Tag: review

I stumbled onto this blog a year or more ago when I found it list on the “Recently Updated” list at Movable Type. It is easily one of my favorite journal blogs and I am so happy she is back to writing it after almost a mysterious year of being gone.

If you are one of those pink, pink and black, or pin-up girl bloggers go take a look at what a real woman’s blog is all about: unmitigated unapologetic content.

Of all my many many faults, this particular shortcomigng fills me with shame, as if I am confessing I secretly believed I was a princess who was switched at birth and any day now my real family will reclaim me. Expecting that little nugget of reinforcement is just as immature as any dream so ridiculously impossible as to be absurd.

http://www.notpretty.com/

Enjoy!

I am quoting my own comment here at the bottom, but I think that if you are coming to this site and not linking over to Coroner Stories from time to time, you should.

A. Douglas writes:

Blood and guts aside, death investigation was—and continues to be—the antithesis of what I consider to be a “normal� job. The kind of job where a person produces something tangible or at the very least goes to work with established tasks to accomplish. Instead I feel like an auto mechanic that was hired to respond to every car breakdown in the city wherever and whenever one occurs. Like a conventional auto mechanic, I can make diagnostic impressions, but unlike an auto mechanic, every vehicle I look at is beyond repair.

My comment back, based on an overall impression of his blog:

I think this post inadvertantly ties in with alot of the comments I have been reading on your blog, those in the “Wow, I couldn’t do your job.� vein.

You clearly have a job and a role in society that needs to be performed–we can’t just leave the dead lying around. If your readers’ comments are a reflection of the populace at large it’s clear that most have no desire for such work. So, on a purely utilitarian level you do have a product at the end of the day, you have accomplished something. It may only seem that it was to keep things tidy around the city, once again allowing the rest of us to ignore death and tragedy for another day. But you have to know its more than that too.

If it was only about the bodies, you wouldn’t take the time to humanize your stories–which is what I find in your posts and what I have found others find as well. What you have been presenting us with these past months is more than a clinical run down of the facts. You have shown us humor, comedy, suffering, and sympathy.

That kind of breadth of experience is exactly what I find missing in my mundane 9-5 job. I pump souless papers across my desk, it’s not intriguing, it’s not worthwhile, and it’s not terribly satisfying for my heart.

I won’t argue that you haven’t become desensitized to both the grim and the sad aspects of the job, but I will assert that you have become desesitized at a depth that most of us won’t reach in our work.

Thanks for illuminating my understanding each week.

Enjoy!

Backpack from 37 Signals looks to be my next favorite and actually USED web app.

Here’s my discovery path if you can believe it:

1. started looking for good definitions of ‘rubric’
2. got a page referring to ‘ruby on rails’–no idea how
3. got all warm and fuzzy for the ‘next big thing’
4. RSSd Loud Thinking
5. signed up for Basecamp (cool)
6. signed up for TaDa List (nice enough)
7. heard about Backpack too late to get or beg for a ‘Golden Ticket’
8. signed up today with the rest of the regular world

Others have raved about it’s usable and clean interface, so I won’t bother–I agree. More have talked about how it’s just what they have been looking for–I agree. I want to talk about it’s longevity.

Like the PDF, Google, and the blog, I am not sure how we got along without something this useful nor how we would get along if it went away. This is an app that I immediately saw myself using forever.

I have started converting all my to do lists over to this format because, unlike TaDa List, I can integrate them with other tools I like to have at hand: reminders and general note taking. I haven’t splurged for the paid account yet, but will be as soon as I can find where I put my wallet (no PayPal payment option?).

Once I am paid up, I will find out how the Sharing and Picture posting goes. I see myself using those features less since there’s flickr and I am not a person to share this sort of information, but the stuff I plan to use is easily worth the $5 a month option.

Don’t waste you time listening to what I have to say, go see for yourself.

On this morning ten years ago, I was just looking for the attendance list for the Science class I was about to substitute teach.

It was the beginning of the third hour, this was an inside room, they were doing contruction on the exterior wall on the west side of the school when we heard a slamming noise like the dropping of sheetrock.

The teacher in the room across the hall with an exterior wall ran out into the hall looking into the room I was covering to see if I had heard anything or if I was alarmed. Since it was a common enough sound for construction I hadn’t worried about it.

Later the day we spent lots of time watching a television during down time and between classes and at lunch.

In the weeks ahead–at my waiter job–I served many of the emergency workers helping with the clean up. They often remarked how much friendlier OKC was than was NYC during the first bombing of the WTC.

Before I left for Philmont, Tim Frielich and I went to the site and surveyed the distruction.

That’s what I remember.

Ender’s Game
by Orson Scott Card

Synopsis
Only six, Ender Wiggin excels at military computer simulations and is inducted into Battle School. Pressured and positioned to achieve, he eventually ends up defeating Earth’s greatest menace before he becomes a teen.

Review
Many of the books I have read in the past few years boasted scores of characters, multiple plotlines, and plenty of complexity. This one does not. Ender’s Game is a straight through read punctuated by boarding school type conflict, culminating with a bait-and-switch climax that ironically doesn’t disappoint.

I found the situations and motivations of this pre-teen tactical genius genuine and believable. The dialogue on the other-hand was half and half. At times it was true to the characters’ age, reminiscent of childish hair pulling and arm biting, and at others it drifted into a precociousness that served the author’s story more than the characters’ desires. Though, maybe this is what it means to be a genius–I wouldn’t know.

Not being a genius, I may have taken too long to catch onto the tension of the climax as well, but Card could have added a few more clues without spoon feeding me too much to help me along. That said, it still works well and kept me eager to read more.

The denouement however, smacked of deadline or ‘we won’t publish this as a trilogy so wrap it up buddy’. It reminded me of the closing credits of movies that tell you what happens to the characters next.

Recommendation
I don’t know why it took me so long to finally read this neo-classic tale from OSC. It’s a quick fun read. I would call it YA and recommend it as such, but others may be inclined to lean toward a more adult audience.

I bought and will be reading and reviewing the subsequent books soon.

Enjoy!