There's Something About Harry

Late last night, I finally finished the book, Born to Run by Christopher McDougall.  I could have easily stayed up and read the book in one shot, but I had to work and get some sleep and things.

The book rocked!  It was like reading an Indiana Jones adventure novel mixed with a James Redfield quest searching for spirituality combined with a mystery and investigation into the science of the foot, the human body and , oh yeah, running. 

For the last 5 months since I started running in Vibram Five Finger Toe Shoes, people keep asking me, “Have You  read Born to Run?”

They have this weird creepy gleam in their eye, typically.  I always said, “No.” I kept thinking that they were caught up in some concept that was borderline fad or hype or something.  I run in vibrams because they work, and I like it, and it is helping to make running both enjoyable and possibly make me into something of a serious writer for the first time.

I don’t really have any room in my life for hype or fads or whatever.  Form rarely supercedes function for me. 

So I mistakenly stayed away from the book.  It sounded like  as self help guru type of book, and I just wasn’t interested. 

Well, I finally had some spare time and decided to listen to the audio book version of the book.

Within about 30 minutes I was completely hooked.  Christopher McDougall is an excellent story teller above all else.  Even if he was talking about a trip to the 7 & 11 to buy garbage bags in the middle of the night, I suspect he could tell a great yarn.

This book contains a great big amazing story, filled with lots of little amazing stories throughout, plus a bit of fact and science and hard investigative reporter like research too.

in fact, I suspect that this book might be one of the better books that I will read this year in 2010.  Even if you are not a runner, I think you can enjoy this great story, the adventure, the jokes, the crazy situations and more.

Sure, McDougall might trick you into learning something, and DISCLOSURE/PLOT SPOILER there are a couple mentions of running barefoot and vibram toe shoes, but this book is NOT about TOE SHOES NOR barefoot running. 

You might learn how to hunt antellope with your bare hands, you might learn about some of the newer theories of evolution, you might even learn about some extreme sports that you have never heard of, but above everything else, this book will entertain you very much.

If it doesn’t then leave me a nasty comment and I will apologize and wonder just what flavor of aum you were dosed with. 

Life Changing Book?

Within the last few months, I have had possibly three experiences now that might serve to change my life in a positive way:

• The Beatles Love Show in Las Vegas
• Love is the Killer App, a book by Tim Sanders, and
• Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

James Redfield might even wink at me as they all ‘coincidentally’ share a similar theme either as a significant element in the composition or as the fundamental basis for the theory of the work.

Love

Screw New Years Resolutions, I’ve just red or expereinced 3 different things that  have inspired me.  I don’t need a hollow promise when I can run forward with inspiration. 

Here’s some relevant videos, but don’t let the videos fool you into thinking that the book might be boring. 

It is Thursday night and I’m writing this article early.  Saturday, I’m flying to Las Vegas for my third Affiliate Summit.  I’m going to be a mentor this year helping at least one person officially and probably 2 other people unofficially navigate Affiliate Summit West for their first time.

Its not even half way through the month of January and frankly things have been a good bit nutty after the holidays.

From a financial perspective I’m racing to make ends meet coming out of the holidays and a short working month of December.  The month of January and February are both looking very good, but cash flow is not timed terribly well right now, so I’m doing everything on the cheap and as conservatively as possible this month.

Delta Maxed out my Amex

I’m also heading to a WordCamp in Boston next weekend, after Affiliate Summit.  I will be sitting in at a couple Genius Bar sessions helping to show people how to design WordPress themes from scratch for the first time.

I was trying to keep my trip cheap, so I went onto Delta.com to book my flight using the last of my frequent flyer miles on Delta ( I used to live in Atlanta and have been trying to get these things used up all year long).  Delta links my profile to my Amex and even when I pay for a flight entirely with skymiles, they secure the order with my Amex.

Well last Friday when I tried to book my order things went completely bonkers on the Delta site and without me pushing any buttons, the site automatically booked and confirmed a flight that I did not select, nor want.

Even worse it charged the order to my Amex with real money not frequent flyer miles and that maxed out my card!

I needed those funds on that card to book my hotel in Boston, so after the order I didn’t have a airline ticket and didn’t have the funds for a hotel! 

I called Delta immediately after and they said they had cancelled my order.  Five days later however, my card had not yet been credited and Delta.com couldn’t process my frequent flyer mile order with a maxed out Amex!

I called them up and they initially told me that I was shit out of luck, no refund.

I re-explained the problem and they relented and offered to give me a refund afterall.  But a day later it still hadn’t gone through.  So this time I called Amex and essentially disputed the charge.  But another day after the dispute and my card is still maxed out.

Its now about 36 hours before I head to Vegas and I have no idea if I’ll be able to get my trip to Boston fixed before I would have left next Friday.

CES Was a Wash This Year too

Every year I always say that I’m not going to go to CES next year.  This year ended up being that year for real.  But my friend Joe Klein and Michael Butler did make it and had a good time.  A new friend here in Charlotte Robert Enriquez (aka NC_SEO on Twitter) also went for the first time himself. 

All in all, I’m kind of glad I missed the show this year, even though I would have preferred to have made that choice and not be forced into it by circumstances.  Anyway it worked out as I have been getting a lot of website design work done for quite a few different customers. (more on that in a future post).

Dancing Last Weekend

Among other things I also had a chance to go out dancing with my wife Becky and some of her teacher friends.  I had a great time as I love to go dancing.  I could do that full time if I weren’t in my thirties. It wasn’t the best club I’ve ever been too, but it got the job done, we had fun and that’s a good thing. 

Broken Laptops and Replacement Cell Phones

My Palm Pre finally died last week and I had a replacement shipped to me by Sprint (I pay for insurance on my Pre).  This was my second Pre to die (I now have my third Palm Pre).  I think its a great phone, but they are not terribly durable.

Once I get back from Affiliate Summit, I’m going to by a spare battery for the phone as well, as the standard battery just doesn’t cut it.

The keyboards on both my laptops flaked out again.  I was able to rebuild my primary laptop keyboard, its less than a year old.  Its a Toshiba and I love the little thing, but it sucks that the keyboard died.

The other laptop is 4 years old and despite spending 3 hours trying I was not able to get the laptop going again.  In both cases, I think the plug for the keyboard on the Toshiba laptop motherboard is a bit defective and it basically causes the keys to seem to stop working. 

So now with my older larger laptop, I will always have to plugin a keyboard via USB to type anything.  I also feel like I am on borrowed time with my newer Toshiba laptop, so I will probably have to get ready to get a new one sometime soon.  I really hoped that I’d get at least 2 years out of this laptop, and am a little miffed that it didn’t even make it a year before becoming unreliable.

Dragon Riders of Pern Series

I’ve recently been listening (re-listening/re-reading) all of Anne Mcaffrey’s Dragon Riders of Pern novels.  I’ve read these more than a half dozen times and just enjoy the story.  This time I’m trying to read them in chronological story order.

I’m also reading Love is the Killer Application by Tim Sanders, which is a good book and I think I’m getting some useful information out of it.

The White Dragon, Harper Hall Series and All the Weyrs of Pern are my favorites.

Meetups and Conferences

I am over due scheduling a WordPress Meetup in Charlotte and will definitely do that no later than tomorrow.  Plus, I am now going to be scheduling the next Charlotte WordCamp picking up this responsibility from Jason Keath the founder of Social Fresh, who also ran the first Charlotte WordCamp.  I’m looking forward to this experience and even more so looking forward to giving people access to some great WordPress resources, information and a people!  I just learned this yesterday so you can be assured that I will have a lot more to talk about on this topic in coming days.

Frozen Lake

The lake is frozen, but I did just receive a new kerosene wick for my heater, so I am looking forward to getting back into my dockoffice, primarily so that I can do some video and audio work.  Outside of my dockoffice I have not found a good location to record video or audio.  Every where I work outside of my office is WAY TOO NOISY! 

So that’s what I have been up to, if you have caught up with me, please drop me a comment with a link or two to your own blog and let me know what you have been up to lately.  I’ve been fairly conversant with folks on Facebook, but haven’t been making the blog rounds as much as I would like, so give me a bread crumb (hyperlink) and let me catch up with you!

I have been a member of Audible.com for almost as long as the service has been running with a 8 month break in service during a billing snafu that resulted in me getting super annoyed and canceling for a while about 6 years ago.

The service used to be great(getting an audio book online when you wanted it), but customer service and ease of browsing navigation for Audible books has always been terrible.

I have always been super annoyed with their subscription plans, mostly because they can not be paused without cancelling your entire account.  From my perspective, there are typically periods of time, when I don’t want the service for 2 –3 months.  This usually happens for two reasons:

1. I’ve read too many books and I need a break from reading for a couple months
2. Audible’s site makes it so difficult to find books I want to read that I give up for a month or two.

Regardless, I have a new complaint about Audible, and this one might drive me away from the service all together.  Its pricing.

They have recently started charging 2 credits (the equivalent of 2 months worth of subscription fees or $30) for the download of many unabridged books.

From my perspective, an abridged book, just isn’t worth reading.  So in making this move, Audible is doubling the price of their books.  Maybe making this even worse, this seems to happen on those books that I can actually find and want to read on Audible, as opposed to the masses of books that seem to clutter their system.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a book worm and read hundreds of books each year, sometimes even a thousand or more.  I’m not super picky, because I can read very fast.  For example, I have read the first 3 books in the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer since Monday.

I had thought about listening to the fourth book, but the price got in the way.

So now, not only can I not find books on Audible, but when I do find them the price is double. 

This might just be the thing that drives me to drop the service entirely.

It started out kind of slow compared to wicked, but finally picked up enough to be engrossing about half way through the book, I’m talking about Son of a Witch that is.  I got the impression that after the author’s ten year hiatus from Wicked, it just took a while for him to get orientated in the land of Oz again, but once he was there, he was determined to make it work.

So last night I stayed up until 5 in the morning finishing the book after I finished work around 1 am. 

This week, I’ve been planning out a trip to Las Vegas next week.  I’m making a trek to Vegas and Laughlin actually to catch up with my business partner Joe Klein of New Media Creative.  We are locking down some very interesting plans for the year.  I’m also hoping to maybe stop in and see everyone in the Las Vegas meetup group again.  Haven’t hung out with that crowd since Las Vegas WordCamp.   Vegas has a very vibrant and strong WordPress group, and after hanging with the local Charlotte group, I’m interested to see what ideas and practices might cross pollenate.

Today, I was spending a little time catching up with some bloggers at Blogexplosion.  I came across a new blogger I hadn’t met before that runs a blog called Snarke.net.  Long story short, I noticed a recent tweet from them about how their current WP design wasn’t really doing it for her.

So I thought I’d jump into my favorite design platform for wordpress themes and see just how fast I could whip something together using a couple pictures from her own flickr account.

Here’s the before (or current I should say)

Here’s my 5 minute design after (I’m sure I could do better with a little guidance and feedback, but I just felt like a little random act of design kindness might help me get some focus on my next project for this evening. 

The original theme isn’t really that bad, and most of those widgets would import nicely into this them.  I just kind of thought the blog needed a slightly more personal feel, but maybe that isn’t Snarkey enough. 

Snarke, whomever you are , if you are out there and come across this, you are welcome to the theme btw.  Just leave a comment or email me or something.

Alternatively, if you want to try your hand at the design thing yourself, check out my theme design video at Softduit.

Since I worked all night last night (Sunday) I feel obliged and guilt free in talking about my weekend a little bit. 

WordPress Meetup in Charlotte

Going into the weekend, I was gearing up for the Greater Charlotte Area WordPress users meetup.  I founded this group and this was our first meeting.  I’m happy to say that it went very very well.  We had a dozen people show up out of 15 yes rsvps and that seemed pretty darn good for a Saturday and a first meetup at that.

During our meetup I provided a session on how to design a custom wordpress theme from scratch with some great software that makes it a snap to create a custom WordPress theme.

I let people see how to design wordpress themes, and used the software also as a means for helping many of the people in the meetup better understand the components that go into a typical wordpress theme, why they are there and where they come from, such as the header, footer, sidebars, content sections and more.

I got lots of video of the presentation including a screencast. I neglected unfortunately to get any pictures of the attendees.  So I’m hoping a few other people grabbed some snap shots of the event. 

Bible Belt Zaps Religulous DVD

That evening, I came home, rented Twilight and Religulous.  I had the intention of watching Religulous first (with the kids) but the DVD would not play in our DVD player.  It wasn’t a blueray issue, just a standard DVD in a standard DVD player.  I was suspicious that a local might have zapped the Religulous DVD or something, but the next day when I tried it on my computer it played fine.

Twilight

So instead we watched Twilight.  Twilight was a good movie, but as vampire movies go, there was no revelation.  When you have heard the history and capabilities of vampires once, you’ve heard it a thousand times.  Basically, this just mixed in the perspective of a moody, post goth teenage girl who developed a crush on the extra pale rebel of a vampire from the local vampire horde.

The movie probably would have been down right dull if the cinematography wasn’t excellent.  Its hard to make the rainy areas of the Pacific northwest look inviting, but the movie managed to pull it off, with odd contrasts back and forth with Joshua treed settings in Phoenix.

The Lazarus Effect

The next day I finished a Frank Herbert book I’ve been reading called the Lazarus Effect.  You may be more familiar with Herberts books from the Dune Series or the Dune movies.  This was a pretty good book, but nothing to do with Dune.  It did involve scifi and politics and the battle for scarce resources, and mutants and religion and things of that nature.

We ended the day with a cookout with some friends.  The kids played with their kids, we all ate some great steaks with rice and beans and had a few beers.

It was probably the beers, but that night I got tired early and crashed around 9 pm, only to wake back up (probably after the beers had worn off) just before midnight.  So I ended up working on editing the audio and video from the WordPress meetup until the kids got up in the morning to go to school.

Today Shaping up . . .

I helped one of my customers, Kensington Solutions who provides IT and business intelligence consulting services out of Atlanta, with a little assistance with their website.  In the process, I helped show Randy how to use WindowsLiveWriter.  Randy’s very tech savvy and picked up the program in about 30 seconds, after we got the WLW connected to his website, which I built a few months back.

In the process, I upgraded my own installation of WindowsLiveWriter.  I always try and keep my installation up to date so that I can help my customers use it by providing guided tutorials or help over the phone if they ever need it for any reason.

Look if you want to read this article beware because I am going to blow the plot 8 ways from Sunday.  It is really impossible to talk about this book without blowing the plot.  Some stories, movies, books are just like that.  Its kind of like trying to explain the classic Frik ‘n Frak joke without giving away the punch line.  The punch line is the only thing that ties the story together.  You have to give it if you plan on having a real discussion about it.

Now, I do not write ‘book reviews’.  Its just not my thing.  Never intended to do so in the past and do not intend to start now.  I like to write and I like to read even more, but I do not like to write about what I read, kind of.

Consider this particular discussion less of a review of Lost Boys and more of a empathetic dialogue or maybe a commiseration with other marks that have read this book.  I use the term ‘mark’ not to take anything away from the book.  I use it because that kind of fits.  Like the Frik ‘n Frak joke you have to experience the joke and in doing so you have to be the butt of the joke to get the full experience of the story.  That is because the reader or observer actually becomes part of the story and this is not really known until the punch line is dropped.

Lost Boys was written according to the author as a response to Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery.  I did not know that when I read the book, and I am glad I didn’t.  It would have spoiled the book.  Throughout the book boys keep disappearing from a small town, and after reading too many James Patterson novels in the 90’s, I kept expecting a showdown with a diabolical villain. It was written in response to Pet Cemetery such that the author could write a story about a boy that haunts his parents, but the boy is still pure or innocent or at least ‘not evil’. 

So the author walks the reader through this long drawn out story.  This is classic Frik n Frak stuff. The longer the story, the more twists and turns and sub plots the deeper the hook is sunk into the cheek of the reader until the author finally tires of teasing his prey along and jerks the fishing rod of the text into the air, yanks the last remaining hidden plot element and exposes the punch line

This post continues Read the rest of this entry »

I finished reading Children of the Mind a couple nights ago.  Children of the Mind is one of the books in the Ender’s series by Orson Scott Card.  This was one of those sequel books that is a must read for closure.  Every now and then authors, especially those in the scifi category will write a book that wraps most things up in a nice neat bow.  It may or may not be the last book in the series, but it does cap things off at the time. 

You see this in the Foundation series by Asimov, the Methusaleh series from Heinlein, the Incarnations of Immortality series by Piers Anthony and again in the Bio of a Space Tyrant by Piers Anthony (although I suspect that he had an end game in mind when he wrote books in the series of his universes excluding Xanth.) 

This one ends a series that came together in a bit of a haphazard way, but none-the-less is a very good series.  The thing that kind of makes this series capping book something equivalent to a classic is the fact that not only does it wrap up character plot line issues well, but it also wraps up the lingering philosophical questions created through out the entire series up until this point.

Now personally, I like philosophy, I like debates, I savor circular logic and discussions and that goes double when you mix it up with a good story, a scifi story if possible and maybe something with a little suspense thrown in.  I’ll take a good mystery or regular suspense book any day of the week too, but I do like to sink my teeth into something a little more substantial from time to time even if its fun at the same time.

I’m currently reading Plum Lucky by Janet Evanovich as I write this article.  Both writers have a talent for dialogue, even though they developed their skills in different ways.  . . .  kind of

Next up on my plate after I finish Plum Lucky is The Lazarus Effect by Frank Herbert & Bill Ranson.  I have not yet read the book that comes before the Lazarus Effect which is called the Jesus Incident, but I’ll probably attempt to track that down also.

Then Ender’s Shadow which is a tangential book in the Ender’s Series covering some supporting characters from the first book.  Then I’ll probably read a little Dan Brown (Deception Point) after that.

I finished reading the twentieth anniversary edition of Ender’s Game a couple weeks ago.   I followed that up with a book by Louis Black called Nothing Sacred.

Speaker for the Dead is the sequel to Ender’s Game.  Ender’s Game was a very good book and I was struck by the lack of detail about the setting and the people and well everything.    The book is written in a minimalist style so that the reader can project with their own imagination what things look like and how they interact with each other.

The book also plays out inside the character’s heads largely.  There is some dialogue, but it is the constant ongoing self analysis of the situations the characters encounter that drive the book forward.

I learned this from the authors own comments at the end of the book.    As I considered that writing style, I realized that like a Heinlein book where the character is often capable of dealing with any situation physically, or like a Asimov book or even a Piers Anthony book where the character’s are always so damn smart that they can figure something out with their intellect, Orson Scott Card emulates that style.  This immediately puts him in company with some of my favorite authors. 

My only criticism of his books comes in either the editing or the close of the book.  In most of the books I’ve read by Orson Scott Card, I run into sections where it feels like the author gets bored with the topic or plot.  That was always my perception until I read the authors notes at the end of the anniversary edition, where a few comments about the editing process helped to indicate that some of the sections of the books were cut to keep the book moving along. 

Personally I feel like that was a mistake, but it could be a sign of the times.  Twenty years ago, lets say before Harry Potter and the Oprah Winfrey book club, I do not think many people were reading popular books as much and reading a page volume level like they might be today.

Book sales may be down, but that could be a function of people enjoying longer books!

So maybe this is a lesson or trend for authors and editors to pick up on and exploit by encouraging authors to write longer books and not editing out all those sections that build a book almost like a Great Pyramid until you have a nice little masterpiece.  Sure fewer words can convey a message and maybe even get a book moving along in a suspense book, but sometimes consumers of books, especially in Science Fiction or Fantasy, we want to experience the world, the universe, the multi verse and don’t want the experience cut short or fast forwarded.

Background on Ender’s Game Series

Ender’s Game (1985) is a science fiction novel by American author Orson Scott Card.[1] The book originated as the novelette "Ender’s Game", published in the August 1977 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.[2] Elaborating on characters and plot lines depicted in the novel, Card later wrote additional books to form the Ender’s Game series. Card released an updated version of Ender’s Game in 1991, changing some political facts to accurately reflect the times. Set in Earth’s future, the novel presents an imperiled humankind who have barely survived two conflicts with the Formics (an insectoid alien race also known as the "Buggers"). In preparation for an anticipated third invasion, an international fleet maintains a school to find and train future fleet commanders. The world’s most talented children, including the novel’s protagonist Ender Wiggin, are taken at a very young age to a training center known as the Battle School. There, teachers train them in the arts of war through increasingly difficult games including ones undertaken in zero gravity in the Battle Room where Ender’s tactical genius is revealed. Reception to the book was generally positive, though some critics have denounced Card’s perceived justification of his main character’s violent actions. Ender’s Game won the 1985 Nebula Award for best novel and the 1986 Hugo Award for best novel. Its sequels, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, A War of Gifts, and Ender in Exile, follow Ender’s subsequent travels to many different worlds in the galaxy. "Ender’s Game" has been adapted into two comic series and is planned for a video game.

Ender’s Game – Wikipedia