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Duffbert's Random Musings is a weblog semi/sorta related to IBM/Lotus Notes & Domino software, but I don't let that be a limiting criteria. I'm Thomas Duff, and you can find out more about me here...

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10/07/2008

Book Review - Fade Away by Harlan Coben

Category Book Review Harlan Coben Fade Away

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I've been on a bit of a recreational reading kick lately...  probably trying to escape the stress of the economy.  Anyway, my number finally came up at the library for the latest Myron Bolitar novel by Harlan Coben...  Fade Away.  It's been awhile since I've had the pleasure of reading Bolitar's irreverent dialog and his interaction with his partner Win Lockwood.  And as always, it's a treat.

Bolitar, a sports agent and one-time promising basketball phenom (before his knee was blown out at the very start of his professional career), is approached by the owner of the New Jersey Dragons.  They're a playoff-bound team with a minor problem...  their star player Greg Downing has disappeared.  He's a bit of a head case anyway, and the team is trying to sell it to the media as seclusion to rehab an injured ankle.  The owner wants to sign Bolitar to finish out the season with the team, basically as a scrub player with some name appeal of what "could have been".  But what he really wants is for Bolitar to investigate from the inside and see if he can solve the mystery.  Bolitar's not sure he wants to subject himself to public ridicule as a player, but the chance to have his shot at the pros is too strong.  He takes the case and quickly finds a number of people who could have wanted Downing dead, including an ex-wife and some underworld characters.  As Bolitar digs deeper, no one ends up being exactly who they say they are (or who Bolitar thinks they are).  He has to question everything, including his own past, to solve this case and find closure for his professional life that never was.

There's not much more to say other than this was just a fun read.  Bolitar always seems to be one snide remark away from getting the pulp beat out of him.  He basically says all the smart-alex things you'd *like* to say if you had time to think about it (and there were no repercussions).  The dialog is one of the main reasons why I enjoy the Myron Bolitar series.  Couple that with a plot that keeps twisting with no resolution until the end (and even then, there's still a few surprises), and it's my idea of a perfect book for killing a few hours at  home or on a plane.

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:11 PM Location Portland, Oregon | | Comments (0)

10/06/2008

Book Review - The Master Planets by Donald Gallinger

Category Book Review Donald Gallinger The Master Planets

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I was contacted by Donald Gallinger recently, asking if I'd be interested in receiving a copy of his book The Master Planets.  The description and premise was such that I was interested enough to agree.  Within about 25 pages, my "I need to be doing..." list was completely shot, because I didn't want to put the book down.  That surprised me a bit, as Master Planets isn't necessarily an action-driven novel.  But the characters were so real that I found myself emotionally drained at the end.

The story starts with Peter Jameson meeting with an Israeli ambassador who is asking him to attend yet another memorial tribute to his mother.  He's tired of being a figurehead for who his mother was and what she did during World War II.  From that meeting, Gallinger takes you back to Peter's youth and traces his path to where he finds himself now.  Jameson was always convinced that he was meant to be a rock star, and with a few friends he formed a band called The Master Planets.  Through a combination of skill, stubbornness, and a little luck, The Master Planets start a meteoric rise up the record charts.  But lurking in the background is Peter's family.  His mother has a secret past that has never been revealed to the kids.  His father is relatively detached from the family, although he cares for them very much.  Through a series of events, Peter finds that his mother was a partisan resister during the war, and was responsible for saving thousands of lives of Jews through her actions.  But she was also responsible for the gruesome deaths of many German soldiers, and indirectly for the deaths of countless others who were killed in reprisal for her assassinations and raids.  Her suicide and possible link to the death of a German war criminal starts to gnaw at his creative efforts, and the band's success starts to stagnate.  When an Israeli general contacts him and starts to reveal the full story of his mother's past, it sends Peter and all those around him into a tailspin.  He has to figure out how to reconcile his mother's past with his current life, and no part of that life is unaffected.

I was surprised at the way this grabbed me, as I'm normally more inclined to shy away from introspective novels.  It's not that there's no action in The Master Planets, it's simply a case of the characters interaction with their past is what drives the story and plot.  The book was written in first-person form from Peter's point of view, and I immediately found myself immersed in his life and emotions.  A reader who is more contemplative will likely get even more out of the book than I did.  But regardless of which type of reader you are, The Master Planets will take you on an emotional ride that you won't quickly forget.

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:30 PM Location Portland, Oregon | | Comments (0)

10/04/2008

I work with a great community of people...

Category Everything Else

As part of my Articles of Interest project, I'm going back through over a year of tagged RSS entries to pull out things that mean a lot to me.  What quickly became interesting is how often certain names and blogs appeared repeatedly.  Chris Blatnick shows up quite often, and I think everything Andre Guirard ever blogged has been copied over.  :)  All in all, I think most of the Notes community makes an appearance (or 10) in my new repository.

Thanks to everyone who shares what they know.  It's this collaboration that makes us so strong and freaky-smart!

Posted by Tom Duff At 11:31 AM Location Portland, Oregon | | Comments (0)

10/04/2008

So do you keep an electronic "Articles of Interest" database?

Category Everything Else

I finally spent some time this week starting a project that's been gnawing away at me for awhile.  It started when I looked at my Starred category on Google Reader and found there were over 500 entries out there.  Some items were Notes tips I wanted to look at later, some were great posts on public speaking and presentations, tech how-to's, cool software...  you get the idea.  But listed as they are in a single category in Google Reader, they might as well have been missing in action.  I decided I had to fix that.

My new "Articles of Interest" application is nothing more than a database in Notes based on the Personal Journal template.  Going through my starred entries starting in June of 2007, I pasted the title link, date, and content of the RSS feed into the body of the document, added the title and date to the fields up on top, and then categorized it by name of poster/site and the type of content (Notes Tips, Cool Software, Personal Improvement, etc.)  I'm up to May of 2008 now, and in the next couple of days I hope to have my Starred category count down to zero.  Then I can use this new database to see what I actually have, and try out some of the tips I had forgotten about.

If you don't have something like this, you should really consider doing so.  You may only have two or three entries a week you want to keep, but those keepers could be what bails you out of a problem down the road.

(Yes, I know you can always search via Google to refind the information.  But if you forgot the tip existed in the first place, what's going to jog your memory to know what to be looking for?  I'd rather just quickly peruse a view to find it.)

Posted by Tom Duff At 11:23 AM Location Portland, Oregon | | Comments (5)

10/02/2008

Book Review - The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory by Torkel Klingberg

Category Book Review Torkel Klingberg The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory

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I received a copy of The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory by Torkel Klingberg via the Amazon Vine review program recently.  Working in the tech industry, I'm all too aware of the massive amount of information we're exposed to each day.  What I was hoping for was an understandable, practical guide for dealing with it.  Instead, the book turned out to be tilted more towards the academic side of the equation, citing study after study about how and why (we think) brains work as they do.  Throughout the whole book, I kept feeling like I was missing a thread, a common theme that would tie together all the chapters into some unifying message.  I'm the first to admit that subtlety is not my strong point, but I'm not sure that unifying message ever appeared for me.

Contents:
Introduction - The Stone Age Brain Meets the Information Flood; The Information Portal; The Mental Workbench; Models of Working Memory; The Brain and the Magical Number Seven; Simultaneous Capacity and Mental Bandwidth; Wallace's Paradox; Blain Plasticity; Does ADHD Exist?; A Cognitive Gym; The Everyday Exercising of Our Mental Muscles; Computer Games

As close as I can determine, Klingsberg feels that our short-term, or "working", memory is what limits us.  We seem genetically wired to retain about seven (plus or minus 2) pieces of data at a time.  Then if the information isn't pushed to long-term memory, it's pretty well gone.  I keep trying to think about how this book would have been more useful to me, since I seemed to disconnect with it on a practical side.  I could see this book being used in a psychology class as a textbook of sorts, each chapter spurring discussion of the concepts in that particular chapter.  The large number of studies cited could provide additional material.  With that frame of reference, I think I might have been much more open to the writing.  But as a layman's book, I'm not sure this did anything but add to my already overloaded mind.

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:31 PM Location Portland, Oregon | | Comments (0)

10/02/2008

The Workspace Picture meme...

Category Everything Else

Since my home workspace is a real mess (and doesn't have any cool toys compared to the rest of you), you get to see my Cubeville location instead...

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A picture named M3

It's quite amazing how much cleaner this space is than my home space...

Actually, it's quite sad...  sigh...

Posted by Tom Duff At 4:25 PM Location Portland, Oregon | | Comments (4)

10/01/2008

Book Review - Fixation by Mark Schorr

Category Book Review Mark Schorr Fixation

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I followed up the book Borderline with Mark Schorr's next novel in the Brian Hanson series, Fixation.  As with Borderline, I loved the setting of the story in my home town.  Also, the suspense of being stalked and harassed at each turn was good enough to keep me turning pages.  I don't think I was quite as enthralled this time as with his first novel, but it was an entertaining read.

Hanson's semi-love interest, Louise Parker, leads a failed raid on a white supremacist compound.  The raid goes sour as someone tips off the group ahead of time, and the FBI team are sitting ducks.  As with most failed efforts like this, someone has to take the blame, and Parker appears to be on the hook for this one.  That might not be so bad, except she also has her wallet and badge stolen while on administrative paid leave.  This starts a series of harassing events, like stalking videos sent to her home from a video rental account...  phone calls with strange individuals...  her face photoshopped on another woman's body for a lewd adult website.  The FBI investigators are starting to feel that perhaps she's going off the deep end, and that she really has something to hide (like the off-shore account she didn't know she had).  Hanson wants to help her out and be there for her, but she's not even convinced that he might not be behind all of this harassment.  She's seen Hanson when he detaches into his Vietnam soldier role, and she knows he's quite capable of flipping out and losing control.  He's got his own problems in addition to Parker's, as it appears the same people after her are also trying to take him out of the picture.  The question becomes who will crack first...  Hanson, Parker, or the stalkers?

The pacing was pretty good in Fixation, but there was much more personal drama between Hanson and Parker as they struggled with trust issues.  There's also tension on the reader's part as two apparently separate people are out to settle scores with Parker, and it's unclear until the very end exactly what is going on.  I don't expect every novel to hit on all cylinders, as writing a great story isn't easy.  Although I liked Borderline better than Fixation, I'm looking forward to additional installments in this series should they appear.

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:47 PM Location Portland, Oregon | | Comments (0)

10/01/2008

Book Review - Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 by David Crystal

Category Book Review David Crystal Txtng: The Gr8 Db8

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As part of the Amazon Vine review program, I requested and received a copy of David Crystal's book Txtng: The Gr8 Db8.  Being the proud owner of an iPhone with two older children, I've done my share of texting with them and others in my circle of friends.  While the book does do a good job in examining the pros and cons of texting on our language skills, it was far too academic for my liking.  Conversely, if you were teaching a class (or were interested) in linguistics, there'd be a lot in this book that would fascinate you.  Guess it all depends on your reason and/or expectations for reading it.

Contents:
The hype about texting; How weird is texting?; What makes texting distinctive?; What do they do it?; Who texts?; What do they text about?; How do other languages do it?; Why all the fuss?; Glossary; Appendix A - English text abbreviations; Appendix B - Text abbreviations in eleven languages; Index

Crystal is a professor of linguistics in the United Kingdom, and he's spent considerable time and effort studying the subject of text messaging.  His main argument is with those who decry "text speak" as the death knell of proper writing skills.  He reaches the exact opposite conclusion in his opinion.  The ability to shorten, abbreviate, and combine sounds to create written communication has been around as long as language itself, and the core skills involved in creating text messages are the same as a person would use for any other written form of communication.  The hysteria of those who don't understand it is countered by solid statistics and research provided by Crystal.  In fact, there are entire competitions devoted to creating poetry that is restricted to the 140 character limit often imposed on SMS text messages.  While some win the contest with full words (just not very many of them), others push the boundaries of texting and create emotional works using sentences like "txtin iz messin, mi headn'me englis".  While not a "language" that would be officially recognized as such, it's difficult to believe that someone couldn't figure out exactly what was meant in those lines.  And really, that's the goal of communication.

I found some of the material interesting, as well as his non-gloom-and-doom attitude quite refreshing.  But it bogged down at times when it came to detailed statistics about who does what most often.  A serious student of linguistics might be interested in knowing how women and men differ in their texting, or how the different age groups might approach it.  But from my techo-geek perspective, I found myself in rapid skim mode more often than not.  I feel that your enjoyment of the book will be based on proper expectations.  If you want a scholarly approach to the subject backed up by research, it's great.  If you're more interested in a "hacker's" view of texting, then you may be left wanting...

Posted by Tom Duff At 6:11 PM Location Portland, Oregon | | Comments (0)

09/30/2008

Book Review - Billy: The Untold Story of a Young Billy Graham and the Test of Faith that Almost Changed Everything

Category Book Review Bill McKay Ken Abraham Billy: The Untold Story of a Young Billy Graham and the Test of Faith that Almost Changed Everything

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I recently was sent a manuscript for the book Billy: The Untold Story of a Young Billy Graham and the Test of Faith that Almost Changed Everything by Bill McKay and Ken Abraham.  I've read and reviewed other books about Billy Graham, but not any that restricted itself to the beginning stages of his ministry told in narrative form.  This book is meant to coincide with a soon-to-be-released movie titled "Billy: The Early Years."  In the book, the authors tell the story of Billy Graham's ministry through the eyes of his one-time partner, Charles Templeton.  The scene is a hospital, where Templeton is living out his last days with Alzheimer's.  An aging reporter, eager to revive her flagging career, has been told to interview Templeton in order to get some dirt on Graham...  be it scandals, hypocrisy, or whatever.  She sets up in the hospital room with a camera crew and starts the interview, trying to get Templeton to turn on his former colleague.  But much to her dismay and amazement, Templeton's cynicism over what Graham believes and preaches is not enough to overcome the fact that he can find no fault in Graham.  He knows that however much he belittles the beliefs he used to share, he can't deny that Graham has accomplished far more that should have been humanly possible given his background and skills.

The flow of the story starts back in Graham's teen years, before he became a Christian.  After going forward at a tent-style revival, he decides that he wants to attend a bible college and move into some sort of ministry work.  Much to his shock and surprise, he's asked to speak in front of a church.  Terrified, he covers the breath of his Bible knowledge in rapid-fire fashion...  taking an entire seven minutes.  But there's something there, and he's asked to speak in more locations, eventually leading to a full-time pastor position.  Along the way, he meets and marries his wife Ruth, who gives up her dream of becoming a missionary to Tibet to support Graham in his ministry.  As his preaching and evangelism starts to pick up speed, he's eventually teamed with Charles Templeton, an extremely popular and well-known evangelist at the time.  They seem to make a good team, but Templeton's life is getting much darker...

Templeton is starting to question his faith, and it comes to a head at the end of World War II.  He sees a newsreel showing Holocaust survivors, and decides he can't believe in a loving God any more.  Graham is crushed by his decision to leave the ministry and study at Princeton.  This turning away by Templeton starts Graham down the path of questioning his own commitment. The story moves to a moment in time where Graham struggles with his fears and doubts by himself out in the woods at a conference.  The ultimate outcome of that war would end up changing the face of world evangelism as we know it.

Unlike some of the other books on Graham that attempts to analyze all his works and actions, this is a more story-driven treatment of his early life.  I'm sure that once the movie is released, I'll find that this book follows very closely to the timing and direction of the film.  Still, it's an inspirational look at someone who has committed everything to what he believes.  It also shows that particular moments in time can have ramifications *far* beyond what one might expect at the moment.  

Posted by Tom Duff At 7:03 PM Location Portland, Oregon | | Comments (1)

09/29/2008

Would *you* ride in this airplane?

Category Humor

When we went on our DisneyWorld vacation earlier this month, Alaska Air unfortunately ended up changing our reservations.  What started as a direct PDX to MCO flight turned into the more typical PDX to SEA to MCO.  Not a big deal for me, but Ian doesn't share the same opinion.

Ian hates flying...  *really* hates flying.  Medication is necessary, be it capsules or liquid.  But getting on a plane stone cold sober is *not* an option for him.  The Portland to Seattle leg of the flight uses Horizon Air, which mostly consists of puddle-hoppers that fly every 30 to 60 minutes between the two cities.  Ian took all his necessary "medication" to survive the first leg of the trip, but I'm sure seeing this didn't make getting on the plane any easier...

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I thought it was funny...  I don't think he concurred with my opinion.  :)

Posted by Tom Duff At 8:06 PM Location Portland, Oregon | | Comments (0)