I just finished another good story from World War II: In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis…. I had heard of this book at some point and had added it to my Amazon “wish list”. There was the reference from Jaws that always interested me, so finally we bought the paperback and my wife and I both read it. I came away from the book with a couple of distinct thoughts: 1) there were a lot of people in the US military at fault for the incident; and 2) those boys really went through hell after the ship…
Now I’ve got a new challenge for my site: go through Mark Pilgrim’s Accessibility series. I’ve been following along over the last 30 days, so the challenge now is to see how much of this I can accomplish with CityDesk. For most of the tips, Mark gives instructions for Radio, Movable Type, Blogger, and other weblog tools. CityDesk probably isn’t the best tool for weblogs, but this should be an interesting exercise.
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…