Read this one for work (what a surprise!). I have always found SharePoint troublesome – it doesn’t ever seem to work intuitively (especially when you start designing workflows and pages), and a kind work acquaintance let me borrow this book. This book is extremely helpful and well written, and SharePoint is starting to make sense now. (There were only a few errata that drove me crazy.) Now I just need to finish my RealLifeProject…
336 pages
“Predictably Irrational” was incredibly interesting and easy to read. One of my favorite anecdotes discussed how if you have two choices that are similar in value (say, a Victorian style house vs a contemporary style house), the very existence of a lesser choice (say, a Victorian style house that needs a roof replaced) will make you more likely to choose the “good” Victorian house. See, isn’t that interesting? The entire book is made up of little experiments like that, and was fascinating to read and ponder.
Highly recommended.
304 pages
4/5
The only interesting thing I learned in these 235 pages is that Nico (from that marvelous Velvet Underground & Nico album) died at the age of 49 from a biking accident in Spain.
Was it worth it?
Probably.
3/5
235 pages
Woohooooo! I’m done! I’m never reading another Twilight book again!
Seriously, though, this one had some good spots, but overall it was pretty horrendous.
768 pages
1.5/5
Yeah, whatever. I guess I’m in this for the long haul now. (Although I thought it was certainly more effort to get through than the last one.) I guess if I’m going to be all twilight-twinkie about this I am completely Team Jacob. Emily is certain I am enjoying these books; I really am just trying to get them over with. Plus, vacations are for light reading only, right? I have quite enjoyed reading the absolutely ridiculous scenes outloud; the voices I give Edward (robotic) and Bella (overDrAmAtIc tEeNAgEr) make me giggle.
Why does Team Jacob always have to lose? Because Eclipse is a movie about rejecting adulthood, not just as a person but also as a culture. It’s about rejecting adult relationships between men and women, but also between people of different races and between people from the city (like Victoria’s army) and people from Forks. It’s about never crossing boundaries, never leaving home.
640 pages
2/5
Read it quickly. Not as bad as the first one. Emily made me promise to be honest, so I have to tell you that there was a little piece of me that enjoyed this one. It helped that she also told me that I had to get in touch with my angsty teenaged side. It didn’t make the ANGST! DRAMA! AGH! any less annoying to read but at least the books are well written than the awful Sookie Stackhouse series, and I read about 8 of those before giving up and just watching True Blood. Two down, two(?) to go!
608 pages
3/5, I guess.
I have been pulling my hair out for a few hours, trying to figure out why Flex seemed to be automatically rounding numbers en route to the SQL Server (via Coldfusion). It was hard enough figuring out how to set a datatype to Number (the flex typing generator automatically sees decimal values as “string”, so to set the type as “number” you need to make sure the column in SQL server is empty before configuring the return type. Flex will configure that column as an “object”, and you can cast it as a Number (using the dropdown box) before saving the return type).
Basically, when you configure a return type to use a Number, the coldfusion service uses a cfsqltype=CF_SQL_DECIMAL type in it’s update & create services. This sends a rounded integer to the SQL server, instead of an actual decimal amount. When I changed this to cfsqltype=CF_SQL_VARCHAR, everything behaved normally. (And surprisingly, SQL server did not complain about the improperly typed object).
Yeah, I’m reading Book 24 on Week 26, but there’s a long weekend coming up and I’m pretty sure I’ll catch back up then. Anyway. I brought this book home with me after my last trip to MT; my Mom bought it on a whim, read it, thought it was awful, and begged me to take it with me. I thought it was pretty awful, too. It portrayed small town Southerns as the redneck stereotypes everybody thinks of, and I’ve lived in the South long enough to take that sort of thing personally. Granted, I’m not in a small town now…and there’s plenty of rednecks here too, but there are also plenty of people who genuinely care about people. This collection of stories only had one person that genuinely cared about someone else – and it was clear at the end of the book. Other than that, the characters were all caricatures of absolutely miserable people. I did miss the fact that it is a book of short stories, so as the book ended I was still hoping for some resolution from the earlier chapters…but there was none. Couldn’t finish it soon enough.
320 pages
0.5/5 (yep, I thought “Under The Dome” was FAR better than this, for what that’s worth).
I finished this book moments ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I picked up “American Gods” because it was the first “one book one twitter” selection. I enjoyed the modern mythology of how the gods of america were brought here by the people who came to this land (and how the gods weaken as people’s beliefs waver). I liked the meandering philosophy of how america’s holiest places are the man-made roadside attractions. In the midst of it all, the fantastical adventures of a man named Shadow keep the plot moving. This is a very lyrical book and an easy read, and I had very vivid, very dark dreams on the nights that I read it before bed.
As they passed their first signpost for Mount Rushmore, still several hundred miles away, Wednesday grunted. “Now that,” he said, “is a holy place.”
Shadow had thought Wednesday was asleep. He said, “I know it use to be sacred to the Indians.”
“It’s a holy place,” said Wednesday. “That’s the American Way – they need to give people an excuse to come and worship. These days, people can’t just go and see a mountain. Thus, Mister Gutzon Borglum’s tremendous presidential faces. Once they were carved, permission was granted, and now the people drive out in their multitudes to see something in the flesh that they’ve already seen on a thousand postcards.”
457 pages
4.5/5
