Well I'm not dead but I have been freaking buried at work lately and this has been the first chance I've had in a bit to actually come up for air and post a little something on my blog. Suffice it to say that I'm extremely hopeful I'll be getting some extra hands to help out with the work here soon.

Yesterday the CSS Mastery book arrived from Amazon and it looks like I'll be doing some reading over the weekend, maybe - they're forecasting hot, sunny weather all weekend so I might geek out and bring it with me to the beach :-) The book Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way We Live With Technology is on backorder so it should ship out sometime in August. That one looks really interesting. Eventually I will have all the books on my "to buy" list :-)

Now that I finished off the project that's been consuming me for the past couple of weeks (I'm becoming quite the expert in re-templating Moveable Type to integrate with existing websites) , today I plan on getting my inbox back into some semblance of sanity (300 emails is 280 too many in the inbox), taking care of some support tickets that have been languishing in the queue and some other admin stuff that has been neglected. I'm also going to be setting up a wiki for our team at work to use as a procedures manual/patterns library kind of thing. I need to plan that out a bit before getting started on it. Lots to do - I better get started.

I finished reading jPod by Douglas Copeland last night and can highly recommend it as a laugh out loud read. I just couldn't put it down. I'm pretty sure this is the first novel I've read by him (having missed Microserfs many years ago) and I'm pretty sure it won't be the last. jPod is Seinfeld (set in todays technology machine) crossed with Clerks (for angsty, dissatisfied with their lives 20 somethings) crossed with Dilbert's cube farm hijinks and with some other really weird stuff thrown in to glue the storyline together. It's told in a style of fast cuts and stream-of-consciousness interstitials which moves the story along quickly. I rather like the characters and, working in this industry, have probably seen at least a few of their types (possibly sometimes in the mirror ;) ). Well worth the read - but be warned, you'll want to finish it in one sitting.

I recently finishing reading this book and really, really enjoyed it. This is not a book on economics per se but rather a series of theories based on observations that are rationalized using economic analysis. I majored in Economics in university so I found the theories interesting and the rationalizations fascinating. Some of the theories are bold at the very least, controversial without question (ie: free choice for abortion correlates to a reduction in crime rate) and yet the rationalization is sensible. It's not a difficult read at all, being aimed at the mass market the authors are careful to keep the jargon to a minimum and their explanations are easily followed. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who was interested in seeing the world from a slightly different point of view. For if nothing else the reader comes away from this book with a healthy skepticism of "facts" and "expert opinion" that is rampant in the media today.

Well, last book it was my daughter who was waiting eagerly for it's arrival, bouncing from foot to foot while watching for the courier that Saturday morning. This time I found it was me that kept circling by and peeking out the front window until the courier arrived with a "Harry Potter's here!". I raced through my first reading of the book over the weekend and finally finished it tonight and can definitely give it a 2 thumbs up. I must admit that I began reading it with a hope that Harry's character had grown out of his whiny brat-ness of the last book and was pleased to find that he has! That one thing made it so much more enjoyable than book 5. As well, the plot seemed tighter where book 5 dragged on a bit. But the ending was quite a shock and unfortunate in many ways. It will be interesting to see in book 7 if her killing off this particular character was necessary to move the overarching plot forward, or simply some gratuitous violence for shock value.