Since this is subtitled ‘The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East’ I want to at least scan it and see if it is a good purchase.

www.boingboing.net recently mentioned ‘Imagineering Way’, but the library doesn’t have it, so I got this one instead.

Finished! Very heavy on the pictures, so it was a fast read. Quite interesting, makes me want to hunt up ‘Imagineering Way’.

I’ve read a couple of articles interviewing Nassim Taleb, and he seems fascinating. The world of derivatives is counterintuitive to me, and in fact actively frustrates me. I rebel against the notion of investing in anything so abstract—it’s akin to simple gambling. When you buy a stock, you can at least fool yourself that you understand the business you are investing in, but derivatives are divorced from any real product by several degrees. So I hope Taleb can enlighten me…

I can’t even remember where I heard about this, but the premise sounds interesting, so I’m giving it a try…

In the end, I just couldn’t stomach this book. McManus pads out the tournament with an ongoing tale (with ample speculation) of the murder of Ted Binion, and salts liberally with his own personal life. Dumb.

Short though this book is, I can’t finish it. I agree with a lot of what’s said here, but it’s just preaching to the choir…

Finished and well worth the read. This is the same format as the Effective C++ books, and I liked those, and still find them helpful from time to time.

Maybe this one’ll grab me more readily than the poker book. About the creators of Doom, a first-person shooter videogame, maybe the first of it’s kind.

This was lots more interesting than ‘Positively Fifth Street’. I’ll write it up in my weblog later…

Chose this for ‘light’ reading while prepping for a colonoscopy ;^)~