It’s been fascinating watching Ben Elton grow as a writer. I read his first book, Stark, when it first came out. It was political and funny, as you might expect for a stand up comedian. It wasn’t terribly well written, though.
Next came Gridlocked, which was better written but not as funny.
I’d argue that he finally hit his stride with Popcorn, which was a real page-turner, with structure and humour and it was well written.
When I see a company that has an “innovation team” or a “chief innovation officer” I immediately understand that it’s not the kind of company I want to work for.
Innovation isn’t found in a particular team, person or department. It’s your culture.
If you need a special team outside the normal management structure to innovate, what does that say?
It’s dark and starting to get a little cold so I don’t feel like wandering around for too long. I manage to find somewhere open on a square near a tram stop.
The restaurant is pleasantly busy. There’s a family and a few couples. There are also three men, other than me, dining alone.
If you read my thoughts on the first book in the Kestrel series, “Changer” you’ll have a good idea of my thinking about the second, “Toll” [affiliate link].
It’s an entertaining, light read. I think that’s the intention, so I don’t mean that as a back-handed compliment.
Compared with last time, the MacGuffin didn’t bother me as much. What jarred were the constant info-dumps.
“[Barcelona is] the sixth most populous urban area in the European Union. Within Spain, it is second only to Madrid. But globally, it does not appear in the first ninety.”
Jared Diamond’s door-stop of a book [affiliate link] has been on my to-read list for quite some time. Maybe not quite since it was released over twenty years ago but probably not far from it.
The gist is pretty much there in the title: in the last 13,000 years, the most successful societies used guns, germs and steel to conquer others. Why, for example, was it Europeans who had world-wide empires rather than Africans or Americans or Chinese?
As I normally do at this time of year, here are a few thoughts about Apple’s new mobile operating system. However, this year has been different in a few ways.
Betas are, well, betas. You don’t use them on devices that you actually need1. My normal pattern is put them on my iPad around the start of August. This is often the third or forth beta. Most of the worst glitches have been resolved by this point. Then, depending on how it goes on the iPad, I’ll probably put it on my phone towards the end of August, earlier if everything is going well.
Having read “Ready Player One” and seen the film recently, picking Ernest Cline’s next book, “Armada” [affiliate link] was an easy choice. “Ready Player One” wasn’t my favourite book, but it was an entertaining read and that’s what I was looking for this time.
It pretty much exactly met those expectations. It’s well written and easy to read. There are all the retro-references you’d expect in a Cline book. The story moves along at a reasonable clip. The characters mostly make sense, though they could have been better developed.
Like Spotify’s complaint before it, yesterday’s “App Store Principles and Practices” document from Apple got me thinking.
Apple talks a lot about free apps not paying anything (which isn’t entirely true of course), and it’s always pitched as a feature.
But the more I think about it, the more I think it might be a bug.
This effectively means that all paid apps have to subsidise all free apps. Is this what’s preventing Apple from reducing the 30% fee?
After reading quite a few non-fiction books I decided that this time I would pick a novel. Having read “Red Shirts” a couple of years ago, I randomly selected another John Scalzi book, “Fuzzy Nation” [affiliate link].
The history of this is a little unusual: it’s not an entirely original story. It’s based on an older story by H. Beam Piper called “Little Fuzzy.” (“Think of this as a ‘reboot’ of the Fuzzy universe, not unlike the recent J. J. Abrams ‘reboot’ of the Star Trek film series (but hopefully with better science.)”) Not having read that, I can’t compare but I did enjoy this one.
After all my fun with Couch to 5K and the Parkrun, The Incomplete Book of Running [affiliate link], about Peter Sagal‘s running experiences, looked like it might strike a chord.
One thing that didn’t strike a chord was the author. I guess if you’re American and listen to NPR and Wait wait… don’t tell me! you might know what you’re letting yourself in for. But I’m British and am more likely to be listening to The News Quiz on Radio 4. I don’t think that this missing knowledge affected my enjoyment of the book, though.