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:

• Chapter One: I doubt Ferrazzi’s assertion that “anyone” can become a connector. I really do, and here’s why: truly being a connector requires the ability to make connections. Even if we work at it, some of us are simply better at it than others: we have better memories, we socialize better, etc. When it comes to the old Nature v. Nurture debate, I definitely say “both”, but I also feal that some folks just aren’t capable of becoming good connectors. Of course, that doesn’t sell you as many books, and what Ferrazzi is selling is something that is easily understood.
• Chapter Two: Ahhh yes, the concept of not keeping score. I really believe in this; the only place where I don’t is in who pays for lunch amongst friends. But other than that, Ferrazzi is spot on: doing for others is the way to building a great network. If you want to be important, you have to remember that most everyone is more important than you are.
• Chapter Three: Another head-nodding chapter on goal-setting. Ferrazzi believes, as I do, that you have to have goals. He also believes in the concept that “a goal is a dream with a deadline”. Additionally, he also believes in Personal Boards of Directors. Rochefauld is right: We rarely find that people have good sense unless they agree with us. [To be fair, I probably ran across the conceptualization of a "Personal Board of Directors" in a Weblog discussion of Ferrazzi's text. In any regard, I practice this---and did so just today [7 Aug 2006], in fact.]
• Chapter Four: Building a network before you need it is an important point, but I was quite disappointed that Ferrazzi only hit the point home with a handful of pages and one major anecdote. Given that his earlier chapters have spent a dozen or more pages weaving Ferrazzi’s own experience and a handful of anecdotes into a cogent point, this chapter felt rushed, thrown-in, and unimportant. It’s not, though.
• Chapter Five: Ahhh, audacity. It’s a skill that I’ve let lie fallow of late. Where I used to be highly outgoing, I’ve pulled back in the last few years. I don’t really know why. This is a bit of a kick in the pants to be better about reaching out.
• Chapter Six: Anti-”Networking Jerks”. Another important lesson. Ferrazzi failed to make what I see as an important point: you never know when the peer of today might be working the system as well as you are and becomes the boss of tomorrow. That said, his decision to stress the importance of working with your team is quite good: at this moment, I somehow quasi-manage people decades my senior. The only reason that works—if it does, which I wonder to myself sometimes—is that they all know that I care about who they are as people. My peers and manager are the reasons I chose to continue working for my employer at graduation, and I treat them as such.
• Chapter Seven: Doing Your Homework. I have not done this as much as I should have in life; I have, however, often gone back to a hotel room or my home after meeting someone and taken notes on our conversation: where they went to school, info about their family, etc. This is the reverse of that, and I see the idea behind doing it. It seems creepy, but it’s easily explained: you’re doing your due diligence for people you’d like to meet. Ferrazzi uses this in terms of meeting people at or above his level in business, but this is applicable to us everyday workaday types: who are the managers in your company? What makes them tick? Here in Alabama, I do my dead-level best to determine whether someone is a BAMA fan or an Aubie beforehand so I can mention it to them; me, I just don’t care, as I went to UAH and have familial ties to both schools. [It's easier to get BAMA fans interested, because a distant cousin of mine, Craig Sanderson, was a star wideout for the Crimson Tide back in the 1990s.]
• Chapter Eight: Take Names. This treads into slightly uncomfortable territory for me, but that’s probably a good thing. [Not that I'm uncomfortable with the process because it's bad; more because it pushes the envelope.] Taking names is a good thing, but I would have named this a bit differently. One thing that I have had great success in doing in my short engineering career is this propensity to always add a number to my Treo [and my Palm before that] whenever I call it. If you call someone about business once, you’ll probably call them again! If you start with a single number, you can end up filling it out. For example, I’ve got the cell phone number of the engineering manager on the main contract I work at TBE in my Treo. He gave it to me once when he really needed to get a hold of me, so I used it for that. Conversely, he has my cell number [and I know this because the third time I called his cell that week, he answered me by name]. Now, 95% of the time when I call him—or any of my other business contacts—I go through normal channels of doing it. Just because I have your cell doesn’t mean I’m going to ring you at that unless it’s your main communication point or I really need to talk to you—and when I call folks’ cell phones, they know I need to talk to them. It’s about respect.

  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…

• Chapter 9: Warming the Cold Call: Cold calls just aren’t something that I do, but it’s something that’s realistic in the medium-term of my career. I do like his advice on doing friend-of-a-friend stuff: when I’m chasing something down in the NASA empire, I always maintain a chain of the people who’ve referred me to others. Ferrazzi is right: if I can tell Person B that I’m giving them an interrupt because Person A referred me to them, I get better results. My best example now is in finding rare aerospace metals and fasteners: I now have a small network of folks across contractors and NASA field centers that I can call, all from a two-day event trying to find something that ended up pulling NASA/Kennedy Space Center out of a stop-work. Everyone knows that stop-works down there cripple the space program, so I got some very, very senior people—I mean, stunningly senior; my jaw was dropping as I was making these calls—on the horn to help me out. Like in Taking Names above: I kept a log across the day of as much info as I could get, who they worked for, and who directed me to whom. Anyway…
• Chapter 10, Managing the Gatekeeper: I was clearly ahead of myself here. As I worked through this chapter, I had another realization: my vice-president’s assistant has been a blessing to me over the years. She befriended me when I was just a shavetail of a co-op, for no real good reason. Okay, I know the reason why, but it had little to do with me and all to do with the person who got me my co-op position in the first place. But I’ve had more reason to work with her lately, and man … I owe her a note of thanks. And a lot more, but that, certainly.
• Chapter 11, Never Eat Alone. Given that this is the title chapter, I expected a long, meaty chapter. It’s not there, folks. I do like Ferrazzi’s idea of bringing people together, though: when I do go to Houston next, I now have the idea to go out to dinner with my engineering manager, any colleagues we can drag along, and any of my Caedmon’s Call Houstonian friends that I can scare up while there. I know that some of my Houston colleagues are believers [and that's all I'll say about that: I try to do my best to keep religion out of the office unless approached], and … putting those folks together would be great fun for me.
• Chapter 12, Share Your Passions. Ferrazzi doesn’t directly say this, but it’s important to know that who we are in our business lives is merely one-quarter to one-half of who we are [in terms of time spent doing our jobs] He encourages the reader to share his or her passions with the people they meet, seeking to find common ground. I have found this to be effective myself: at the end of the day, you’d rather be talking with a customer about your shared passion for canoeing—or actually doing it!—rather than re-hashing the issues you’ve already hashed out that day.
• Chapter 13, Follow Up or Fail. He makes good points all around about following up, including timing for doing it in various situations. There is first-mover advantage in following up…
• Chapter 14, Be a Conference Commando. Ferrazzi clearly gets the key thing with conferences: an opportunity to make acquaintances that can become relationships. Conferences are singles bars for business. [Note: I don't go to conferences.] I felt like this chapter should have been broken up a bit—it’s far longer than any other to this point—but you can winnow it down to three things: 1. Do your homework beforehand. 2. GET OUT THERE. 3. Follow up, follow up, follow up.

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:

1. I’m not really sure that I’m in Ferrazzi’s complete target audience. He seems to be after the people that want to be C$Os in corporations. Me, I’m fine with the concept of being a middle-to-upper manager, perhaps a VP in my 50s or something. Really and truly, I don’t have the top-of-the-world aspirations that Ferrazzi has. Unfortunately for the reader, that’s the case with most of us, and Ferrazzi loses site of that, I feel. His principles—which are, on the whole, very good ones—get diminished more than a bit by this. The biggest example is his bit about being the CEO of Me, Inc., and about building your own personal brand. I might have bought that crap five years ago, but I just don’t buy it now, largely for theological reasons. [That's a whole other post there.] I hate that an otherwise good book was diminised by that.
2. That said, the best premise that Ferrazzi provides—never in so few words as I would like—is a quite simple one: you get the most value out of any network to which you add the most value. I would like to think that this is something that I intrinsically understand and execute at this point. [Is it any wonder that I love BitTorrent, really?]
3. The book could stand a re-write. I cherished Ferrazzi’s anecdotal story-telling, which fuels much of the book, but I would argue that the book is not formulaic enough. Look, every good book about business needs to have a good idea—usually common sense packaged in uncommon ways—told in an engaging manner. That said, I’ve found that the books that I like the best are either told by excellent writers—guys at the level of a Malcolm Gladwell or a Michael Lewis—or by competent writers who know that they should stick to a formula [notably, David Allen]. Yes, reading formulaic prose gets tiresome, but it divides and conquers the subject matter into manageable chunks, which allows you to read really good books at the same time you’re chunking your way through the other book. Ferrazzi and Raz seem to veer towards and away from a formula, and I wish that they’d stuck to it.
4. Stephen, you might read this and see what you’d have to say, given how often you, Jonathan, and I have discussed it.

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!

As I prepare to go to Portland, I’m reading the book of one of Portland’s up-and-coming adopted sons, Donald Miller. I enjoyed his Through Painted Deserts, and I’ve been told that I’ll like BLJ. We shall see!

As I’m headed to Portland in May—I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d sell body parts to go see Over the Rhine and Hem together!—I picked up a travel guide to Portland today. I fly out on Saturday the 6th and back home on Tuesday the 9th. Fun exchange with my boss about it yesterday:

Me: I’ll be out of the office on the 8th and 9th.
Boss: Oh? Going somewhere?
Me: Yep. Portland.
Boss: Oregon?
Me: Yep. Remember a couple weeks ago when I was trying to figure out when I could go see Over the Rhine during the [program] monthly?
Boss: Yeah. You were frustrated about the shows in Ohio being on Easter weekend.
Me: You got it. Never been to Portland, always wanted to go, and now I have a great excuse.

Two things:

1. Yes, Sean, we need to talk before I go.
2. Yes, Mom, I will come to Tennessee before I go off on this crazy trip. I’m coming either next weekend or the next, whichever doesn’t have choir singing at church. I know that we’re off one of the two, but I just don’t know which one is clear.

And yes, if you’re curious, this is replacing my longer planned trip in July. I had that trip half-planned, but I’m doing this instead. I’ll just shelve those plans until next year. Actually, I’ll probably shelve them until next April. As this year’s gone by, it’s made sense to me that the best time for me to take vacation is just after Easter: any earlier and I mess up Lent stuff at church and run into co-workers’ Spring Break trips with kids, and any later I run into summer vacations with kids. [And if you're saying, "Well, what about the fall and winter?"---you maroon, that's HOCKEY SEASON!]

Lastly, the greatest thing about all this is that, assuming I don’t take any time the rest of the year, I’ll have a good three weeks banked up by the time I’m ready to take vacation next year. I hit my five-year point at work for accruing vacation time in early September, so by the time I’m ready to do the trip I’d like to do, I’ll be able to make it a driving trip and not a flying one. Driving is what I want to do most of all…

Through Painted Deserts : Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road was a fast and easy read. I’ll quote what I said on the Don Miller fan forum:

I agree that it would make an interesting movie: the mechanic coming along out of the blue, the providential linkages in the junkyard, the sidebar into Vegas. It’d have to be an art film, though, because I think this kind of a movie would have to be told with a lot of silence, with a lot of still shots and glances and shrugs broken up by brief snippets of dialogue.

Frankly, that’s the way the trip would seem; road trips with guys always start out with flurries of conversation, and then fade into the miles. I was reminded of my old hockey trips, back the year after I finished school, when we would travel to Minnesota or Denver or Connecticut or New York to broadcast a game. It was a familiar rhythm: work the week, gather on Thursday night, throw your stuff in the car, talk until we got to Nashville, and then just drive. When you drive a long time in a row—and Huntsville to Minneapolis is 18 grueling hours, most of it through the Midwest, with Madison and Nashville your only touchstones to urban America—your thoughts turn to God … or at least ours did.

I think that I resonate with TPD mainly because long drives are my thing. Sometimes it takes a trip to give you perspective on what really matters in life, for your thoughts to go away from your boss, your co-workers, your alarm clock, the humdrum crap that annoys you and occupies a bunch of useless brain cycles. Stripped away from all that and put on the road—where, to be honest, we really just have to stay between the lines and under the speed limit—our brains can rest from all the frustrations that so easily flood our consciousness.

Earlier this afternoon, I dropped in to see Jonathan and Ashley, and Jon mentioned that they’re going out to Oregon sometime to visit his sister and her husband. One possibility is that they might drive, which says to me that I should just loan them this book until they’ve made their trip.

I picked up Donald Miller’s Through Painted Deserts the other night, and I’m starting through it. I figured I’d better read him if I’m going to keep administrating the Don Miller Fan Forum I ought to read the man …

Dear Reader: I can’t decide which book I should attempt to tackle next. After polishing off the wonderfulness that was Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook on Saturday—it was so good, I might even attempt to review it—I’ve got three daunting non-fiction works that have been sitting in my to-do pile for some time. If you have a choice amongst the three, leave a comment telling me the book that you believe I should tackle first.

[I mock these types of entreaties when they're made on message boards ... and yet, I've become what I hate. Typical!]

On the advice of Maciej Ceglowski, who recommended a variety of Eastern European novels to his readers, I’m reading Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook.

Reading fiction like this is totally outside of my standard fare, but I found it rather hard to put down last night. [I only succumbed because it was late, I was tired, and it was delightfully cold in my house, the kind of cold that begs one to throw the covers overhead and coccoon oneself into the night.

The only weird thing for me is that I keep imagining Shteyngart’s Vladimir to be like my friend Daniel Khaykis … which just isn’t fair. It is, however, amusing…

Yesterday, I was pillaging the bookstores of Huntsville for a copy of when I found the Holy Grail:

It is mine. Oh yes, it is mine. I may end up (ab)using this by stealing Susan’s thunder and ending lifelog entries with quotations that support my main premise.

[Actually, I probably won't, because, well, I'm lazy. But it's a nice thought.]

As I’ve discussed a couple times, I’ve been reading Charles Petzold’s Code I finished just now, and so I’d like to share some scattered thoughts:

• Petzold builds slowly but swiftly, if that makes any sense. He divides the early chapters into small, manageable chunks, talking about things like bits and bytes and Boolean logic in ways that the average layman shouldn’t have any issues with. The first 40% of the books or so fairly flies by [if you're interested in the material and willing to set aside the time to read it, that is].
• The next 20% of the book or so, though, slogs way down, as Petzold jumps from small chunks to large chunks fed to the reader at once. [If you want to compare it to the terminology of the text, he goes from feeding you 1-bit chunks to 8-bit chunks to 16-bit chunks of information at quite some speed.] It’s disconcerting, and this is the point where I lost steam in reading the book and went from reading it to skimming it. That’s unfortunate; Petzold’s voice is extremely strong and engaging early on, and it’s as if he’s like so many engineering professors I had as an undergraduate—suddenly realizing that he’s way behind the syllabus and deciding to just charge forward, Mas alla! over the next hill. My feeling on this book went from “I love it!” to “It’s teaching me a lot, and I should shut up and keep reading.” There’s a difference there, folks.
• The next 25% or so of the book actually slows up a bit, but it covers dreadfully boring material [assembly code, addressing memory, etc.]. Important stuff, and it’s covered in much the same manner as before: a balanced historical perspective told anecdotally. However, I was left wondering when there would be a quiz on the material being covered.
• The next 10% discusses high-level subjects like high-level programming languages, APIs, and things of that ilk. It’s done fairly well, with a sense of history, but the anecdotal nature is lost. At this point, the book has certainly resumed its desperate-to-finish nature.
• The final chapter of the text is an amalgam of stuff under a banner of The Graphical Revolution, but it quickly devolves into a thumbnail sketch of technologies like CD-ROM media, GIF v. JPEG, vector graphics v. raster graphics, DACs, etc. Honestly, you could get more information from these links than you would have gotten reading the final chapter. However, Petzold’s work suffers from covering an exponentially-growing sphere from the perspective of the late 1990s, so while I’m tempted to skewer the ending, any book discussing modern computing is going to be highly prone to grinding to a halt like this.

Please don’t get me wrong: the text is still quite solid, and it comes as recommended reading to people who are interested in how computers work. [Before anyone says otherwise, please understand that I'm a hobbyist administrator, trained in following manual pages, install scripts, and asking for the advice of others. I AM NOT A PROGRAMMER. The only language I've ever written working programs in is FORTRAN 77, and that almost eight years ago. I'm a high-functioning user; this is part of my self-education, serving as a foundation point.]

I would absolutely recommend handing this book to a book-savvy pre-teen who is interested in computers. Had this book been available in 1990, I might be a programmer now instead of an aerospace engineer. [I think I prefer the aero bit. I like blowing stuff up.]

[This entry starts my Booklogging category. If you're interested, see why I'm booklogging.]

So, I finally got around to reading Freakonomics, which makes me a lame Weblogger or something. I found it to be interesting, a nice thumbnail sketch of using statistical analyses to look at the world in interesting ways. A lot of the stuff that Leavitt argues for in the book is the same kind of thing I’ve been reading over the years with the folks who do sabermetrics—taking the data, looking for trends, seeking correlations, and possibly finding causalities.

Doing it from an economist’s point of view, however, widens the scope of the investigation. The things that Leavitt, his colleagues, and others he finds interesting study are really … out there. But they’re pretty doggone cool.

One thing that I found interesting, however, is how Leavitt’s regression analysis that found a correlation between abortion becoming legal with Roe v. Wade and a nationwide drop in crime pretty much kicks the leg out from under the anecdotal argument that Malcom Gladwell made in The Tipping Point about what worked in drawing down crime in New York City. Considering how much the blogosphere talks about both Freakonomics and The Tipping Point, you’d think I’d've run across someone remarking this before. [However, I've probably missed every reference to this contradiction. Oh well. In this case, I'm writing for my limited audience. ]

Anyhow, if you like unconventional thinking and having your preconceptions challenged a bit—or in watching others’ preconceptions shaken—it’s a good little read. It was great for a Saturday afternoon in Florida.