becomes available, they will tell me and give me 48 hours to decide if I want it or not.  The next person on the list has to wait for me to decide if I want it or not.  They get the next copy.  BookMooch emails everybody that wants it at the same time, so I'm never, ever going to get a copy of Harry Potter from BookMooch.  Eventually, it'll be my turn on PaperBackSwap.
2. The PaperBackSwap interface is much easier to understand than BookMooch.
3. PaperBackSwap lets you print postage.

Note that I quit using TitleTrader, one of the other ones mentioned by the article.

Which book trading site is your favorite?

Book Review: Learn to Program

I picked up Learn to Program for two reasons:

• I was curious about a book that could teach you to program.  Where do you start?  Also, I originally learned how to program (in Basic) from a book with no computer.
• I wanted to learn Ruby and that's the programming language that Learn to Program uses.

I was impressed with the book.  Chris Pine starts out with the very basics - how to set up your computer with Ruby and how to create and run a program and takes you through a few basic programs, algorithms like sort and finally simple interactive games and file manipulation.

If you are looking to learn how to program or how to teach your kid to program, Learn to Program is a good starting point.

The rooms that writers' create in

Ever wondered what a writers' office looked like?  You can see pictures of them on the Guardian's website.  They range from very austere to very cluttered from the New York Public Library to the libraries of other famous authors.  It's an interesting glimpse into part of the creative process of writing.

Book review: The Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan

I am listening to The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan and in the first few chapters I've already learned some interesting things.  On economics:

• The interest rate reflects how much money is available for investing.  Our interest rates are low because people have saved lots of money and are investing it.

About Alan Greenspan:

• He was raised by a single mom.
• He learned math from following baseball statistics.
• His first professional job was playing the saxophone.
• When the 9/11 attacks happened, he was sitting on a plane on the way home from Zurich.  The plane had to turn around and go back to Zurich.

Book Review: The Cure: How a Father Raised a $100 Million ...

I just finished reading a great book, The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million--And Bucked the Medical Establishment--In a Quest to Save His Children.  John Crowley discovers that his two youngest kids are dying from a rare disease - one so rare that nobody has bothered to invest a lot in a cure.  Crowley ends up quitting his job, starting a drug company and finding a drug to treat his kids.  Only to discover that the FDA considers it a conflict of interest to include his own kids in the trials! 

It's a great heart-warming story of a family's struggle with a little known disease written by a great writer - Greeta Anand.  The book is mostly about the business side (as opposed to the medical side) of the disease.  It's a story about the dad's struggle to find a cure for the disease.  He's never run a company, never gotten funding, knows little about biology or science, and yet he starts a very successful biotech company and finds a drug that works - all for his kids.

I found the conflict of interest part interesting.  John Crowley brings in people suffering from Pompe to meet the people in the company.  Most of the researchers have never met anyone suffering from the disease they are trying to cure!  And get this, it could be considered a conflict of interest to meet the people they are trying to cure!  That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  In the computer high tech world we consider it a very good thing to meet your users - you are making the product for them!  In Crowley's case the visitors helped motivate and empassion his company.

Hachiko, the loyal dog, is one of my favorite stories

One of my favorite stories is the story of the dog Hachiko.  Hachiko was an Akita who lived in Japan with a professor.  Every day he walked the professor to the Shibuya train station and every evening he met him at the train station to walk him home.  After the professor died, Hachiko continued to go to the train station every evening to wait for the professor.  He went every evening for 11 years!

There's now a statue called Hachiko at the Shibuya station and two children's book about the story.  I read one of the books, Hachiko: The True Story of a Loyal Dog (Bccb Blue Ribbon Picture Book Awards), to Jacob last week and then a wikipedia article showed up about Hachiko.  Hachiko's story is truly an amazing story of friendship and loyalty.

Picture from Wikipedia.

Book review: Old Man's War

If you like Heinlein, you have to read Scalzi's Old Man's War.  I really enjoyed it.

Amazon had been recommending it to me for some time and I kept skipping it because I'm not a big fan of military fiction - although I don't mind an occasional military science fiction book.  I finally decided to try Old Man's War when it came up on Paperbackswap and I have now added all of Scalzi's other books to my wishlist!

How to convince someone they are wrong

You know that it's hard to change someone's mind because they'd have to admit they are wrong and nobody likes to be wrong.  Well, anytime you convince someone to use a new product, they are in some sense admitting that their old solution was wrong.  In All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World Seth Godin gives the perfect example with Acumen.  Acumen is a non profit that wants to invest in third world companies that sell affordable products to people in developing countries - it's the best way to help their economies grow.  However, traditional philanthropists don't want to hear that the way they've been doing it is wrong - and traditional investors don't care that the company they are investing in is in a developing country as long as it makes them money.  So Acumen had to tell a different story and reach out to a different market: those philanthropists that are not happy with the way things currently work. 

If you want to convince someone to do it your way or buy your product, don't tell them that the way they are doing it now is wrong.  Sell them a new, exciting story.

We listen to what we want to hear

Growing up I had a reputation for being really good.  Because everyone believed I was really good, they would never believe I had done anything wrong.  Honest.  My eighth grade class elected me class delegate (this was Spain) simply because I could deliver the bad news and be the scape goat and I wouldn't get in trouble for it because everyone believed I was good.  I got to explain all sorts of things that we had done and the teachers would go, yes, yes, I know, and I know you weren't part of it.  (It only backfired once, when the teacher said she'd dock my grade unless I fessed up some names.  I lived with docked history grades for the rest of the year.)

So I knew intuitively that people hear what they already believe.  (We usually say they hear what they want to hear - but really they hear what they believe.) Seth Godin put it in writing much more clearly in All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World. Marketers can tell any story they like, but the only one you are going to hear is the one you already agreed with in the first place.  You hear you need that special cup of coffee because you are special and deserve it.  They didn't have to convince you that you were special - they just reminded you of the fact.

I was tempted to send a copy of the book to an ex-friend who looked at me like I was an egotistical smartass when I told her I really liked The Business Plan for the Body because it made perfect sense - the book described weightloss just like I thought about weightloss.  Her response was "You liked it because you agreed with it?"  And I was like, "yes!"  And she decided I was full of myself.  But Seth Godin says we all only hear and like what we agree with.  And I knew that from all the way back in eighth grade - I just didn't know how to explain it.

Do you like graphic novels and movies?

Graphic novels are like comic books.  Graphic movies look like comic books - they are real actors in black and white with digitally created backgrounds usually with a little color added.  300, the graphic movie about a Grecian king who is greatly outnumbered by the Persians, is the number one best seller on Amazon and it just released on DVD the day before yesterday.  (And we owned our copy the day before yesterday.) 

Personally, I like any movie that's well done with a good story line.  However, the "graphic" effect doesn't do anything for me.  The movie Sin City wasn't bad because it looked like a comic but it wasn't any better because it looked like a comic.

(I haven't watched 300 yet but Frank says it's good - he watched it after I went to bed and it was good enough to keep him up!)

Book review: Learn to Swim

Learn to Swim: Step-by-Step Water Confidence and Safety Skills for Babies and Young Children is a beautiful book about teaching kids to swim.  It has great pictures, step by step instructions, and games and techniques for teaching your children how to swim.  I especially liked the fact that it very clearly stated what children can learn at each stage.  So Caleb is now old enough to be learning how to hold his breath.  (He's 11 months old.)  They not only said he can learn how to hold his breath, but explained how to teach him and what to watch for to see if he's comfortable with it or we need to take some more time.  I now have a very clear guide of what I can work on with him and what I might want to wait a bit on. 

As a side note, my problem with Caleb is not making sure he's comfortable or getting his face wet - it's teaching him that he's not a fish - he can't just walk in water over his head!  He was quite happy to be in the water and immediately went walking towards his dad and didn't seem to mind at all that it meant he inhaled a couple of lungfuls of water in the process! 

Book review: Speaking of Boys

I've read a couple of books on boys and the best by far is Speaking of Boys: Answers to the Most-Asked Questions About Raising Sons.  It's set up in a question and answer style and it answers questions like:

• why are brothers competitive?
• does my son really mean to be that mean to his sister?
• why is my son preening like this and will it ever end?
• what to do as a divorced mom breaking up with someone
• what do do when your son starts acting abusive or violent
• how to react to your son (or his friend) lying

But I found it most useful in understanding boys' humor.  I don't find most "boy jokes" very funny and I struggle on how to respond and I struggle with understanding why they are funny - from farts to knock-knock jokes.  (I'd like to be in on the joke!  It looks like fun.) Michael Thomson did a really good job of explaining how boys use humor to gain status with their friends and in their social groups and he even gave some good advise to people like me who just don't get it. 

I learned a lot from this book and I highly recommend it to anyone who is occasionally baffled by boys - small or big ones.

Book review: Organizing From the Inside Out

One of the most important points in Organizing from the Inside Out is that being organized is not the same thing as being neat.  If you want your