100% happiness

100% happiness
Originally uploaded by ellen forsyth

This was on a vehicle which I passed recently. It was a joyful sign to read. The company which is offering 100% happiness is a pipe company, but I thought it was lovely thing for any company to offer. It also seemed a really difficult thing to offer - 100% happiness. Would we be wanting to offer quite this boldly in libraries?

Denizens

  Garth Nix in his The keys to the kingdom series has characters, known as Denizens. They inhabit another world connected to ours but not part of it.  They were made by the Great Architect and are process oriented and can not create anything new, but they can produce amazing copies.  They can not see the big picture and they can rarely think creatively or imaginatively.  Superior Denizens have much more flexibility, they still can not create anything new, but their thought processes are more flexible. 

Some of the Denizens are in groups named after beaurocracies such as Sorcerous Supernumeraries and Paper pushers.   The key idea is that there are many characters who are resistant to change, very process oriented and not able to look at the big picture.  Just as well as it is a series of stories and not real. 

By the way it is a very interesting series to read.

Epic win

I really like Epic win.  It is an app to help with organization, kind of like electronic post it notes, but this works much better for me than electronic post it notes, and it is a lot more fun than I am making it sound.  I am using it to organise my non-work things and it really has helped.  It is not about the points and the levels, but they are there, and I have a look at them from time to time.  I really like the way this helps me be more organised and not miss things.   You set up the jobs to be done as challenges where you earn points, in different categories including social and strength.

I use electronic calendars as well – but this is more fun.

Scare up a good book

I am participating in the twitter based reading group readit2011.  The January theme was scare up a good book #suagb.  I don’t read much horror, so this month was going to be a challenge for me.  My reading for the year started badly, so that might count as scary.  I started but did not finish two much praised management books (and they will remain nameless).  One was about using social media at work.  It was a personal story of success in doing that, backed by a family business.  The author kept telling the reader to quit our jobs, but he did not have a history of doing this, having worked for the family firm since before he left school.  This presented a credibility issue for me.  The other abandon was a management book which told me to be neat and tidy (before it went anywhere else).  As a fan of A perfect mess this was not going to work either.

Fortunately my reading picked up at this point. 

• Dog loves books – an enjoyable picture book which could work as a guide for readers advisory work 
• Jennifer Cruisie Getting rid of Bradley –  entertaining romance reading 
• S J Rozan A bitter feast – a reminder of some of the uses of oleander 
• Richard Khadry Kill the dead – is in the scary category but mainly for the blood and other gore
• Richard Hetzler The Mitsitam Café Cookbook – lots of fun recipes to try 
• Clay Griffith and Susan Griffith The Greyfriar – this is the first part of a trilogy and I will be reading the second part when it is available.  It presents an alternative future with a long running battle between the humans and the vampires 
• Barry Maitland Bright air – an ecological mystery with many betrayals 
• Scott Westerfield Behemoth – this is in the ripping yarns category with some beautiful imagined machines and fabricated animals 
• Garth Nix Mister Monday (preparing for a seminar where the author is speaking) great page turner, very enjoyable and imaginative – includes the very scary bibliophages which feed on text (well it is scary if you work in a library), there was also a lot of compassion in this title, and Grim Tuesday which was an excellent audio book 
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson  This book is way too good just to read once, (I am up to my third reading).  I really like Neal Stephenson’s work, and it is well worth waiting years between titles.  This one has some lovely use of scientific theory as well as many other wonderful ideas like page trees (which is where paper comes from, it is grown as leaves which are then cut to size) and library grapes (which are grapes with the complete genetic sequencing of all grapes – how they grow depends on location) .

Also reading Jamie (the food magazine), New Scientist, delicious

My reading has been a mix of audio, e-books and paperbased.  I have only mentioned the titles I finished this month.  I have several other titles which I have started, but they will be mentioned when I finish them.

I have been playing Angry birds,  Wordworth, Plants and zombies and World of Warcraft.