Just read Daniel H. Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and I really liked it. Four out of five stars... and the missing one is just that they didn't go into quite the depth I wanted them to go into.

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To all those U.S. of A'ers that celebrate.

We had a doozy of a day, with 40+ people coming for a pot luck with plenty of grilled corn and smoked ribs and John's Jerk chicken and lots of salads and desserts that everyone brought and loved. And then, in the midst of it a thunderstorm just poured down rain until the back patio was an inch deep in ( Read more... )

I've been intrigued by Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, and when one of amberley's boxes revealed a copy of his Blink, I dove right in, and read it right through in two days. (DO check out the online references and bibliography... it's well worth doing). I'd highly recommend Blink to anyone that wants a better understanding of how people react, sometimes ( Read more... )

I made a little review for this on Good Reads, and thought I'd try using their "Blog This" button. r0ck3tsci3ntist recommended the book to me, and I really enjoyed it a great deal.
( Cut for a picture of the book and the text, no spoilers. )

I edited the scribbles entry to say that anyone that guesses at all gets a drabble. *grins* It wasn't about people getting it right so much as *me* getting as much as I could right ( Read more... )

It's been... probably three or four years since I've voluntarily seen or read much of anything that smacked of hard realities. Admittedly I went to Biloxi and New Orleans and got smacked over the head with them, but I could DO something about that, even an infinitesimal amount of something, but it was something. On the most part, I've been only ( Read more... )

Hm... I think I like being middle-aged.   I had a really great day on my birthday and a good day after, too...

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Spent the morning on Monday trying to sleep in... and then John and Jet and I hit the waterfront to eat at Ivar's and feed the seagulls. The seagulls were loud enough to be mildly intimidating, but it was really nice to just sit in the sun and eat and feed 'em. *laughs* Fish and chips, the clam chowder, and I had a pile of the clam and chips.

( Cut for the length of what Jet called 'a busy day'. )

Since I owed amberley for giving me a copy of Old Man's War, he asked me to donate it to a good cause. And since I was feeling bad yesterday, thought I'd give/lend more than that to someone on Kiva and donated the cover price towards their operating expenses. It's micro-loans person to person, rather than the Graeme method of getting a lot of money from ( Read more... )

Thanks to amberley I read all of John Scalzi's Old Man's War, and plan to ride my little bike to Border to pick up all the other books in the series as soon as I can lay my hot little hands on them.

Old Man's War starts with 75-year-old John Perry, as he visits his wife's grave and then goes to enlist in the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF). It's a one- ( Read more... )