Kids' Fiction

The Treasure at Greene Knowe, and The Stones at Greene Knowe by Lucy Boston are books in a series I started reading last year, about an old house with lots of secrets and ghosts and things. I have always loved books about houses with lots of secrets and ghosts, hidden passageways and so on, and this series is no exception. It's very well written and I'm looking forward to sharing it with Delphine.

I had to pick up A Coyote's In The House by Elmore Leonard because I wanted to know how he would handle young adult fiction. Well, first of all he managed to contrive a situation in which he could legitimately use the word "bitch" a lot. Kudos! This is a book written from the point of view of a coyote contemplating the life of a domesticated dog. The characters are well-drawn and the story is good. I liked this book.

Adult Fiction

I read Life on the Refrigerator Door by Alice Kuipers because it was recommended in the Globe and Mail Books section, and because I was intrigued by the premise: the book is written almost entirely in notes between a woman and her teenage daughter, left, as you might guess, on the refrigerator door. Surprisingly enough, the conceit works and the story is well-told. It's a tear-jerker but ends on a hopeful note.

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff is a book which Blake got me to read because he really enjoyed it. It's a SF mystery thriller about a vigilante assassin, full of plot twists and lies within lies which keep you guessing and manage to hang together right to the final page. It's one of those books which, upon finishing it, you immediately want to start it again so you can see if it all fits together properly. A great book if you like that sort of thing.

I put I Am Legend (and other stories) by Richard Matheson on hold at the library back when the movie came out — I do that a lot, read books which have been made into movies without bothering to see the movie. I am often intrigued by the premise of a movie but know that the book will be better (not to mention cheaper). Anyway, everyone else in Toronto did the same thing before me so it took ages for my turn to come, and the memory of the unseen movie had long faded by the time I got the book. I like horror, though, so I gave it a read and quite enjoyed the title story. It's the story of a guy who remains uninfected when a disease very much like vampirism spreads over the world. Kind of a cool post-apocalyptic story with a grim but satisfying ending.

I started reading the other stories in the book, but they were all kind of samish and didn't do much for me.

The Bone Garden by Tess Gerritsen is a book my mother sent me, a mystery about a lady who finds some bones in her garden and goes off to Maine to investigate them. It was pretty good. I've seen some people say that Tess Gerritsen is really great and she's won a couple of awards and been nominated for an Edgar, but this book didn't blow me away. Maybe I should read Vanish, the book which got all the awards. (Except apparently the Toronto Public Library doesn't have a copy. Go TPL!)

I picked up Alice in Jeopardy by Ed McBain and Watchman by Ian Rankin in summer as my fluffy, mindless reading. I chose them because I like the authors and that's what the library had on the shelves, and I managed to get a McBain book that isn't an 87th Precinct book and a Rankin that isn't a Rebus book. However, they were both pretty good reads, definitely fulfilling what I required of them.

I joined a book club in 2008, in part to force me to read more fiction, and to think about what I read more. In spite of how much I read — well, maybe because I read so much — I don't think about what I read as much as I would like to. Knowing I'm going to have to talk intelligently about the books forces me to read more mindfully, which improves all my reading.

My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult is a book about a girl, Anna, who is born to provide her sister Kate with bone marrow. Kate gets better but then gets sick again, over and over, and Anna keeps getting tapped for more and more biological matter. I quite enjoyed the book, I think (it was a while ago, but I know I didn't hate it, except the ending which was egregiously heart-rending), and there was plenty to talk about: the ethics of designer babies, issues of identity and responsibility to family, and a bizarre subplot about a lawyer with an anachronistically shameful disorder of his own. Pretty good but don't run out and read it or anything.

The Girls by Lori Larsen is a book about conjoined twins living in a small town near London, Ontario. This is a beautifully crafted book, not just about the sisters but about life in small-town Canada. I found the characters so compelling and real that I kept feeling I could Google them to find out their ultimate fate. The one weird thing is that although the girls in the book are almost my exact contemporaries I kept feeling the book was set in the fifties or sixties. I don't know if that was intentional on the part of the author, to evoke the nostalgia of small-town life or of the cloistered nature of the girls' lives, or not, but it quite jarring when one of the sisters started looking things up on the Internet herself. Other than that I really enjoyed this book.

The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs is about a New York woman who owns a knitting store and has a teenage daughter and meets up with an old friend and, I dunno, hilarity ensues. As you might guess I wasn't overwhelmed with love for this book. It was fluffy like a ball of mohair and seemed contrived.

Last Days of Dogtown by Anita Diamant is a book about the various inhabitants of a dying town on the Massachusetts coast. It's gloomy reading but compelling. The characters are well-drawn and the stories are interesting and credible. A worthwhile read.

The Memory-Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards is about a woman who, upon being asked to take a doctor's baby daughter, born with Down syndrome, to an institution, instead kidnaps the daughter and takes her to live in Pittsburgh. Meanwhile the doctor tells his wife that the baby died and they go on to have a messed-up marriage and never quite find happiness. A bunch of things happen and everyone lives happily ever after, more or less.

This was another good book which didn't blow me away. It seemed quite contrived and book clubbish, with lots of Talking Points and Dramatic Turns.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Yes, we read Ender's Game in book club. Weird! About half of the book club members don't read science fiction, so it was an interesting meeting. Anyway, so this is another book about a kid who is born for a special purpose, this time to be the child genius who saves mankind by having the a unique combination of video gaming skillz and innocence required to defeat an alien species which threatens mankind. You have to suspend your disbelief pretty high over a couple of things in this book, but if you give yourself over to Card you're rewarded with a good yarn and some interesting things to think over, like the ethics of using children to fight wars, and the similarity between modern warfare and video games. Also the techniques of military training, the value of adding in bits to a book which don't really make sense in that book but pave the way for a sequal, preemptive war, genocide, whether we could recognize the "humanity" in alien species, and what form those species might take, collective intelligence versus individual minds and the inability to truly know another person. Lots to talk about.

I actually read Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett as a companion piece to this (according to Blake there is a whole subgenre of "video games that turn out to be real" SF out there). They're quite different books but they're neck and neck in terms of quality of characterization and depth of insight, with Pratchett coming out ahead with Humour over Earnestness.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is my big winner this year, in terms of fiction. This book ripped me up. The writing is gorgeous and the characters are instantly compelling, but the plot is gruelling and horrifying. I wept for the women in this book, and at the same time I learned so much about Kabul and the recent history of Afghanistan. I sent my mother a copy of this book and she read it in two days. Fantastic book.

I'm not sure where to post this, but I saved it because it rings so true for me. It's from Robert Sapolsky's Essay, "Mountain Gorilla and Yeshiva Boy", in Curious Minds: How A Child Becomes A Scientist. He describes an epiphany:

...There is no God. This is gibberish.

Since then, I've had no religion, in fact no capacity for spirituality of any sort whatsoever. There is no facet of my life — love, parenting, mulling over why we are here — that I view outside the context of mechanistic science. For me, there is no Divine Watchmaker — no top-down volition, no purpose, no cause beyond what emerges from the complexity of biological systems. This is no a cold point of view: I am as intensely emotional now as I was at the age of thirteen, and I don't find science and emotionality to be at all contradictory. Nor do I believe that science is an emotional substitute for religion. But for me, it has finally made the religious worldview impossible.

Here are the parenting books I read in 2008, sorted into two categories:

Books that Made me Say "Enh"

These are books which were pretty useful but didn't change my world view or particularly affect my parenting style.

• Curious Minds ed. by John Brockman
• Toilet Training the Brazelton Way by T. Berry Brazelton and Joshua Sparrow
• Children: The Challenge by Rudolph Dreikurs
• Parent Talk by Stanley Shapiro and Karen Skinulis
• Your Five-Year-Old: Sunny and Serene by Ames and Ilg
• The Highly Sensitive Child by Elaine Aron
• Siblings Without Rivalry by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish
• The Money-Tree Myth by Gail Vaz-Oxlade

Awesome Books

These are the books which either blew me away with their insight or actually changed how I view my role as a parent.

• Breaking The Good Mom Myth: Every Mom's Modern Guide to Getting Past Perfection, Regaining Sanity, and Raising Great Kids by Alyson Schafer is about democratic parenting, the notion that kids are actually much more competent than they are given credit for, and that we must give them more responsibility to allow them to grow into competent and independent adults. (This philosophy also says that we should allow our children to experience the consequences of their decisions, which has unfortunately led to people using "consequence" as a euphemism for "punishment". If there's a point, some folk are bound to miss it.)

  This book changed how I parent; I used to fret so much about how to get them to tidy their rooms, how to get them to dress appropriately outside, how to get them to play nicely together. Schafer points out that you can't really "get" kids to do things, but you can treat them like human beings, explain the situation, help them make their own decisions and then live with them. The problem, of course, is that you have to live with their decisions too, but as long as you remember that your kids are not in fact tiny extensions of yourself, that's usually not really a problem. The nice thing is that once something is your kid's responsibility it's no longer yours! Hooray! - Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn. I was led to this book by the Schafer book, which is a bit ironic because Kohn tears a strip off the democratic parenting crowd for their euphemistic "consequences" and their apparent lack of sympathetic support for little kids. Anyway, this book is about how rewards (praise, stickers, grades, incentives, commissions, bonuses) are actually counterproductive in parenting and in business.

  Kohn is brilliant and very compelling and has led me to fundamentally change my parenting style. I now almost never praise the girls and never reward them, and I am very conscious of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation in myself as well as them. Absolutely everyone should read this book, whether parents, teachers, employers, managers, or anyone else. - Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion by Dale McGowan is a collection of essays about raising children in a household without religion or other superstition. I was casting about for support in this area when I discovered this book, apparently the only one on this topic. It's a great book, interesting and funny and insightful. - The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love and Healing by Bruce Perry is a book about how the development of children who have undergone extreme trauma can teach us about normal mental development. It is fascinating, inspiring and at times grueling. Another must-read for anyone who has or works with children.

Back on November 17 when I started this blog entry I had read about fifty books since the beginning of the year. I wrote up eight of them and then got distracted (probably by reading, I think I have read another ten at least since then) and haven't worked on it since. It's now December 23rd, and I would really like to post my book logs for this year. The problem is I obviously don't have time to write up each book properly, so this is going to end up being a giant list of books I have read. I hate to do that because then it takes all the value-add out of a book blog and seems a lot like bragging. Neener neener, look at all the books I read, I'm such a smarty pants. But I've come to depend on my book blog to see what I have read and how I liked it, so I'm going to go ahead anyway, and I'll try and categorize things cleverly and hopefully write a little bit about books which really had an impact, so this isn't a completely worthless process.

But first, here are the eight books I wrote up back in November.

I ended up grouping all the books I've read into six rough categories: books on parenting and childhood development, memoirs, non-fiction books on other topics, books I read for my bookclub, and other fiction. (Okay, that's five. Degree in math, what?) The only thing which really surprised me was the number of books I read which could be termed memoirs. I certainly don't consider myself a person who reads memoirs. As it turns out there is no particular pattern or commonality among the memoirs I read; each one was chosen for some specific reason.

Anyway, here are the Non-Fiction (Other) books I read, broken into "Books About How To Do Stuff" and "Other Non-Fiction". Perhaps that should be "Otherer Non-Fiction".

Books About How To Do Stuff

Houseworks by Cynthia Townley Evers is a book about how to organize your house, or at least that's how it's billed. The author is the organizedhome.com lady, and this is to some extent a bookization of the website. It works very well as a book, since getting organized is inherently a somewhat linear procedure. But it's not just an organization book, it's really much more than that. It functions as a full household maintenance reference, along the lines of Home Comforts, by Cheryl Mendelson, although much less hardcore. I got some helpful tips from this book and I'm already pretty organized, so I recommend it to anyone who feels they need a little help in the housekeeping department.

Knife Skills Illustrated by Peter Hertzmann. Go ahead and guess what this book is about. It covers what to look for when you are buying knives, how to care for your knives and keep them sharp, and knife safety. The second half of the book demonstrates, through photographs, how to cut up various fruits, veggies, meats, and the other stuff you might want to dismember in the comfort of your own kitchen.
Insasmuch as something as inherently physical and three-dimensional can be taught in a book, this is a handy book. I still feel like I would learn more in a half-hour face-to-face with an expert.

The Naturalized Garden by Stephen Westcott-Gratton is about how to grow a garden which takes care of itself, by choosing indigenous and hardy plants suitable for the characteristics of your garden. This book discusses woodland (or shady) gardens, meadow (or sunny) gardens, and damp gardens. (I can't remember the picturesque name for damp gardens.) The author recommends hundreds of species and gives advice on planting and maintenance. I love this book and it has inspired me to (gradually) convert my back and front gardens to naturalized gardens. Thanks to Auntie J'Anne I already have a nice patch of hostas and ferns in the back, to which I added some astilbe and plenty of bulbs (I got one of those 75 bulbs for $30 deals, we'll see how they do). To my surprise I determined that the front of the backyard (if you will) is actually reasonably sunny so I will have to revisit the book sometime to get some meadow suggestions.

Getting Things Done by David Allen is a book which is very much discussed and followed on the Interweb. I decided to check it out after screwing up something which seemed disastrous at the time but which I have now forgotten. I hate that feeling of being out of control I get when I miss something important or let someone down.

The author is an organization expert who has distilled all his experience with executives into this amazing foolproof n-step plan to get things done. I had to know. It actually does seem to be a really good system, although somehow the infrastructure doesn't entirely fit into my life, probably because I don't spend a whole lot of time with pen and paper, or computer. You do need to spend a little time on the infrastrucure of the system, but that's better than spending the time looking for lost files or apologizing to people for dropping the ball on things. I did implement some aspects of this book, most notably keeping little notebooks all over the place and writing everything down, and also creating a file system for absolutely everything. It has helped. I will probably get it out again soon and see what other incremental changes I can make.

The Global Warming Survival Handbook by David De Rothschild is a really rather handy little book of ideas on how you can act to reduce global climate change. There are plenty of good ideas in here, including big changes that will really make a difference, like living in a smaller house, close to work, and biking to work. And the most important — changing a lightbulb is good but changing a representative is better: vote for the people who will make a difference. (That's why I voted Liberal. Didn't seem to make a difference... sigh.)

I read this book in tandem with a little piece of crap that calls itself something like The Green Book. It's a bunch of tips from celebrities on how you can prevent climate change. The other book was written with scientists, and if I might advise you, when given the choice between taking tips from celebrities or taking tips from scientists on matters of science, go with the scientists. Celebrities have lots of great tips on, I dunno, mascara, but they don't know crap about climate change. This book perpetuates the nice myth that we'll be able to save the world without too much inconvenience. They suggest such profound changes as using paper matches instead of wooden matches. Not taking a receipt at the ATM. I think my favourite celebrity advice was from Jennifer Aniston. Apparently she saves water by brushing her teeth in the shower. Now unless I'm out of touch and Jennifer Aniston is actually the earthly manifestation of the multi-armed Hindu goddess of destruction Kali and can actually brush her teeth and soap up her hoo-hah &at the same time, brushing your teeth in the shower is exactly the same thing as brushing your teeth in front of the sink with the tap running! Stupid, so so stupid.

The book is notable only for it's amazing analogies: if everyone in America switched to single-ply tissues, say, a wad of snotrag the size of a cruise ship would be saved every year!
They must have had a team of interns devoted to the creation of a giant database of various dimensions and their pithy equivalents.

When You Catch An Adjective, Kill It by Ben Yagoda. I love a good grammar book but this one didn't grab me. It's a long time since I read it so I can't remember why. Let's see what I wrote in my notebook... Okay, I said I didn't really learn anything about parts of speech (the topic of the book) because that stuff is inherently boring, but I enjoyed the discussions of historical and popular usage.

One thing that stayed with me is that "they" as the gender-neutral pronoun was in use before "he or she", so I will happily keep saying "they" when gender is not specified.

The Perfect Wrong Note by William Westney is a book about musical practice and performance. The author is a concert pianist and teacher, and he has come up with some new theories of musical training, practice and performance. Mainly he doesn't like the traditional way of dealing with mistakes: you make a mistake, you go back over the passage and beat it into the ground until you can play it a time or two without the mistake, and then you charge on. His contention is that the mistake is teaching you something about what you know (or rather, don't know) about the piece. You need to go back and figure out what the mistake is telling you so you can correct it properly and deepen your understanding of the piece.

He also has some interesting ideas about how to practice: that you should treat it more like a physical workout than a mental exercise, so start by relaxing your body and mind, stretching, finding a comfortable and relaxed position. Then play some notes, make some noises. Not music, just noises. It's all a little hippy-trippy but if I were an earnest student of music I would definitely try it. I totally agree that the making of music is as much an athletic pursuit as a cerebral one; I never gained as good a physical appreciation for my body and it's strengths and liabilities as I did when I was studying voice.

There's one rather intimidating point in the book: Westney encourages a profound knowledge of each piece you play — he would like you to be able to verbally describe what is happening at any point in the piece. For example, "In this bar, the piece retains the key signature of the tonic minor but modulates to its relative major of G flat"... It's representative of my limited musical knowledge that I had to use Google to find that technical-sounding phrase, and while I know more or less what it means I'm not entirely sure it makes sense in this context. And it is very safe to say I have never known or understood any piece I have learned or performed that intimately. It's amazing how clueless a choral singer can be and get away with it. And humbling to realize how little I know. What did I learn in those eight or so years of piano lessons? Apparently not much.

Feel the Fear... And Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers. I have this sneaking feeling — maybe everyone has it — that I am not living up to my potential. I am smart, and organized, I can talk to people, I can solve problems and understand complex situations, and yet I am of no more value to the world than any stay-at-home mother. I feel like I should be contributing more than I am. I feel like, well, I'm wasting my potential. This is a matter for an entire blog post, of course, and there's more to it than I can go into in this paragraph. Lucky you.

Anyway, at various points in my life I have been given opportunities to do interesting or ambitious things and I have passed them up, sometimes explicitly and sometimes just by dropping the ball. I realized this summer that I run away from these exciting possibilities because I am scared. Scared of screwing up, of letting someone down, of getting in over my head, of becoming overwhelmed. It seems like a pretty straightforward thing, but it took my thirty-two years to figure it out. So, as I do when I have any kind of problem, I headed to the library to check out a book about it, and this is the one I chose because Gail Vaz-Oxlade recommended it, and she seems pretty sensible.

I found the book mostly helpful. It had a few great insights which seem, in retrospect, to be really obvious but which I needed to have pointed out to me: no matter what happens, you can handle it; other people are scared too, they just go ahead anyway (that is, fear isn't a legitimate reason not to do something); even if something horrible does happen, you can get through it and find some good in it. Jeffers talks about moving away from being a victim, how to deal with that negative chatterbox (that's my personal hobgoblin), and how to live a balanced and meaningful life so that failure in one area doesn't destroy your whole sense of self.

A couple of things didn't work for me: Jeffers loves affirmations, but I find them contrived and dorky. I do make a point to avoid negative self-talk and strive for the opposite (or at least, realistic self-talk) but I can't stand in front of the mirror and chant canned new-agey phrases. That's not me. Also at the end of the book she gets into this woo-woo stuff about the Universe having a Plan for you and reaching your Higher Consciousness. I am don't believe in the supernatural and I know the universe is just a whirling mass of elements with no intention at all for me or anyone else. I ignored those chapters, without any detriment to the value of the rest of the book.

Other Non-Fiction

Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature by David P. Barash and Nanelle Barash is an examination of literature through the lens of evolutionary theory. Or is it an examination of evolutionary theory through the lens of literature? I'm still not sure. I came into it with a little understanding of literature and slightly more understanding of evolution, and I left it with a much better understanding of both. To the extent that literature is really the encoding of human nature, this book greatly increased my understanding of how evolution as we know it informs the way we behave. Fantastic book, I recommend it to all inquisitive readers.

The Geography of Hope: A Guided Tour of the World We Need by Chris Turner. The author, upon having a baby, realized that the world is in very real danger of going to hell in a handbasket. Being a go-get-em journalist type, he decided to travel around the world (I don't know how you get away with that when you've just had a baby; he must have a very forgiving wife) and figure out who is doing what to prevent that, and how's it working out anyway. He concludes that in fact the technology already exists to save our collective asses, and that what is required is the political will to implement it on a significant scale. (See above re: changing representatives as well as lightbulbs.) This was a fun and heartening read: Turner sees hope and possibility in a green economy and culture. Turner continues to track developments in sustainable policy and technology in his Globe and Mail column.

Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss — And the Myths and Realities of Dieting by Gina Kolata is an overview of the history of dieting and the current scientific thinking on obesity and dieting.

Kolata describes what happens to your body when you reduce caloric intake: you become panicky and obsessed with food. Once healthy intake resumes, you rapidly regain weight. Similarly, if you increase caloric intake and gain weight outside of your natural weight range, you rapidly lose it again once you stop overeating. That's why it's so easy for actors to lose weight if they have gained it for a role (assuming they were within their own healthy weight beforehand). Bottom line: it's very difficult for people to change their own weight. There are numerous biological checks and balances in your body to keep your weight consistent, whether you like it or not.

This book challenges popular wisdom with its crazy old nemesis, data. Apparently, for example, changes in cafeteria menus and physical education programs in an attempt to reduce obesity levels in students don't make any significant difference. Bummer. Kolata also dicusses the fact that the danger of being overweight (which is of course just a medical/social construct) are overstated. Being overweight — as opposed to obese, or "normal" weight — is possibly optimal for good health. It's certainly not the medical disaster it is often made out to be.

The frustrating thing about this book is that it doesn't explain why everyone is getting fatter, but of course that's because we don't exactly know. My opinion is that it's probably a perfect storm of factors: ready availability of food, reduced need to exercise, and possibly the effect of some novel chemical or combination of chemicals. Only time will tell.

This book is a must-read for anyone who is overweight or worried about their weight, and for anyone who feels they need to have an opinion on fatness.

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo Phil Zimbardo is the guy who did the Stanford Prison Experiment. You know, the one where they took a bunch of undergrad men, assigned half of them to be guards and half to be prisoners, and let them at it in a fake prison constructed in a basement. Obviously, the experiment went terribly and it was finally stopped only a few days in after an observer insisted it was cruel and immoral. The experiment ended but Zimbardo has never stopped thinking about what makes normal people do evil things.
He studied this experiement, as well as wars and genocides. After thinking about it for years he wrote this book, which I found profoundly interesting and useful.

Zimbardo describes the circumstances you need to create an environment where people behave evilly: group conformity, obedience to authority, deindividuation (so lack of individual responsibility), dehumanization and moral disengagement (so the others are pigs, rats, cockroaches; anything but human), Inaction and passive bystanders.

It's not just a description of evil and how it comes about, but a how-to of not being evil! Everyone needs one of those. I honestly can't say, if I were in some awful situation like a genocide, that I wouldn't be one of the bystanders. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't take a machete to my neighbours but I know I have a weak, fearful, conformist, deferential-to-authority streak that could see me looking the other way while my neighbours machete each other. "Well, if everyone else thinks it okay," I would say to myself. Or, "Well if I say something I could be next. I don't want to piss off the guy with the machete." Zimbardo addresses these excuses and more. If you want to learn how to not be evil it's all there at the Lucifer Effect website. They are good rules for living, not just for avoiding evilness: admit mistakes; be mindful, be responsible, assert your individuality, rebel against unjust authority, value your independence from groupthink... and so on. Worth a look at the website even if you don't have time to read the book.

The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg is all about personal hygiene through history.

(This is where I stopped writing back in November, and here end the long write-ups. This book was neat but didn't blow me away. If you are interested in personal hygiene through history, check it out.)

Here are the other non-fiction books I read before November 17th:

• Bonk by Mary Roach is a book about scientific research into sex, written for a general audience. Funny and interesting.
• Only In Canada, You Say? by Katherine Barber is a book about uniquely Canadian words and phrases. Awesome book, notable for the number of times I said "What the hell does everyone else call it?" Double-double? Open concept? Reno? You people need words for these things.
• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman is that book about what the earth would do if people suddenly disappeared. It's awesome and thrilling and very informative. And humbling.
• Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar (Yes, I do get lots of book recommendations from The Daily Show.) A book about how to be happier. I think this must have covered a lot of the same material as the other happiness books I've read because nothing stands out in my memory. Still probably a worthwhile read if you would like to be happier.
• The End of Food by Paul Roberts is about the incredible fragility of the global food industry. It could be laid low at any time by disease, climate change, peak oil. When you walk into the grocery store it seems as if there is such endless abundance, but it's really a house of cards. Scary but well worth reading.

The command to use is:

$ env CC=/usr/local/bin/arm-apple-darwin-gcc CC_FOR_BUILD=gcc ./configure --host=mac; make

Well, kind of. First you do that, then you copy gsc/gsc to gsc/gsc.onboard, then you go to a new directory, and type:

$ ./configure;make

and copy the gsc/gsc from that directory into the first directory.

To compile a script into an exe:

$ gsc/gsc -:=. -c euler.scm
$ gsc/gsc -:=. -link euler.c
$ /usr/local/bin/arm-apple-darwin-gcc euler.c euler_.c -Iinclude -Llib -lgambc -o euler

It's freaking huge!

$ ls -alh euler
-rwxr-xr-x   1 bwinton  bwinton  4M Jan 23 14:22 euler
$ ls -alh /WifiToggle
-rwxr-xr-x   1 bwinton  bwinton  17K Jan 16 14:07 /WifiToggle

And it's not a lot faster. 0.1643 seconds for the compiled version, as opposed to 0.1803 seconds for the interpreter.

But on my Mac:

$ more m1.c
power_of_2 (int x) { return 1<<x; }
$ more m2.scm
(c-declare "extern int power_of_2 ();")
(define pow2 (c-lambda (int) int "power_of_2"))
(define (twice x) (cons x x))
$ more m3.scm
(write (map twice (map pow2 '(1 2 3 4)))) (newline)
$ gsc/gsc -:=. -link -flat -o foo.o1.c m2 m3
$ /usr/local/bin/arm-apple-darwin-gcc -Iinclude -bundle -D___DYNAMIC m1.c m2.c m3.c foo.o1.c -o foo.o1
$ ls -alh foo.o1
-rwxr-xr-x   1 bwinton  bwinton    13K Jan 23 14:45 foo.o1

then on the iTouch,

# scp bwinton@latte.ca:/Users/bwinton/Programming/Bazaar/iTouch/gambc-v4_1_2/foo.o1 .
# gsi foo.o1
((2 . 2) (4 . 4) (8 . 8) (16 . 16))
# gsi
Gambit v4.1.2

> (load "foo")
((2 . 2) (4 . 4) (8 . 8) (16 . 16))
"/private/var/root/foo.o1"
> (twice 5)
(5 . 5)
> (pow2 10)
1024

'Tis the season for acquisitiveness, but honestly, I want stuff all year 'round. I don't expect anyone to get me any of this, because we're not "doing" presents this year and anyway Blake never buys me anything that he knows I want. Some kind of perverse male pride thing, like not asking for directions. So this list is really just for my amusement.

This is what I want right now:

• a classic French mandoline
• a long fleece nightie for those mornings when I just don't want to get out of bed. (Isn't it nice when you imagine your perfect whatever, and then it turns out someone else has designed and manufactured it?)
• too many books to name.
• ballerina-style slippers like this
• a new bra. I've been wearing the same two nursing bras for three years now. They are so done. I'm not even nursing any more! I also need another running bra. Except I don't know what size I am, so I have to go to the store and get measured properly.
• another computer so I can do computer stuff while we watch TV (our computer is our TV). Actually Blake just bought a new computer so in theory I could borrow his.
• protective table pads; back before we even thought about having kids we bought an elegant, flawless wood dining table. Turns out it shows every scratch and fingerprint.
  So now I keep it covered with a cloth tablecloth over a vinyl tablecloth. It looks awful but it works. Now, those table pads I linked to look really tacky because apparently they haven't redone their marketing material since 1982, but I was at the house of a friend who has them and they actually look really great. I thought she had a cool leather-embossed table at first. They're only a couple hundred bucks and I really should have bought some by now.
• a long down coat for those freezing afterschool pickups. Not black, though, or I will look like all the other North Toronto moms in their long black down coats.

A few Fridays ago, I was laid off from my job. After seven years I’m sort of out of practice at looking for a new job. The economy is also kind of slow, and I know a few people who are going to graduate soon into this economy, and who might want to know what I did when I was laid off, and how I’ve found a new job.

So, Friday. As a side note, if you’re ever in the position of letting go of employees, please don’t lay them off or fire them on a Friday. They can’t do anything but sit and brood over the weekend, which can really get them depressed. On the other hand, I’ve been pretty upbeat about it because after seven years, I’m kind of ready for a change. It was a big shock when I first learned about it, but I had made my peace with it after around 30 minutes or so. An hour later, there was a meeting where the rest of the employees found out, and that was kind of tough to sit through, but afterwards it was like there was a big weight lifted from my shoulders, and my co-workers and I started to joke around about it.

That afternoon, and the next couple of days, I emailed my friends and asked whether they knew of any companies that were hiring. From that I got six or seven leads, and three or four interviews, and finally decided to do some work and sign a three month contract, which will probably turn into a longer term contract. I don’t expect it’ll turn into a full time job, but that works out fine for me, since I expect the market will have changed by the new year, and I’m hoping that a friend of mine will get the hiring freeze he’s currently in lifted by then, and hire me.

On the plus side, now that I’m working from home, I bought a new computer because I can deduct the price from my income as a business expense. Similarly I can deduct part of the interest on my mortgage from my income. And I’ll be making a fair bit more than I was getting as a full-time employee, because of the lack of benefits, my inside knowledge of the app, and finally because I have had only one raise in the last seven years. (It was hard for me to ask for a raise, because I knew the company didn’t have a lot of money to give me a raise with, and because I owned some of the company, so I would rather have seen my shares increase in value than get extra cash in the short term. Of course neither ended up happening, but who could have foreseen that?)

So yeah, there’s my tale of woe and hope. It’s really not that bad, apart from the sadness of seeing something that you worked really hard for crash and burn. But even in that sadness is the spark of excitement for something new and different. If you haven’t gotten your first job yet, then I don’t know if this will help you all that much. I guess the main thing to take away from it would be that you should cultivate contacts among your peers, profs, co-workers, and clients because they’re the ones who will find you the good jobs, in the end.

Yesterday I went to see a presentation by Kosta Zabashta about the work he did on Basie. The presentation went fairly well, but while listening to it, I had a few ideas that I thought I should write down.

First, since the configurations for Exim and Postfix are so complicated and so different, it would be nice if we had a program that could figure out which one you’re running, and generate the lines to add to your config files to get it all set up.

Second, I think we probably don’t need to add that many boolean or set operators to the search functionality. I seem to remember reading a paper a while ago where Google said that people only used 2 of the advanced search features, "s to make a phrase, and OR to choose between two different things. Sure, some people used all the wacky operators, but it was a vanishingly small percentage.

Third, do we update the search index when items change, or are we constantly rebuilding it? I would have thought that doing the dynamic updates would have run into many of the same issues as the Events app, but maybe there was a smarter way to do it that I’m overlooking.

Fourth, and finally, I wonder if there’s a way to use metadata about the objects we’re searching to influence rankings. To take the Google approach, add the number of mail messages/commit logs/wiki pages/tickets that refer to an item as a factor in determining the ranking. Or, push more recent things higher in the search results, since we know when things were added. Do we actually want to do either of those? Maybe, maybe not, but we’ve got a lot of data about each item, and it seems like using it might be, well, maybe more interesting than useful. :)

So, there are my thoughts on stuff we might want to do for the next version of Basie. I suppose the next step will be to get Greg to link to this, and get other people commenting. (And now that I’ve written it all out, I suppose it might have been cleverer to post this to the Basie blog. Ah well. Live and learn.)

...independent! We had Cordelia's parent-teacher "chat" today, with her nursery school teachers. I love talking about my children, so I was very excited to be there, and of course Blake doesn't have a job so he came along 'coz he doesn't have anything else to do. Just kidding; he had taken the morning off to come anyway, before the company folded (or whatever it's in the process of doing).

Simone and Sameera were very happy to talk about Cordelia too. Apparently she's a delight at school. (I bet they say that to all the parents.) She's very independent; she puts on her own outside clothes and clears up after snack by herself. This is a revelation to me because like idiots we're still helping her on with her snowsuit and boots, and begging her to take just one thing into the kitchen after meals. Suckers, we are!

Her favourite things are sensory activities: playdough, cornstarch, sand. Anything messy. She's still focused to the point of being oblivious to what's going on around her (she gets that from Blake), and she's happy playing by herself, to the point that her teachers are actually engineering situations to force her into talking and playing with other kids. They are going to hook me up with some good playdate matches for her.

That's their only concern for kindergarten, that she won't be able to make connections with other kids and with the teacher. Academically, in terms of colours, shapes, letters and numbers, she's just fine!