Book Review #3

The next book I read was Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. I loved this book. As I've mentioned in a previous post, I'm a sucker for statistics and this book used statistics to analyze an assortment of world issues that. It didn't get bogged down in the numbers but used them to point out mistakes with "common knowledge".

Freakonomics is only 207 pages and reads extremely quickly. It is an intriguing book and will likely make you look at the world a little differently.

Book Review #2

Another book that I have read recently was Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer, by Victor Cherkashin with Gregory Feifer.

This book interesting because it had all the excitement of a spy story, but in this one the "bad guys" win, twice. Victor (Cherkashin is way too hard to spell repeatedly) tells of his life as a bright up and comer in the KGB. He works his way through a series of assignments until getting station in the heart of the "Main Adversary," Washington DC. He lucks into having two of the biggest American spies volunteer to betray their country for money. He tells of their handling of the two biggest assets the KGB had, as well as several other intriguing side stories.

Victor is a true believer in communism, while still maintaining a soul. He truly loved his country but did not agree with its treatment of its citizens, even the treasonous Russians that his CIA and FBI sources exposed.

Spy Handler was a great read and gives you insight into both the espionage profession and the other side during the Cold War. It is 314 pages and reads very quickly. I would highly recommend it and if reading about Soviet successes rubs you the wrong way, you can take comfort that we won the Cold War and that his two big recruits are both rotting away in prison.

Book Review #1

My wife told me that she was probably going to start reviewing books that she had read on her blog, and so I decided to steal her idea. But first I have to say that I have never been a good reader. I am a slow reader and it tends to put me to sleep so I can only read so much at once. Consequently I haven't read much other than the scriptures and text books since I was 12. Even in English classes I would try to buy the book on tape of a book I was assigned to read.

Well after we canceled our DirecTV and suddenly there was a lot less to watch on TV, I started reading for really the first time.



The first book I read was Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police by John O. Koehler. Koehler worked for the Associated Press in East Germany and was once even approached to be a spy for the Stasi. He used the opened archives of the Stasi along with first hand accounts to tell of the oppression and injustice that the Stasi and their "friends" the KGB imposed on the East German people. He also chronicled the efforts of the Stasi to further the cause of communism in the West and in the third world.

Although the book seemed slow at times due to the lack of unifying story line, it was eye opening for me. The fall of the Berlin Wall occurred when I was eight and its significance was completely lost on me. I can only remember my 5th grade teacher trying to impress upon me the importance of the new European maps that the school had finally gotten. I had had little understand of what it was like to live during the height of the Cold War, let alone behind the Iron Curtain. It gave me a greater appreciation of the freedoms that we enjoy and the sacrifices that are made to preserve those freedoms.

Stasi is 478 pages, making it the third longest book I have ever read, behind the Book of Mormon and Red Storm Rising. Although it was not a nail-biter, per se, I would recommend it. I would say that if you hit a chapter that doesn't draw you in, such as the Stasi efforts in Central America, then just skip ahead to the next, since the book does not carry a single story line.

iTunes Update

I have had a few minutes with the iTunes data in Excel. Here is the Reader's Digest version.

• The weighted average date of my music collection is 1996.
• Kent leads cumulative listening with 229 hours.
• Blur comes in second with 178 hours.
• U2 is third with 146 hours.
• Radiohead is third with 137 hours.

I want to see the average play count for each of those bands but it will have to wait.

Excel Geek

I am an engineer or geek by trade. One of my favorite toys, err, I mean tools, is Microsoft Excel. I use it for all sorts of calculations and even when I discovered my new company didn't have any stormwater analysis software, I wrote a spread sheet that modeled a 20-year, 24-hour storm on a street I designed.

But in my free time I track all sorts of geeky stuff in Excel. My biggest spreadsheet tracks football and basketball statistics for Mountain West Conference (MWC) teams and schools that are expansion possibilities for the conference.

By there are two spreadsheets on my wish list, that I haven't figured out to put them together. One is a spread sheet that looks at college basketball and football attendance to ascertain what is the key attribute to higher visiting attendance. Attendance is money and if you can statistically show which attributes contribute most significantly to higher attendance, then you could best target schools to add to your conference.

The second spread sheet also has to do with a new feature I added to my blog and that is my iTunes listening. I love music and was thrilled when my wife surprised me with an ipod Nano last year for Christmas. The only downside I saw was that I would not longer be able to track which songs I listened to most often, because I would be listening on my ipod instead of on iTunes. But my sister informed me that even though a play count isn't shown on my ipod Nano, it nevertheless tracks how many times I have listened to each song and down loads that data to the host computer every time you sync. So my blog now has my Top Ten most played songs in iTunes that I will update periodically.

But I wish I could export that data into a spread sheet so I could track which songs I have listened to the most in the last month, or how many cumulative hours of listening have I done. I was a little surprised to find that most of my Top Ten were by Radiohead and none were by Kent, who I would consider to be my favorite band. Is Radiohead really my favorite band to listen to, but I consider Kent my favorite because it reminds me of Sweden? Perhaps I listen to more Kent cumulatively, but my favorite songs are by Radiohead.

Great News. Before I posted this I thought I would double check to make sure there isn't a way to export the data, and it turns out that you can. I will have to tinker with the formatting and it will take time to setup a spreadsheet, but I should be able to check that off my wish list, and in so doing, I sink lower into geekdom.

Seattle Vacation

Kids are so wonderful. They love the simple things in life. Our family recently took a vacation in Seattle where we visited the zoo, aquarium, air and space museum, and took a harbor tour. My 2 year old son loved all of that, but equally as entertaining was the back-hoe, or "digger" to him, that was working across the street. When we would come back to our hotel room for a break, he would camp out at the window watching it bring loads of dirt from inside some building (I am totally curious about that) and fill up a waiting dump truck. Even here, in the picture, when the digger was simply parked, he couldn't take his eye's off of it.

Storming the Court or Field

Last Saturday, March 15, was the Mountain West Conference Tournament Final. It pitted #1 seed BYU against #2 seed UNLV at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas (It is UNLV's home court). It was a hard fought game with BYU building a first half lead and then UNLV getting hot in the second half, taking the lead with the help of outstanding offensive rebounding, and putting the game away late when they made their free-throws and BYU couldn't hit anything. UNLV got the automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament and BYU ended up as an At-Large team, both as #8 seeds.

After the game, in spite of multiple announcements that fans are not allowed to enter the court during or after the game, and a 6 foot wall surrounding the court, erected specifically to keep fans off the court during the tournament, UNLV fans stormed the court after the final horn. In the crush of people trying to reach the court past the barriers and guards, a few scuffles broke out between BYU fans and UNLV fans. This sparked days of debate on the Mountain West Conference(MWC) discussion boards at http://www.mwcboard.com about whether fans should storm the court or field after games.

I would argue that the problem persists because the enforcement of the rule is equivalent to our border enforcement. We make a token effort to keep them out, but once they are in there are few if any repercussions, and generally only if you break some other law. Consequently millions have illegally crossed our borders, because there is little to risk, but so much to gain.

Fans who storm the court meet only token resistence from security and once there, they are left pretty much alone until they decide to leave. In fact, I worked at the BYU football games one year and was on field duty at the end of the games. We lined up, one person every 5 yards, holding a nylon barrier, but in our training we were instructed to tell people to stay off the field, but to not make any effort to stop them. No one ever tried to storm the field but had they tried with any sort of numbers it is likely that nothing would have happened.

If a conference or school wants to have a policy prohibiting fans from storming the field or court after games, then they actually need to enforce it, and not just a half hearted effort. Erecting barriers in the Thomas & Mack Center only produced a back log of people that filled the aisles and forced frustrated and disappointed BYU fans against the surge of exuberant (and often drunk) UNLV fans which led to more problems. And then once the UNLV fans were on the court there were no consequences for breaking the rules, which essentially encourages fans to follow suit in the future.

For the sake of safety and order I would like to see the MWC prohibit storming the court or field (which probably makes me old). I remember once while I was at Beaverton High School we won a game against our bitter rivals Jesuit High School and in so doing won the conference. Many fans stormed and field and I followed, convinced it had to be the coolest thing ever. I made it to about the 30 yard line. Stood in the crowd with friends for a few awkward moments before I realized there was nothing to do once you were on the field. I felt silly and left for my car and home.

Sure the victory was thrilling, but there is nothing to do on the field or court after a game, and people are often hurt in the crush to reach the field. Stadiums are designed to get people in and out from the street, not from the field. Plus opposing fans are trying to leave the facility while you are shoving towards the center. Fans routinely get black eyes and bloody noses in the effort, and every so often someone is seriously injured.

Quick Update

It has been a busy couple of weeks. Here are some quick hits from it.

I started a new job. Does anybody like orientations? I had to pace myself by working on a project for an hour or two and then nod my way through some training. If I had to sit through orientations as a full time job, I would shoot myself in the head.

We are two weeks into free-tv and so far, so good. I have watched less TV, read more in books, finished projects I started and found more shows on networks that are interesting. We "upgraded" to a more expensive antennae and we may do so again to ensure good picture quality, but the reduced amount of programming has not been a problem.

I got my kent CD. It caught me off guard, because it went in a completely different direction than their last album, Du och Jag Döden, which was simply phenomenal. But I am adjusting to the new direction and I like it. It hearkens back to their older stuff and Depeche Mode, who was one of their main inspiration.

Amazon Beef

Have you ever eaten at that Brazilian Barbecue Restaurant that everyone is always talking about? Me neither. But my wife recently bought me the latest release from my favorite Swedish band, "kent," from Amazon.com and they have not impressed. The album is an import and she hoped to avoid messing with international shipping and exchange rates by buying it from Amazon. The album was released on October 17 and Amazon initially promised delivery by October 23, then it was pushed back to November 1, then November 6, then November 8, then January 1! All the while Amazon was blaming kent saying that they had pushed back the release date, which was ridiculous because I could read on kent fan sites about the album and how others had received their copies from other vendors. After sending Amazon a bitter email the CD was finally shipped "early" on November 8. It bugs me that Amazon customers who got their Harry Potter books a day late got it for free, but they just push back kent deliveries willy-nilly. Thus my Amazon Beef.

I setup some kent videos on the side bar so you can hear some of their music. More of it is on youtube.com including their latest single Ingenting (Translation: Nothing). Another kent side not; my screen name Isola comes from one of their albums.

Free TV for me?

No this isn't some half cocked scheme to get 150 HD channels for free. It is our attempt to go cold turkey on cable and satellite TV. Our one year bundled rate expired and we remembered that TV, or at least some of it, is free to anyone with some bunny ears for their TV. So we decided to give it a try. So far so good for me. The satellite turned off Saturday morning, so instead of catching bits and pieces of a dozen college football games, I watched bits of three games. My wife wasn't sure at first because on Saturdays and Sundays networks are clogged with football and little programming intended for her viewing. But instead of watching TV we went and worked in the yard, read books, blogged and talked. This morning (Monday) I have opted for a book and a blog with my breakfast instead of Sports Center. I think this is going to work out pretty well. We are going to take back the $10 antennae for a better one so we the picture quality is higher, but I think we are going to make it work.

Dropping satellite is going to save us money, but more importantly it is going to save us time. Time we can spend doing better things. Plus now it only takes us 30 seconds to discover there is nothing on TV, whereas before by the time you checked everything out and learned there was nothing on, it was time for the next shows to start and you wasted more time discovering that there is still nothing on.

One last thing about dropping satellite. I really wanted to get CSTV, Versus and mtn. because together they will have broadcast every BYU football game this year. But in order to get CSTV I would need to order the Sports package ($15) and to get Versus I would have to get the expanded channels ($15) and to get the mtn. I would need to live in a Mountain West Conference (MWC) area and have Comcast. And even if I did fork out the money to get CSTV and Versus I would also get 50 other channels I would probably flip through before deciding that nothing was on.

I will keep you posted on how it is going. For my wife's take, check out the link to Vanessa's Blog.

Let's Get This Show Started with a . . .

Who knows how this will get started? I've never done this sort of thing before, and seeing as this is primarily an outlet for random thoughts that no one is interested in, who knows where it will lead? In addition to being an outlet for random thoughts that my wife doesn't want interrupting her reading, this is also intended to parallel my wife's blog. Her blog will deal with family issues and mine will be an adventure in triviality, but since I have to be serious all day at work, I need something worry free. So it will likely be filled with the sort of worthless preponderances that are a necessary escape for the mind, or at least my mind. Not the sort of stuff that keeps you up at night, but the things I use to box out life's real concerns. In short; the sort of stuff to make my mom proud.

But I am sure that real life issues will creep in occasionally. How can one keep them out when so much of one's life is spent dealing with them? Sure to pop up are thoughts from being a working professional (I use the term loosely) and a devoted husband and father (I hope I'm not using that too loosely). Well lets get things started.