Next time you want to complain about your job (assuming you have one), pick up Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich. The author spends one year trying to live on minimum-wage jobs alone and can’t pull it off. So much for the minimum wage actually adding up to something…

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I read The Bourne Identity when it first came out, in 1980. I devoured it. The movie, 22 years later wasn’t bad, and I’ll be sure to see the new one. I’ve read many of Robert Ludlum’s other books, including the very funny The Road to Gandolfo, so I was pre-disposed to grab Ludlum’s The…

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On a cross-country weekend without the kids (a story for another post), I enjoyed Moneyball by Michael Lewis. In answering a “simple” question — how does a poorer team, the Oakland Athletics, win so many baseball games — Lewis tells the story of orthodoxy and upheaval in a small, very public world: professional baseball. To…

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Last night’s BlogOn panel clearly was only to whet the appetite of the crowd, so I’m looking forward to today. While I and other other panelists did need to prepare, beyond bringing our brains and tongues (and hopefully connecting the two), the panel didn’t feel much different from other public discussions. We were really only…

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Patrick O’Brian’s The Commodore handles one of the more challenging steps in Aubrey’s career: promotion. Simply put, if the author removes one of his main characters from the sea, it’s hard to imagine the result. Promotion in the Royal Navy eventually removes a captain from commanding a ship. First, the rising officer commands a small…

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I’m driving to the Albany, New York airport on Sunday morning. As I enter the Northway (US 87) at Exit 30, my tenuous link to North Country Radio, the regional NPR group of stations, finally fades into static. So, I start the Seek experience. And I find eBay on the radio. WOKO, 98.9 on your…

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If so, read on. As I try and keep up with my reading, and blogging my reading, I got pretty excited by Booxter. A Mac OS X application for cataloging your book collections, Booxter seems to be a smart, focused, network aware application that does one thing — record your book collection — very well.…

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Seth Godin hardly needs an introduction if you’ve been paying attention to online marketing for the past decade, so I won’t bother. One of the books a colleague at work keeps in her “lending library” is Purple Cow, his penultimate book. Subtitled “Transform your business by being remarkable,” Purple Cow is in style a magazine…

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I’m looking forward to being part of BlogOn on Thursday, as a member of the opening panel. I’m doing some thinking on the term “social media.” It’s not a term I’ve heard before this conference was put together, despite my general interest over the last several years in blogs and (more recently) Wikis. Am I…

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Another one gone. The first book I picked up in late June on returning to San Francisco was The Wine-Dark Sea, number 16 in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series. I can see the end of the line, and that’s not a happy forecast. I should have written my senior thesis comparing the Hornblower novels to the…

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