It's not the busiest time-wise that I've been in my life. I still have time to watch the Olympics, work on a jigsaw puzzle and play some Wii (mostly Soulcalibur Legends and Boom Blox). The problem is the mental cost of not being able to focus on anything specific for enough time. I have been coming home earlier than usual and more tired than usual. Quite worrisome.
And is this improving any time soon? Not really. Some of the projects at work have to finish in the next week or so, but new ones will take their place. I'll be going to Vegas for KDD this weekend, which will probably give me more ideas of other projects to do at home.
But one of the things that I feel like I'm being most wasteful about is that not only I haven't been finishing most projects, but when I do get somewhere I don't really write it down to both remind myself later and try to give something back to my readers as a token of going through things and suggestions of what they should look into. So I'll try to be a little better about that from now on. Easier to write about a book that I've finished than write emails that friends never reply, or when they do I take months to reply back.
So, what was the last book that I've read? Well, I actually finished two at the same time:
Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value by Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood
Quite an interesting book, but unfortunately I wasn't able to absorb too much out of it, because it's more focused on building leadership on your company, creating a theme for it, and making it something visible to the outside world, and it's really not the level that I usually operate. I'm not even sure why I bought this book, but it was on my bookcase, so I decided to read it.
Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter
I really like Stephen Baxter. I thought this was another very well-done book. I liked it more than the first of the trilogy, Time's Eye
. I actually bought the trilogy when I heard of the death of Arthur C. Clarke. I always wanted to read it and found it was a good opportunity. I was actually at the bus reading the news and went on my Kindle and bought the trilogy. Later I found out that I had already had this idea before and I had the trilogy on hardcover.I'm not going to any details about the book, as anything might spoil part of it. As all Stephen Baxter books, I'd only suggest it to the hard sci-fi fans and not the ones that like nice stories in a futuristic environment. The technologies were interesting, but maybe a little lame. The connection of it all and the reaction of the world to tragedy was interesting.
Anyway, as I said, I won't get into any more details. I'll just mention one thing: I really like my Kindle. Great device to read books. Unfortunately not so great for other things. I tried newspapers (and still have a rolling subscription of at least one newspaper at all times), but it's just hard to skim through it and see if anything catches your attention. And that's how I usually read newspapers. But for books... Ah... One of the things that differentiates it from my bookshelf is that I can see all the books that are there waiting to be read. My bookshelf has too much noise of read books. I usually just delete the books I've read from my Kindle (I can re-download them at any time anyway), so it's easy to see what is there waiting for my attention. Also buying new books is way too easy. Very dangerous! I read some news or listen on a podcast about a book that sounds interesting and I get my Kindle, check if it's available and if it is I usually just buy it there. Very dangerous to my finances.
I think that's what I had to write today. Long post, I know... But hopefully with some interesting content.
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