I’m usually left with way more books that I want to read than I have time to read, so keeping track of them all can be a hassle. After trying a variety of methods, I’ve landed on GoodReads and it seems like a pretty good tool. There are apps for all phone platforms which is important so you can save a book when you’re on the go and it integrates with Facebook to quickly find friends who are also using the site. That being said, it doesn’t look like many of you are using it. If you’re looking for a site to help you keep track of your reading list and also suggest books that you might like, check it out and add me as a friend! Or if you have a better system, I’d love to hear about that too.
King County Library Rocks
We live in a high tech county. Facebook, Amazon, Google and Microsoft all have offices here and those are just a few of the names you’d recognize. It apparently trickles down into our library system. The more I look at the library, the more amazed I am!
A couple years ago, they enabled Kindle ebook checkouts. I’ve been a heavy user of that and it has worked fantastically well. We were also able to drop our Consumer Reports website subscription because the library gives us that for free. Tonight I was contemplating subscribing to a magazine when I decided to browse through the library. It turns out that they offer free access to a bunch of magazines through Zinio! (Zinio is an online digital magazine distributor.) Tyla is sitting on the couch laughing at me because I’m so excited about this.
The moral of the story is that if you haven’t been to your library in a while, be sure to check out what services they offer. You might be surprised!
P.S. The magazine I was looking for is called Family Handyman. I was given a couple free issues of the magazine and was very impressed. They’re full of great quick tips and project plans. Every issue I read gave me some good ideas. I’m pretty excited to get it for free through the library. I also signed up to receive Skiing, Popular Science, and Mental Floss. Who knows if I’ll have time to read them all, but who cares, it’s free!
P.P.S. “Free” in the context of this post of course means “you’re already paying for it with your taxes so you might as well make use of it.”
Kingkiller Chronicles
Looking for a book to read? I just finished the first book of the Kingkiller Chronicles and immediately started on the second one. It’s something like a cross between Harry Potter for adults, but that isn’t really fair to either series. Patrick Rothfuss is the author and he has spent a decade polishing these books and it really shows. The world is extremely intricate, but it’s not overwhelming. The story is engaging, but it’s easy to follow along. If you’re at all interested in the fantasy genre, check this out. And if fantasy isn’t your thing, don’t be put off by the sterotypes around the genre. While there is magic in the book, it’s used as a tool in the story, not as a main focus that keeps getting beat to death.
Leo Laporte interviewed the author on a recent episode of Triangulation. It gives a nice background into Patrick’s thought process behind the books. At the end they apparently start talking about the book, but they warn of major spoilers so I’m going to listen to that after I finish the second book. Hopefully it won’t be too much longer until book three launches because I know I’ll be itching to continue the story after I finish book two!
Trap Shooting
I picked up a copy of Breaking Clays: Target, Tactics, Tips and Techniques by Chris Batha in hopes that it would help with my trap shooting. The first half of the book is an introduction to shotgun sports while the second half covers the various sports and doesn’t spend a lot of time specifically on trap. I did get a few good tips though which are shown below:
- When you miss, it has little to do with the ballistics of the shotgun – choke and cartridges give you inches where you miss in feet. A miss is more often caused by a breakdown in the fundamentals.
- If you can keep the muzzles on the line throughout the shot, you limit your misses to in front or behind. You instantly achieve a fifty per cent reduction in missing. You also gain a significant second benefit. As a competitor, if you miss, you need to know the fault or the cause and understand the correction. If you can stay on the line, it becomes easier to recognise the fault. You miss either in front or behind, now you can analyse the cause and apply the correction. You can improve the odds even more. You can make sure that if you do miss, it is in front of the target.
- Raise your eyebrows just before you call for the target. This simple action gives you a twenty per cent increase in light-gathering vision.
- Clay target shooting is different from other sports in that there is little physical activity to relieve stress build-up which increases incrementally as scores increase.
- The inability to suppress left brain activity is what leads to ‘choking’.
- My approach is, they are all one-bird competitions. You should take each target one at time. See the target – break the target. Concentrate on each shot as an independent and all-important target and forget about everything else…especially your score!
- There is no such person as The Natural. I will allow that there are a few participants in any walk of life who can learn a motor skill quicker than the average person. But there is still a ceiling to their progress – they just reach it quicker. The learning curve of any activity is never a straight line; it consists of peaks and troughs and very often long plateaus of little progress.
The book also taught me where the term “trap shooting” comes from. It started in England when they would place a bird on the ground and cover it with a box. You would move the box, pick up your gun, and shoot the fleeing bird. When people got too good at that, they attached a string to the box and moved farther back. When the sport came to America there was a shortage of pigeons and doves so they switched to the clays instead. In the 1920s, England made it illegal to use live birds in trap shooting.
Book Quotes
One of the best features of the Kindle is the ability to highlight passages and then retrieve them on your computer later. Here are some of the passages I’ve highlighted in the last few months:
- ATLANTIS by Bob Mayer
More missions meant they were better at what they did, not less afraid. - The Time Machine by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours—that is another matter. - The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle
Nitwit ideas are for emergencies. You use them when you’ve got nothing else to try. If they work, they go in the Book. Otherwise you follow the Book, which is largely a collection of nitwit ideas that worked."
I’d say Mote in God’s Eye is the best of the books I’ve read recently. I’ve been very impressed with two of the Jerry Pournelle books I’ve read. The other is Lucifer’s Hammer. If you’re at all interested by the synopsis of the books, give them a shot and you probably won’t be disappointed.