As I’ve been reading and thinking about the financial markets of late, it’s just so obvious that it’s gotten to be less about investing one’s money wisely in companies one believes in and far more about beating the market in the short term. And, well … look how well Warren Buffett has done by doing the former, and how poorly the market has done by doing the latter.
Sure, Gladwell gets criticism—much of it warranted—for relying on anecdotes and selective theories, oversimplifications, etc. But Gladwell gets people to think and engage, which is, I believe, the true value of a non-fiction writer.
I’m not deep into it, but I did find the bit about the age cutoffs providing an arbitrary selection bias in year-grouped populations. As someone born 1 Oct in a state that, at the time, had a 30 Sep cutoff for kids starting school, I’ve always been one of the oldest folks in my classes. Now, I was offered a couple chances to skip grades [second, as I remember it, and probably eighth as well if I'd pushed for it], but I never really thought it worthwhile, and my parents never pushed the opportunity at me. I think that it’s been an advantage for me.
Now, do I think I’m smart because I had a good birthday, one that let me be more mature than my peers when it came time for school? Is there a reason for the skew of my nerd friend group to early fall birthdays? Perhaps. It’s making me think about it, critically, and that can’t hurt.
So, I said that I liked marking things off of lists, and boy, do I ever. [It's a compulsion.] Stolen from Kari and CJ, I’m blaming Holland for this because, well, I blame all memes on him at this point. Susan Coleman pointed out that the BBC generated this base list:
Here’s how it works:
Do you have suggestions for what I should read on this list that I haven't indicated that I would? [Yes, Kari, I hear you yelling for Pride and Prejudice. All the way over here. And my window's closed. ]
I’ve read Waiter Rant for a couple of years now, so I was quite happy to snag The Waiter’s book when it was published. I got my copy yesterday, and I wolfed it down this afternoon like one of his yuppie customers polishing off a $200 meal at The Bistro. Wait, no, I enjoyed it far more.
While the whole of the idea is to take the reader through the narrative of what it’s like to be a waiter—the lifestyle, the business environment, and how waiting tables seems to attract all sorts of misanthropes and social deviants—The Waiter also takes the reader through his own narrative: how he became a waiter, how he rose to the top, how he was beloved, and how he ended up becoming a minor tyrant at The Bistro. The whole book has a nice arc and speaks well of The Waiter’s newly-chosen career. The advice often given to writers is to write what they know, and The Waiter knows the restaurant biz well enough to tell the front-of-house story engagingly.
I’ve never worked in the restaurant business, but I’ve lived with folks who have. Understanding the economics of that back when I was co-oping and making ends meet most of the time helped me to recognize that, if I was going out to eat, I could afford to tip well. [And if I couldn't afford it, I'd keep my happy ass at home.] I like to think that The Waiter would find me to be a nice customer. I certainly try to be.
If you like a good narrative, are interested in the food business, or just like supporting bloggers-turned-dead-tree-product pushers, Waiter Rant is an excellent choice. I’ll admit: when I first saw the URL, I thought it was “Wait Errant”, like a knight errant. That mental image has always colored how I read The Waiter, but I also think that it fits.
I awoke this morning ready to kick ass. Less than an hour later, I was having my ass kicked by some stomach bug. I’ve just about decided that it was something that I ate, but as I was running a low-grade fever this morning, I decided not to pass this on to my co-workers.
When I decided that I could safely leave the house for longer than a half-hour, I headed to my local Books-A-Million and returned to a pulp fiction favorite of my youth: W.E.B. Griffin. Griffin is no master of detail—characters’ names and linguistic abilities change [most notably in The Corps series], personalities don’t always seem to line up—but yet his characterizations are always interesting, and the prose lends itself to being swiftly read. To wit: where I have certainly fallen out of the habit of reading books for long stretches in the last five years, I pounded 400 pages today like it was nobody’s business.
If you’ll excuse me, I have a book to finish …
[amazonify]0758216599:right[/amazonify] Greg Knauss, among others, has written about his experiences in contributing to Things I Learned About My Dad (In Therapy), a book by parents about the experiences of fatherhood. I got my copy earlier this week and plowed through it in mostly two quick sessions [which is good; I have been in a serious reading funk, something I should address elsewhere]. Knauss’s comments pretty squarely reflect his essay:
It goes on from there, documenting everything Child Protective Services is going to need to put me away for a long time.
Reading the book, I’m astonished at the quality of every essay that wasn’t written by me. Some are sweet, some are heartbreaking, all are funny — it’s a wonderful book, and it truly is an honor to be included. I’m now forever squatting squarely next to some of the best writers on the Web, and they can’t do anything about it, ha ha ha ha.
Told you I was kind of an asshole.
Yeah, well, he is. But he’s an endearing one [at least to me].
Being single myself, you might wonder what attraction a book like this has for me. Well, several of my friends have kids now, and they write about them. It’s fun, because I can go back and look at entries they’ve written and have good memories, even if I’m just barely a part of these kids’ lives—being as, you know, I’m just some dude that’s friends with their parents that comes over from time to time and takes attention away from the star of the show [them] because–GASP!–I want to talk to the parental units. Heh.
Heather Armstrong, Dooce herself, edited the essays and contributed two of her own. As I’ve read the monthly newsletters that she’s written her daughter, Leta, I’ve felt a lot of emotions—most of all, jealousy. In this month’s letter, Heather talks about the stresses of criticism of people writing about their kids and all the obvious critiques that come of it:
But I guess there are some people who are very uncomfortable with the fact that I and many other women are writing about our children on our websites. How dare we violate your privacy like this, how dare we endanger you like this, we obviously care more about ad revenue than what this is going to do to your adolescence. And I have been asked countless times if I am at all worried that you will totally resent me for the details I have shared here. Of course you will you resent me. I have no doubt that you will spend years of your life resenting me and being embarrassed that we have the same last name, despite the fact that I have and will spend years of my life writing love letters to you on the Internet. Despite the fact that I have declared to millions of people that you are the most amazing thing that has ever happened to my life.
You will resent me for your curfew and the fact that I will not let you leave the house in that mini-skirt. You will resent me for showing up to your school in my pajama bottoms and for raising my hand in a PTA meeting when I hadn’t brushed my hair. You will text message your friends to tell them that I am the most horrible person on the planet because I’m forcing you to study for your exam in the morning. You are going to think that I cannot possibly understand what you are going through, and you will slam the door in my face.
Will you resent me for this website? Absolutely. And I have spent hours and days and months of my life considering this, weighing your resentment against the good that can come from being open and honest about what it’s like to be your mother, the good for you, the good for me, and the good for other women who read what I write here and walk away feeling less alone. And I have every reason to believe that one day you will look at the thousands of pages I have written about my love for you, the thousands of pages other women have written about their own children, and you’re going to be so proud that we were brave enough to do this. We are an army of educated mothers who have finally stood up and said pay attention, this is important work, this is hard, frustrating work and we’re not going to sit around on our hands waiting for permission to do so. We have declared that our voices matter.
Let me be honest: if we’d have had the Internet in the early 1980s, my mother would have blogged the shit out of me and my older brother. You would’ve read all sorts of interesting, hilarious, and terrifying stories about us.
I don’t want to get too much into our family dynamics here, but suffice it to say that, growing up, my older brother wasn’t classically gifted in academic ways, and I was. He hated school; I loved it. He was [and still largely is] an introvert; I, well, I never frickin’ shut up. If you read all the bunk of the birth order folks, you’d think we were born out of order—but hell, no, people. Doug and I are who we are because of the sum of our experiences, as varied as they are. Because of the spread between us [five years, ten months] and the fact that Dad was Air Force [meaning we moved every four years, most of the time], we never went through the same stages in life in the same places. We never had the same teachers; only once, when I was in kindergarten and he in sixth grade, did we attend the same school. We are, functionally, two only children who happen to have the same parents. Doesn’t mean that I don’t love him, ’cause I do. We’re just … startlingly different.
I’m sure that Mom would’ve written a couple hundred things that would’ve mortified me when I read them at 14, but she also would’ve written a thousand more that would make me smile, laugh, cry, and appreciate what they went through that much more. And I admit … I would love to have those stories now as I near 30. Well, I do have them, but you don’t have them, Internet. And while it’s narcissistic to want you to read them, I am a blogger.
Anyhow, if you want to read engaging essays on fatherhood, Things I Learned About My Father (In Therapy) is terribly good and worth your time. [And for my friends who are parents and are broke because they're buying diapers, I'll let you borrow my copy as long as your kids don't gnaw on it. 'kay?]
Garrett Oliver’s The Brewmater’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food was both worth reading and frustrating. Oliver’s passion for beer is quite evident in the writing, and he does a solid job of explaining how beer styles evolved. It’s a solid mixture of anecdotes about his own discoveries of beer and historical discussions of the importance of beer throughout the ages. Rightfully, the book focuses on European brewing and places pilsners in the proper historical context. [I must note here that I love Pilsner Urquell, but I know that what we drink here in the States is a mass-produced facsimile of the original. But damn, it's tasty.]
There is a fair amount to criticize in the book, though. For one, it’s awfully repetitive—understandable at some level, if it’s designed to be a reference text. Reading it even as I did in fits and spurts, I tired of the unending sameness. I think that a fair amount of the writing could have been replaced with some solid tables. Also, I found it a bit amusing that the best American producer listed for many European style beers was … Oliver’s employer, the Brooklyn Brewery. Admittedly, they do great work, but … come on. Also, I found the bicoastal nature of the American beer discussion to be a bit disheartening; yes, there’s great beer brewed on each coast, but there’s also a lot of great beer brewed in Middle America. I was disappointed that Abita in Louisiana got a mention but Shiner didn’t.
All in all, it’s a decent book, but I get the feeling that Oliver’s passion translates better in person rather than on the page. That said, I must thank Scott for getting it for me, because it convinced me that maybe I wanted to try an Irish red ale, and … well, I love Smithwick’s now. [Goal for the next year: have a few pints of Smithwick's with SOG.]
I think the true sign of how a book resonates with you is with how many people you think about while reading it. For me, the best books I read leave me saying, “This person needs to read this book … and this person, and this person, and this person.” Well, I could think of about eight people who needed to read Michael Lopp’s Managing Humans while I was going through it, which says, “Hey, Rands knows his shit.” In fact, I just bought my third copy on Friday: my program manager has my copy, but only after I let Stephen borrow it and read it first; my director down in Houston plans on passing it around to several managers at the customer/teammate [!]; the third copy is going to go to my manufacturing engineer and her husband. Her husband will be the first software person I’ve actually had read it.
Now, if you know the subject [or the subtitle], you’re saying, “He’s a software middle manager. How does that relate to what you do, NASA nerd?” Please. Software is a high-cost, low-volume business—ignore the fact that one copy of software can be sold a million times. Ideally, software development of the style that Rands discusses is high-dollar, low-vol stuff—exactly the business that I’m in over in manned spaceflight hardware. If we build ten of something, it’s a lot. We’ve got a fundamentally creative process going on, and we get the same crunches and crazy stuff that software dev teams like Rands’s get. [Like, um, my week this week: deliver hardware to foreign customer tomorrow, finalize overseas shipment/export control paperwork on Tuesday, polish the program review charts on Wednesday, have a program review Thursday morning before hopping a plane to Houston for a system requirements review on Friday, then return back here Saturday morning and walk right over to the shop, because hey, next Monday? Fit check before we deliver that hardware in another ten days so it can fly on Shuttle in January. Hooah.]
Obviously, there are things that don’t really apply. [You might think that all the stuff about version control doesn't apply, but ... you've never seen NASA-level configuration management. Honestly, it stuns me that we don't have VCS stuff in place at the pre-deliverable phase. It would make lives much, much easier.] But there is so much that does apply, because … people are people everywhere, and the smart, gifted, creative that you see in software also flock to manned spaceflight, for the same “I want to change the world” reasons—just a different application.
Oh, for the record … I’m an organic, holistic, incrementalist Sally Synthesizer. Most of the time. This is a change for me in a couple ways—I used to be more of a completionist and more of an inward, but … well, the last year has changed me, in ways I will never blog about because doing so requires talking about work I’m doing that I won’t talk about in much more than the abstract or, well, posting press releases or something. But that’s not to say that I won’t tell you a story over a Smithwick’s at Mason’s Pub.
90% of my photos are taken at concerts, so through trial and error, I’ve learned what works for those situations. [Generally, the light is so poor that I'm running at ISO 800 or 1600, apertures between f/1.8 and f/5.6, and shutter speeds between 1/8s and 1/60s.] As I joked when I took photos of both Stephen and Misty’s and Jonathan and Ashley’s daughters, “I don’t know what to do with this much light!
Well, after reading Bryan Peterson’s Understanding Exposure, I have some better idea now. It was a good read to get me to thinking outside of my photographic rut. It’s written with examples all throughout the text and ideas for things to try on your own. Heck, I’m thinking about going to go get a grey card this afternoon. It’s a book that should stand re-reads and references as I add skills to my photographic toolkit. I may never be more than a guy who takes photos at concerts, but hey, you never know. It’s a fun (if expensive) hobby.
That said, when Amy borrowed my camera this week, I had to laugh … I couldn’t remember how to re-engage the onboard flash. I just never use it. 
Admittedly, it took me six months to finish, but I finally plowed through the final quarter of Eric Kandel’s In Search of Memory tonight in an urge to get to reading other books. Unlike many readers that I know, I don’t read multiple books at once; my dogged unwillingness to not give up on reading this has forestalled a number of other things. That, and the fact that I’ve been insanely busy since September and have largely fallen out of the habit of reading at long stretches since I’ve entered my twenties. I read a lot in my teens, and while I still read a fair amount now, it’s far more stuff in short bits—blog entries, magazine articles, Wikipedia entries. Yes, I’ve forsaken the pleasure of engulfing myself into the world of a book because I’m too busy worrying about not knowing other things that are going on!
I’d be interested to see what Kandel, an historian and a psychoanalyst by initial training and initial career, would have to say about my reading habits. I think that he’d argue that they’re an outcropping of my neuroses. I think that he’d also consider that, after my initial exuberance to plow through his tome, the death of my sister-in-law not two weeks later interrupted the reading and provided an unrelated but associated event in my brain that made it difficult for me to come back to the book. Even tonight, as I pulled the book out of my backpack—where it had been since my trip to Houston six weeks ago, during which it never was even opened—I recoiled a little. But I resolved to finish it, and I have.
I find it difficult to summarize my feelings on the book. I found it to be terribly fascinating and written such that someone as myself, who has nothing more than a barebones familiarity with biology, could understand it. Admittedly, Kandel approached biological research with an intellectual rigor hardly seen in previous decades; as he notes, biology was considered a “soft science” a century ago, far removed from the rigor of chemistry [which never interested me much] and physics [which certainly did, although I became an engineer anyway]. Admittedly, I come from a technical background, so I’m not the best judge of how your average reader is going to pick up the book—although I find it unlikely that a näif is likely to pick this up at the airport for a little light reading on the red-eye from LAX.
If you’re of a technical bent and are interested in how the mind works—even if you’re not terribly interested in biology as a whole—I think that you’d find it interesting. Since I first began reading it, I’ve known who I’d next hand it to—my friend Jonathan. Jon, perhaps you can steal a page from Stephen’s book and read in the middle of the night when your daughter won’t sleep.
Back tomorrow with some more reading, something that I’ve wanted to do a fair amount of whilst on vacation.
I think that there’s something ironic about thinking I’d left Kandel’s In Search of Memory at my grandmother’s on Friday when, in fact, it was in the trunk of my car the entire time. I only found it because I’d gone out to the car to get my camera, which … I’d forgotten that I’d left out there until I couldn’t find it elsewhere in the loft.
Yeah, so I’m amused even if you aren’t.
I’m only 90 pages in, but I’m really enjoying it so far: Kandel’s initial urge to become what he terms “an intellectual historian” certainly lends his retelling of his own journey into the science of mind [through studies first of psychoanalysis, then medicine, then molecular biology] and the same collective journey. I think Kandel spent a bit too much time fawning over Freud, but … well, Kandel has a Nobel and I’ve got a mortgage and a car note.
I hope to finish this book this month. I’m not as voracious as Kari is [mainly because i don't carve out time to read like she does], but she is making me want to read more. I’d like to average a book a month this year, which is something that I haven’t done since … well, since I started working at TBE. I don’t know that correlation implies causation here—I did also start having challenging classes at the same time, many of which sucked my will to read for pleasure right out the window—but there’s something to it.
Oh, it couldn’t be all the time I spend blogging and reading blogs. I used to do the sportswriting thing, and that sucked just as much of my time.
As I noted, I’ve been reading Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time thanks to the generosity of Jonathan, who let me borrow his copy. I think that Jon knew what he was doing when he gave it to me. [But then again, he did say, "Of all the people I know, you're probably the person who least needs to read this."]
My thoughts, as I’ve gone along:
Another quick note: you should use any relational abilities of your contact management software to their fullest effect: note supervisor-employee relationships, who serves as administrative assistant for whom, etc. Speaking of AAs, it never, ever, ever hurts to be personally interested in them. With my company’s program manager for my main work contract, I try to pick up new little bits of info about her every time I call. I’ve never met her [because I've not gone to Houston on this job in the 32 months I've worked it, heh], but we have good small-talk whenever I call. In fact, I always try to treat the situation as if getting to talk to the boss is an afterthought; compared with how many folks seem to run roughshod over people they perceive as unimportant, I get good results. I can’t tell you how many times one of the AAs at work has pulled my ass out of the fire when I’ve deserved to be left to burn to a crisp…
Okay, okay, I ran out of energy after that point, mainly because this chapter-by-chapter bit was making it take forever to read the bloody book. My generalized thoughts after finishing last night:
Okay, two months to read that? Oi.
Seems everyone thinks I should read more books. I agree. [I've been working to finish Never Eat Alone at an accelerated pace...]
Here’s what showed up on my doorstep from the family:
Must finish up the Ferrazzi tonight…
Thanks to Jonathan, I’m reading Never Eat Alone, a book that I’d been wanting to read for some time. I’m going to try to do better than I normally do and peck down my thoughts about this as I read it …
Back when I bought my copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature (17th Edition), I was excited to have it. I’ve not used it enough, but I’ve broken it out the last couple days; doing what I have today, I found the source quote of a maxim that I’ve long espoused. I state it as:
The level of a man’s intelligence is the degree to which he agrees with me.
That’s pretty close to how Tom Clancy stated it in one of his novels. I think the source, though, falls from François, Duc de La Rochefoucald:
We rarely find that people have good sense unless they agree with us.
– Reflections, maxim 347
Excellent!
It's all just a stream of consciousness for me, folks.