Saturday, July 21, 2007

Picking up the pieces Not so much pieces, just plenty to catch up on now that we're back from a week vacation at Lake Tahoe. Did not quite live up to my book-a-day goal, but I did get some exercise every day, either swimming or riding the stationary bike, which is a significant change in habits for me. Books that I did get through: The Heath brothers' Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Concrete, sensible advice on what works and what doesn't when it comes to sharing ideas with others. Appropriate for making presentations, presenting arguments pro or con, wherever you need to get a point across so it's remembered. An IBM colleague said this "is the most important business book of the decade." Henry Petroski's To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. Petroski wrote this book in the early 1980's, and revised it for subsequent editions to pick up such engineering failures as the Challenger explosion. While he's specifically looking at mechanical and civil engineering failures (collapsing bridges and dams, falling skywalks, and such), his comments on how analyzing failure makes for better successful designs have application anywhere that products get designed. Trafalgar: The Nelson Touch, by David Howarth. I've been indulging an old interest in famous naval battles in some of my casual reading, and this 1969 book details the decisive battle between Lord Horatio Nelson's British navy and Napoleon's French and Spanish fleet. Nelson died a hero, saving England from invasion. A fascinating and sometimes gruesome look at how navies fought 200 years ago. Also read through pieces of some other tomes, including a start on Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, which I'm finding a bit plodding in the early going. I get the feeling that I already know the material, so just get on with it! As usual, I'm collecting more books than I can read. Oh, yes, and the new Harry Potter arrived in today's mail, but the wife grabbed it first. I'll get to it eventually. [Something screwy with Amazon's associates coding, so no linkage for now.] [Linkage fixed, I think. . .] 6:50:48 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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