Mountain Lion

I upgraded to Mountain Lion this evening. I cannot believe how easy it was. The longest portion was the download, which doesn't really matter since I could do other things while that was going on.

Once it was downloaded, I kicked the process off, then went and had dinner. By the time dinner was finished, so was my install. Incredible.

There are a million reviews out there already for Mountain including the legendary John Siracusa review. I will say that in the 30 minutes I've been playing around that I love that Reminders and Notification Center are now on my mac. Having Reminders on my mac makes it easier to quickly set up location based reminders to use later on my iPhone.

So in the span of 48 hours I've updated to Squarespace 6 and Mountain Lion and wrapped up 3 projects. Seems like I should be leaving on a high note.

Knocking out some books this weekend

I decided to turn this rainy Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend into a catch-up on reading day, especially because I had so many in-process books. So I wrapped up all these books today.

Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

I have become fascinated with the math/computer science history of the 1930's to 1950's lately. This book was exactly what I was looking for.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

I enjoyed this book almost as much as Turing's Cathedral, just a great portrait of a particular period in American history and some key characters in it.

Man's Search For Himself

This book is entirely different than the other two and I can't remember how I even came by it, but, it is a book written in the early 1950's about the state of man, and I was delighted that this book helped inform the previous two, and visa versa. Namely, the first two books talked about the math and science involved in computers and bombs during the middle of the 20th century, and Rollo May's book looks at the ramifications of that from a psychoanalytical perspective. The other thing I liked about this book was how relevant it is 60 years later.

The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work

I saw the author's Ted Talk online and bought the book and am 100% onboard with it's findings.

A History of Reading

Not that this was a light read, but it was less taxing intellectual and just an enjoyable treatise on the title that I found enjoyable.

Jawbone Jambox

This year for Christmas my company, Gomoll Research + Design got everyone the Jawbone Jambox for Christmas. I'd seen the device on the web, including the youtube video for it. It was neat, looked like a lego brick but I wasn't sure about it. Now that I've had it for a couple weeks, I can tell you I love it.

Like so many of these things, I ended up appreciating a feature that I didn't even think was important. I have several iPod/iPhone speakers at home, but they are now firmly ensconced in their respective plugged-in places. The Jambox comes with me everywhere.

The portability and ease-of-connectivity are what makes this device great. The sound is good. I don't confess to be an audiophile, and I can get my other speakers to play louder than the Jambox, but most of the time that I am listening to music, "turning it up to 11" is not what I need. I want to be able to grab the speaker in one hand, my iPhone in the other, and listen to music in the shower. I want to be able to grab and go and listen to this in my car.

(I have a tape converter in my car, i.e. I put the tape in the cassette deck and plug the attached wire into the earphone port of the device. The problem is that the tape converter is so loud it sounds like someone is rolling a cart of ball bearings right next to me. I've tried at least five different types of converters, and over a small amount of time, they all get ridiculously loud.)

And I want any of my devices to easily connect. With the bluetooth capability it is as easy as turning the Jambox on, then going to the bluetooth settings on the iPhone/iPad/computer etc.

It's not cheap, but if you want a portable speaker that you can grab and go, with one hand, that sounds good, connects easily, and has great battery life, I recommend the Jambox.

11/22/63

I am a huge fan of Stephen King. I've always loved the way he tells a story. The macabre and strange nature of his books were never what got me hooked. Rather, it was (and still is) the way he tells a story, and I always liked how he wrote characters. (As an aside, his book On Writing, is my favorite book on the topic.)

I was in high school in the 80's when Stephen King was on an amazing run. I didn't read them in order but once I read Christine I was hooked. So I then went to the library and started to read some of his other books as well. I don't recall the order in which I read them, but I read a lot of them, and read them more than once. The ones I vividly recall are The Dead Zone, Firestarter, and Pet Sematary. To this day, I trace my dislike of cats to that book.

I was among the very excited when I heard about the book he was writing about the Kennedy assassination, 11/22/63. I thought I would be excited because he was going to write about the actual assassination in detail and bring up some of the different conspiracy angles and tell about that day in ways that no one else had. And to be sure, he does. But that had nothing to do with why I loved the book. And I knew that about 5 pages into the book. Stephen King is great at 'the hook', the angle that gets a reader sucked in. I cared about the characters and the story and ended up reading this in about 3 sittings, only because I couldn't cram it all in, in one.

Go read this book.

The Information

Finished this book this month. It is a long read, and not a mindless page-turner. But, it is excellent. I really enjoy these types of history books, the history of things, like the book "Salt", or the history of an idea, like this.

Ready Player One

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
My rating: 4 of 5 stars