Ceaseless Student

So I’m reading The Prince. I have yet to find it cruel or even intense. I tend to agree with Machiavelli on most things. I wonder what that speaks to - me or The Prince.

I just practice-read Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. Practice-reading is when you try to read faster than you can actually handle. You get pretty bad comprehension, but it helps increase your reading rate. It took me 57 minutes to get through its roughly 300 pages. The first time through I went a page a second (this is to just pick up character names, a rough chronology and a bit of the novel’s structure) and the second time I was going at around 1500 WPM.

This is actually a full 50% faster than my original goal for this whole speed-reading thing. w00t!
Also: it’s about 4 times the speed I read at going in. Hooray!

It’s hard to keep going at breakneck pace - having my computer yell at me every minute and louder every 5th minute helped a lot. I’d end up picking up the pace every time the 5th beep came along as I kept on falling about a minute slow. I ended about 3 minutes slow so I guess it was a bit shy of 1500WPM. Sadly, I don’t actually have many books that are short and easy enough for me to read in one sitting like this…

It looks like a trip to the library is in order.

PS - The gunslinger series is pretty awesome. Not my all-time favortie but certainly in the top 10 and maybe in the top 5.

Today, I’ll talk about Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat”

To sum it all up in one phrase: “People are becoming more empowered - with all that entails.”

Considering the press this book gets and its strong following, I’m really a bit underwhelmed. To be fair, his major points are valid and he applies them to the coming world and has examples of how they’ve worked in the past. Nonetheless, he doesn’t seem to say anything at all that surprised me. And, given all the tech research he must’ve done, he sometimes manages to sound shockingly ignorant. For example, he talked about bittorent as a music sharing network or something of the sort. This is far from right. It’s more of a process or protocol than a network; and, more importantly, people share all sorts of files via bittorent.

I dunno. I wish I had a lot to tell you about, but it’s really just him talking about how things have led to globalization and why this tendency is likely to continue. My two favorite things he talks about are people who’s jobs are safe from outsourcing for a number of reasons (eg locality-based job - convenience store owner) and the idea that the opportunity cost of war between developed nations is a huge deterrent (eg India/Pakistan nuclear standoff).

He also likes to concentrate on a few key things for just about everything. Titles like “the 10 _” or “The 3 most _” or “the 7 _ that _” were easy to come by and he seemed to fixate on certain things more than made sense (eg: 11/9 [Berlin wall taken down] v. 9/11). I did like it when he acknowledged that any and all of the awesome power that an individual can wield use to the world’s flatness can be used for progress or destruction.

Oh well. Not all books can rock hard. I should finish Atlas Shrugged (I’m finding it a bit tedious).

These babies are sweet. They can hold your spot on a specific line instead of just a page. These aren’t bookmark replacements; they’re more like quote markers. It lets you mark notable parts in books in an externally visible way. Evidently librarians love them because they play nice with the books; no damage = happy librarians.

Evidently the librarian-pleasing people who run the company know how to please their customers and expand their fan-base. I ordered a tin of 50 - they sent me my tin with 50 then (this is from memory so it could be a bit off) an envelope with 3 more, a card with three more, a pamphlet with three more and maybe one more thing with some bookdarts stuck on it. Clearly the goal was to get people to be like: “hey check this out!” And then you could give them an envelope with a booklet inside that explains bookdarts and sings their praises. And, of course, you’d include a few of the extra bookdarts they sent you. Good plan. Nice thing to do. I have bonus bookdarts. I’m not going to be handing anyone an envelope, but if you want to check them out, find me and I’ll give you some.

I hope I’ll be reading enough good books to make a dent in that tin’s worth of book darts. I wish I’d had these when I started reading “The History of Western Philosophy.” That book would be littered with these things. While I’m at it, if you are at all interested in philosophy, I highly suggest this book. It’s by Bertrand Russel and it gives you textbook content in a less dry form. Not that it’s riveting or anything, but considering the amount of info that’s in there, his book is shockingly readable.

Bookdarts make me feel like such a bibliophile…

Sometimes I have a tendency to take blogging too seriously. I’ll check my stats more than makes sense. I’ll ping. I’ll check out Technorati. I’ll see where I show up on a bunch of Google searches. This is unfortunate because I write mostly for myself. It makes me solidify some thoughts and it gives me an audience for random stories I’d like to tell.

I’ll be on lifehacker and link over to problogger and soon enough I’ll be all like “Y’know what? My blog has no f***ing focus. I mean it’s ridiculous. How is something like that going to maintain traffic?”

Answer: it’s not. Duh, self. But that’s not what it’s for. I’ve had 208 unique visitors and I have 81 returning visitors; not very large numbers. This is probably a bit low due to rss, PlanetOlin and the fact that Olin IPs probably show up as the same visitor (?). Man. I’m silly. Part of me really wants to come up with something to seriously blog about. And part of me thinks that’s dumb. Oh well. This particular blog refuses to be consistently useful or informative.
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I’m having a not-so-fun time transitioning my sleep pattern. I have yet to get more than 10 minutes of sleep from any naps. This means that I’m pretty much just operating on my core sleep of 4.5 hours a night. Oh well. At least I decided to do a 4.5 hour core instead of a 3 hour core this time around…

When I did biphasic last year it was actually after a month or two of normal sleep with a 20 minute nap at noon. By the time I got to doing biphasic, I was awesome at falling asleep nearly instantaneously. I’ll have to redevelop that skill. Hopefully soon.
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Barnes and Nobles didn’t have the kind of Moleskine I wanted. *sigh* Tim to order online…

Ooh! Speaking of ordering online, I just ordered some book darts. These are neat little line markers. They clip onto books without leaving any marks. Word on the street is that librarians absolutely love these things. I have a plan that involves these. If it turns out not to be dumb, I’ll post about it at some point in the future.
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Now I remember what biphasic was like. There’s just not that much to do this late on a weekday… it’s OK. I have some books to read. I’ve also been considering being a wikipedia badass…
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OK. I’m done for now. Hope you enjoyed random stuff.

Boris out.

I don’t know If I’d actually spoil anything but I don’t want to worry about it so:

SPOILER ALERT

Ok. You’ve been warned.

I often use my blog(s) as motivators to get me to do stuff. So. In order to get myself to constantly read, I figured I’d post about books I read. This should be good for my speed-reading and my general knowledge.

I might play a little bit of catch-up soonish as I’ve read a lot recently.

Today, I’ll talk about Keith Ferrazzi’s book “Never Eat Alone.”

To sum it all up in one phrase: ” Ask. You can’t lose anything when you don’t have anything.”

Keith is big on a fairly direct approach. If you want to get to know someone, learn as much as you can about them. Then talk to them. Listen. Care.

I kinda like Keith. He’s not a smarmy guy who’s trying to get on people’s good sides in order to get above other people. He’s really into positive feedback. He offers help. This ends up creating a good rapport and goodwill. When he needs help he asks for it. The kicker: he doesn’t keep count.

Keith also does things like recognizing the importance of talking to “gatekeepers.” These are the people that get you on people’s calendars. He talks to them, not through them and they are included in his little thank-yous he sends.

His general modus operandi is carry out all of the steps that normal people do when they become friends really fast. He learns about them. He talks about the intersection of their interests (he’s studied up on this obviously). He finds their needs and fills them; he becomes needed. He pings people all the time (in taxis etc.). He follows up on everything, he hosts dinners, he finds mentors, he finds mentees. He gets close to the people who will get him closer to what he wants. This man is a machine.

I am not him. I cannot do life like him. That being said, we have very different priorities. I am very self-validated. Keith gains meaning from others, from interactions. I enjoy these interactions and will try to do more with them, but they will never be life-defining to me. I still plan on having few friends who are big enough in my life to be called life-defining. Keith is fine with celebrating his birthday at a business conference with his business friends or at his NYC home with his NYC friends or etc. etc. It’s fantastic.

It reminds me of “The Tipping Point”. Some people have few deep relationships, others have many shallow ones. If we think about these as two axes, the area defines how social a person is. My goal is to increase my total area by creating more shallow relationships; I have plenty and plenty of deep ones already. Good luck self.

On a completely different note, I decided I’m not following enough blogs (16). Send me links to good ones or just post them in the comments. Thanks all!

I recently got a book called Break-Through Rapid Reading (by Peter Krump). It’s pretty much seen as the best book out there to teach yourself speed reading. Anyhow, I did the first evaluation today and was very unhappy. Previous test that I’d done online showed results of around 400WPM. This time around I got 240WPM. It was a book I don’t really enjoy so I tried with a fiction book and got 360WPM. This is sad. A good friend of mine pushes 2000WPM. That’s more than five times faster than my easy-book pace. The book claims doubling is on the low side for the results it yields; we’ll see. It’s a six-week long program if you go a chapter a day (which they recommend) so I should be blazing through stuff (about triple speed with more retention they claim) by August. Meanwhile, it is incremental so I’m supposed to expect significant (30%ish increase) results within a week. Sounds a bit out there, but we’ll find out. /me crosses fingers.

In other news, podcasts are pretty awesome. I’ve taken to listening to the news in French and German. This only works out because the German one comes with full text that I can paste into a translator. I read through the German (out loud b/c that’s the only way it happes at all), read through the English butchering and then listen to the podcast while reading the German (usually with occasional glances at the translation for missing words. I really enjoy when they translate people’s names to English… Here’s a good place to find foreign language podcasts. Oh and while I’m at it: Netvibes rocks! that’s where I play my podcasts and the place I call home on the internet.

Big plans for rice. We’re getting another rice cooker! In the near future, we’ll hook up Bryce’s 3-cup model to give our 10-cup a little boost (we run out every day). We’ll see if we end up using both of the 10-cup versions. If not, we’re still planning on running this out of both dorm buildings next year so we need two anyhow. Oh man. This is nuts. Just for reference, we’ve eaten about 90 pounds of rice since after spring break. Super-intense.

Great happiness! I’m not moving my blog to Wordpress after all. It turns out that if I put in the html tags [em] and [b] manually, my formatting shows up just fine on rss feeds. Unfortunately, the blogger defaults use things like [span style="font-weight: bold;"]. Oh well. I can do it by hand. No big, I like Blogger better anyways for now.

Kind of random, I need to train up for the Super Smash Bros Tournament!! I’m sooo out of practice; I have no idea which three characters to play. I think I’ll do falcon, pika and jiggly? I dunno. I really want my ness in there, but I’m mostly sucking big-time with him at the moment. Samus is also really nice at this point, but I should probably stick with the three I named. The other cool thing could be Samus, Link, Yoshi. That’d be so many style points… then again, I have a way of getting mad style points with falcon and jiggly anywho.

Not random enough? How about a book recommendation? Everyone should read the Death Gate Cycle (Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman). It super-awesomely-fantabulous. These aret he people that brought us Dragonlance and the darksword trilogy. But this is far, far better. This is what fiction should always be like. It’s a 7 book series (really a 4 book series with 3 more books added) and the 7th is my favorite book ever. I don’t normally count it b/c it requires one to have read the other 6 for it to be so good. Another couple of good books are The Stand, the Dark Half, and Insomnia (all Stephen King). Those are awesome too. OK. enough random add thoughts for now.

Yawn…
Man I’m getting in the habit of writing quite late…
So yeah, coming up with stuff to write is harder when I’m tipsy. Let’s see… ah OK.

To Kill a Mockingbird. I just read it for the first time. Yeah, I know; quite uncultured. The book was pretty sweet (even if it was rather predictable). Poor kids right? Nah. Poor Atticus. Imagine being morally bound to put your children through hell. What if the story had ended less happily? What if Boo had not been there? Atticus would’ve had to deal with the fact that he sacrificed his kids to his morals. That sucks. I hope I’m never in a situation that pits my values against people I care about. I’d have to pick my values; that would suck.

Alt + Shift

Rice is flying out at a prodigious pace. I weighed 10 cups of rice (the amount we go through each day) using a very imprecise measure and decided that it weighs somewhere between 2 and 3 lbs (it’s worth noting that these are 10 rice-cups which, I believe, are actually .75 cup so that’s 7.5 actual cups of dry rice or about 12 cups of cooked rice). This means we can expect it (our 50 lb. bag) to last between 2 and a half weeks and 3 and a half weeks. I hope I can blame this on the scale cuz that is fast. On the upside, this bodes well for a future rice culture sort of thing that would encourage the use of East Hall lounges. W00t! As for sustainability, people are offering to chip in for rice, so I feel confident that won’t reall be an issue.