February 13, 2006
Site has Moved
Over the weekend (during the storm), I changed the backend of this site to WordPress. If you're reading this from an RSS feed, then please update your feed - the new site is at http://heaney.org/wp. If you're not reading this from an RSS feed, then odds are you're not reading this, because the main page of site automatically forwards there.
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February 12, 2006
Still reading...
"See, you look out there and you want to go out and play. I look out there and I want to run under the covers"
- Gina, after looking outside during today's snowstorm
There's not much else to do except wait for the snow to stop so that I can go out and shovel, so I may as well write about what an utter piece of crap Blink turned out to be. The subtitle, as I said before is "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking". The book focuses on "thin-slicing" - taking very small bits of information, and making quick decisions based on that information. It takes the reader through several mini-essays about people who are very good at this - people who can spot fake pieces of art, firefighters who make quick decisions, etc. However, that's all it is - just a collection of these stories. Maybe I was reading under a bad assumption, but I figure that, at some point, the book would detail how the reader can harness this power of thin-slicing to better himself. No dice. Not even in the chapter called "The lessons of Blink" - that was just more drivel about somebody who can make good decisions with minimal information. Bah.
So now I'm reading Freakonomics which, ironically, has a quote on the cover from Gladwell. I'm only one chapter in, but it seems much better, although that may be because this time I'm expecting a collection of stories, and not a lesson in Economics. So far the book has focused on incentives in modern life, and why they don't work. I'll report back when done with the book (which could be soon, depending on how bad my travel delay is tomorrow)
Non-book-related-note: We just tried to open the front door, and the snow is up over the level of the door, so once this is all done, I'll have to shovel my way out to get to the shoveling. Good times...
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February 06, 2006
What's Dave Reading?
I know I said a while ago that I was going to start posting more frequently. That obviously hasn't happened. It seems like whenever anything entertaining happens in our life, I sit down to write about it, and say "man, that's SO not funny if you didn't get to witness it in person". This has happened no fewer than 4 times this calendar year. I've had a bunch of time to read lately, though (thanks to frequent trips back and forth to Logan, and frequent flights from Logan to Dulles), so I think I'm going to start writing about what books I've been reading, and what I thought of them. I'm currently halfway through Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. Before I get into what I think of Blink, though, here's a quick summary of what I've read recently:
The Smartest Guys in the Room - I'm a big fan of Mark Cuban's blog (and of many of Cuban's business philosophies and ideas), so I first learned of this book when he wrote about the movie version of the book that appeared on his television station, HDNet. It garnered a fair amount of critical praise, so when I saw the book in the Borders by gate C18 at Dulles, I picked it up. It takes the reader through the rise and fall of Enron, the two people most associated with the company (Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling), and a number of lower-level executives in the company. It also details how they set up a number of the "off balance sheet debt vehicles" that one hears about so much in the news. I'll be honest, the way the accounting worked in parts went a bit over my head, but overall, the book was great. It was both entertaining, and educational....which is more than I can say about....
The Devil in the White City - Argh. I don't know if this book was too hyped up by the time I read it for me to enjoy it, or if it just sucked, but it was a chore to get through. I will usually fight through any book I start, and get to the end, but this one almost broke me. It's the story of the Chicago World's Fair, intertwined with the author's version (based on a fair amount of research) of one man's murderous spree that happened at the same time. All of the reviews I saw said that it was a "history written as a novel" so that it was factually correct, and completely engrossing. The chapters about the fair were interesting, though by no means engrossing. As for Mr. HH Holmes (our dastardly murderer)....eh, his story was pretty boring. "Boy meets girl. Boy kills girl" Rinse, repeat
Harvard Business Review - Managing Yourself - This was actually a pretty decent selection of essays collected from (obviously) the HBR. The best among them was "How to Play to Your Strengths", "Managing Your Boss", and "Managing Oneself", all of which were applicable to a 26-year-old working at PwC. "Almost Ready: How Leaders Move Up" was more or less useless, because of the fact that it discusses why some COOs can make the jump to CEO, and others can't. Seemed like an odd choice for the first essay in the collection. The other four essays were decent, but not worth writing about.
Out of the three listed, I'd recommend Smartest Guys first, then the HBR essays (if that's something you're into). I'd shy away from Devil unless you have a ton of time on your hands...
And seeing as I wrote a ton about those 3, I'll save my thoughts about Blink for another time...
One final note - I've enabled commenting for this thread...we'll see if I still get spammed....
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January 29, 2006
New Bedroom!
Well, not exactly, but it's at least a new color - Beach Glass! This is what the bedroom looked like before the painting...white walls, and a nice little water stain that you probably can't see in this picture:
And here's the after (note, though, that Gina hasn't had a chance to fix the curtains. she didn't want anybody to see them this way, but I'm quick with the camera =) )
This was Gina's first painting experience, and she was very nervous about it. She had never used a roller before, and was convinced that we needed to put newspaper over the *entire* floor (not just by the walls) and also over all the furniture in the room (plan A was to move all of the furniture out of the room....I put the kibash on that one). She was also convinced that she was going to get paint in her hair. I tried to explain to her that the physics of the whole thing made it almost impossible that she would get paint in her hair. Well.....
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January 24, 2006
Whoops...
That last entry probably didn't make any sense. That would be my fault. I made a post about our little "incident" from this past friday - apparently you're not supposed to point a humidifier at a wall. We did, accidentally, and now there's a snazzy water stain in the corner of our bedroom, so we'll be painting our bedroom "beachscape" this weekend. I have pictures on the computer at home (I'm currently residing in the Sheraton Premiere in Vienna, VA), and that's what screwed all of the formatting up. When I wrote my haiku, though, I overwrote the entry with the haiku, instead of adding the haiku afterwards
Stupid haiku.