Well, it’s not quite like book reports I used to do for school, but I decided to start tracking books I’ve read. It also gives me a chance to play with Amazon’s new interface to their data. For now, I’m simply linking to the titles on Amazon’s page, but will expand on this later. Books I’ve Read
I just finished Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley and really enjoyed it. This book was released in May of 2000 (just before Father’s Day) and I’m sure it was very popular at the time. That doesn’t explain why it took me two years to get around to reading it, but I finally did over the July 4th holiday this year. Overall I really enjoyed the book. My knowledge of Iwo Jima was limited to “the picture” and the fact that we fought the Japanese on some island in the Pacific. Along with learning a lot about the men…
NSDQ I just read an amazing book: Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War. I knew of the book and in fact my wife was reading it. Seeing the movie twice in the theater finally convinced me to sit down and read the book to catch all the details. Surprisingly, the movie was a very accurate portrayal of the events and matched the book quite well. (I believe that a couple of characters were composites, but the rest were based on the actual men involved.) Some critics of the movie complained that it didn’t show the human side of…
I try to make it a point to update my resume on a regular basis. I’m not currently looking for work, but if I could just update it as I go along, it seems like it would be easier. But….updating a resume is really a pain. This time I tried something different by treating it more like a conversation, starting with the old stuff (school, first job, etc.) and end with what I’m doing now. If someone wants the gory details with all the right buzzwords, the full resume will need to be updated. In the meantime, if someone just wants to know what I do (and what I’ve done), this form should be perfect.
Microsoft publishes some handy tools for web developers in the form of add-ins for Internet Explorer. In addition to viewing and validating XML content, there are some cool power tools including one that lets you “view partial source” when selecting part of a web page.