Here Be Subtlety

Culinary Weekend – 27th and 28th May

I’ve had a couple of what I like to call culinary weekends these past weeks with my main goal being to find good food while touring around the country (or these parts of the countries that I can reach within an hour long train ride).

Between trying to finish the Song of Ice and Fire series as well as the Hunger Games series, reading and watching Jane Austen and trying to finally finish the last season of TV shows I wanted to write about it, but didn’t really get to it.

But here it goes. The first weekend was pretty harmless in terms of culinary indulgences, but it took me to Münster, so that’s something.

I didn’t get to really have lunch there because all of the restaurants that sounded cool would not open until 5 or 6 pm and I didn’t plan on staying so long. So I just bought a tasty apricot muffin at Tollkötter, some white vanilla chocolate, a scoop of hazelnut ice cream and some wasabi-nori crackers and just walked around a lot. Münster is a really pretty town to just walk around in and take in the atmosphere. I even pondered renting a bike to get into full Münster feeling, but I was happy just to walk around on foot.

Bohème Boulette – Unfortunately closed until the evening

Bakery in Münster

So instead I went back home and decided to just have a quick lunch at the Thai place in the local shopping mall. Sounds a bit disappointing, but I was seriously craving some light Asian cuisine. Although Cha Chà so far has had its lower and higher points for me, it’s a nice option when I want some quick and hassle-free Asian food.

Besides I’m on a quest for the best Tom Ka Gai around where I live, so it was my opportunity to sample the Cha Chà version.

Unfortunately it proved not to be a contender. It’s okay, but somehow the vegetables are a tad too raw, it’s like they’re trying to prove their food is extra-healthy by sacrificing a bit of Tom Ka Gai awesomeness.

As some kind of second course I chose a plate of three salad samples with pancakes and soup. The salad actually were great and teh combination with the pancakes was a nice touch. The soup wasn’t great, but tasty. As I said, Cha Chà is kind of unreliable. I’ve had great dishes there and not so great ones, but it was never actually awful, so it’s a good option for some healthy meal after (or during) a small city shopping spree.

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On Sunday I had planned to check out a new American place, but it wasn’t open until the evening and I needed some lunch, so I changed the plans and went to the Mexican restaurant right in the city. This is probably not what passes as Mexican for anyone who actually knows Mexican food. A US friend of mine usually complains about the lack of original Mexican food in Germany. Basically I just need my Chili con Carne fix from time to time and the one as Sausalitos is pretty fine.

I ordered the Chili which comes with Taco chips and sour cream and the Caesar’s salad, both of which made for a nice lunch, but together too much for me to finish.

So, that was the first culinary weekend. It wasn’t that much compared to what is to come for the next ones, but it was a nice start and a great way to spend the days off work.

Brushing up on Austen

I’ve wanted to write about my personal thoughts on what makes a geek, and my very culinary weekend and a ton of other stuff which might or might not include my new adventures on the ukulele, but I decided that tonight you get Jane Austen.

So, why is that?

Since I had my Kindle I’ve squeezed in some classics in between, because they’re free and it’s a good excuse to read up on some Dickens or Jules Verne or H.G. Wells or Lucy Maud Montgomery. Or Jane Austen. I’ve liked her stories pretty much since I saw the 1995 Ang Lee adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, but I never really pursued the Austen path until now. Before I got my Kindle I had read Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Emma. I hadn’t seen any of the movies aside from the aforementioned Sense and Sensibility, but that’s all going to change.

Given that she only wrote six complete novels (there are a few other works here and there, look it up on Wikipedia if you want to know more, that’s what I did), I am now 2/3 through her books and 1/2 through the movies and I guess I will be through all of it completely by the end of the year at the latest (I’m guessing earlier).

The thing about her books is that they’re are surprisingly intelligent, funny and witty. I have my problems with Charles Dickens or at least I had them with Great Expectations which I thought dragged on a bit whereas Pride and Prejudice pretty much just flies by.

As for my favorites, I think I want to wait until I finished all of the novels and come back to that question then. So far it’s Pride and Prejudice which seem like the most mature and complex novel to me so far. I wasn’t completely convinced by Emma, although I’m looking forward to watching the movie adaptation. Northanger Abbey might be the most ironic so far, but that’s also the book’s biggest problem as it’s hard to sympathize with a heroine who is mostly a naive dud. And I need to re-read Sense and Sensibility to be able to judge it.

Pretty sure though that Sense and Sensibility will win the favorite adaptation award, mostly because of Alan Rickman. I know it’s a bit unfair, but I’m helpless that way. Anything with Alan Rickman automatically wins. That’s just how it is.

So I’ll get back to you when I’m done with the three books I still mean to read and have watched at least one film adaptation of each book and write about the ultimate Austen experience. Since I also need to finish George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, I guess I’ll be pretty busy this summer. But at least I won’t be bored.

Easy Pinning with Pinterest

Pin it! Well, that’s it basically…

One of my colleagues from my old job sent me an invitation to pinterest, which she said she was already addicted to. Because I try about every new internet thing I find I quickly registered and checked it out and so far I like it. It’s been less than 24 hours though, so we’ll see whether I will stick to it.

So what is it? The screenshot should give you a pretty good example. My first impression was that it reminded me a lot of tumblr, which I love to pieces, insofar that it allow for easy sharing of things you found on the web. It is a lot like tumblr, but then it’s not. From what I could see so far, pinterest is images only and the whole experience is different from tumblr.

On pinterest’s own site, they say the following:

Think of Pinterest as a virtual pinboard — a place where you can create collections of things you love and „follow“ collections created by people with great taste.

People use Pinterest to collect and share all sorts of things — wedding inspiration, favorite T-shirts, DJ equipment. You name it, people are pinning it.

One major difference is that on pinterest you have boards, so that you can group whatever it is you want to share. You can follow other user’s boards, either all of them or selected ones. You can repin or like other user’s pins or just add new ones. All pins usually are linked to their site of origin, so that for any yummy food picture you can follow the trail back to the recipe, or you can follow the pin of that awesome dress to the actual vendor’s site.

All in all, great idea, lovely implementation. It’s very easy to use, pretty and sleek and I agree with Daniela, it’s crazily addictive.

The only problem for me so far is that it’s hard for me to keep up with all the services I signed up for. I’m trying hard to keep this blog alive, and while I have tons of ideas for articles in my head I never seem to find the time to write them down. (Who am I kidding, I’m so busy trying to finally catch up with my TV shows AND finishing George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire books in time for the fifth one in July AND enjoying the lovely weather we have here AND practicing to play on my ukulele that I’d need another three to four hours a day to do all the things I want to.)

Anyway, I already use tumblr and I don’t know whether the two services are too much alike – at least for me – to be able to keep up with both of them (and I’d probably choose tumblr over pinterest if it came to that). However, since it’s easy to use and practically no hassle at all, I’m not ruling out that in the future you’ll find the stuff I like on this blog and on tumblr and on pinterest. (And here’s what my friend Daniela likes.)

If you check it out and start to pin, leave me a note.

(Software) Management Advice Courtesy of Game of Thrones

I recently read Game of Thrones, partly just because and partly because I wanted to be done with the first book of the series before the HBO series started. (Might I say that I think that I was right to read the books first. While I really liked the pilot I’m not sure how many things are lost on someone who hasn’t read the books. It might still work, but it’s probably not the same.)

In the book I stumbled upon two passages that reminded me of very valuable management lessons which apply nearly as is to your common workplace. Here’s the first one:

„Know the men who follow you,“ she heard him tell Robb once, „and let them know you. Don’t ask your men to die for a stranger.“ At Winterfell he always had an extra seat set at his own table, and every day a different man would be asked to join him. One night it would be Vayon Poole, and the talk would be coppers and bread stores and servants. The next time it would be Mikken, and their father would listen to him go on about armor and swords and how hot a forge should be and the best way to temper steel. Another day it might be Hullen with his endless horse talk, or Septon Chayle from the library, or Jory, or Ser Rodrik, or even Old Nan with her stories.

I think this resembles closely to what I’d say goes for a manager. I mean, you don’t have to be each and every one of your employees‘ best friend, but at least get to know them a bit and make them feel that you’re interested in them. This can be purely work-related, by the way. Find out what they like to do, what tasks they enjoy and which ones they hate, what gets them motivated. In the best case, this is a win-win, because you might be able to assign tasks to the employee who has the most interest in doing a good job. You’re happy, they’re happy. I say, in the best case.

But even if you can’t just magically pull awesome tasks from your sleeves to hand out to your happy employees, getting to know them is important. We’re all just people and unless someone really is the kind of guy who wants to be left alone, we enjoy talking about… well… stuff. What you make of it is up to you and maybe it’s nothing more than showing that you care. In the end, though your employees probably won’t literally die for you, chances are they’re more likely to stick up for you and the rest of the team if they feel connected.

(Mind you, I’ve never been in a manager’s position, so this is just my idealistic developer’s point of view. If you want to read more about managing software developers which I’ve heard is very similar to herding cats, just go over and read Michael Lopp’s blog Rands in Repose or his great book Managing Humans.)

Another quote that immediately made me thing of some valuable software development lesson was this:

That was the trouble with the clans; they had an absurd notion that every man’s voice should be heard in council, so they argued about everything, endlessly. Even their women were allowed to speak. Small wonder that it had been hundreds of years since they last threatened the Vale with anything beyond an occaxional raid. Tyrion meant to change that.

That is a classic example of what I learned to know as Design by Committee Must Die. I didn’t come up with this lovely name, there is an excellent article over at Smashing Magazine which says about all that there is to say. It’s true though, while I think it’s important to have people discuss ideas at work, there are certain decisions that are better left for a single person (or at least a very small group of maybe two or three people) to make. The bottom line is, a) you never get done with anything if you want to discuss it first with everyone and b) half of the time you try to make compromises to make everyone happy which leaves you with a design that is so inconsistent that nobody’s happy.

This isn’t a call for tyranny, but it is a call for healthy judgement of decisions that don’t need to be made with the whole team. If someone has valid arguments to object the final decision they will (hopefully) voice them and if they are valid, they should be heard. But make that decision first and then see who deems his time and energy worthwhile to defend their take on the idea.

I find it fascinating who these ideas which are presented in a book in contexts of war and castles and kings and whatnot are so applicable to today’s management values. But then again, maybe it’s not that strange and there are just some values that hardly ever change.

This Geek Girl Would Like to Disagree

So, some of you might be acquainted with the whole Ginia Bellafante/Game of Thrones/Boy Fiction thing that’s been going on in the last couple of days.

If you haven’t, that’s the article in which she is „reviewing“ HBO’s Game of Thrones. And this is her reaction to the mass of outraged replies that first article has earned her.

In a nutshell, I’m with those who say they don’t care about whether she did or did not like the pilot episode of GoT. I usually watch what sounds interesting and don’t really care about what critics or – for that matter – anyone else thinks about it. And I think it’s fair that people don’t like what I like and the other way round. What I care about is that I, too, felt personally offended by what she wrote, and I’m not even that much of a GoT fan. I have only read the first book and enjoyed it a lot and I partly read it now so that I would be able to watch the show with a bit of context.

However, there are already a lot of blog posts out there from girls like me who have written down their thoughts and I agree nearly completely with what they all have to say, so I feel there’s no special need for me to write another reply in which I say what hundreds of other people have already stated very clearly.

What I would like to say though is that I’m always so disappointed when I come upon people who look down on what other people like and act like they’re better because they read supposedly better books or watch better movies or even don’t have a TV at all, because TV is bad and books are great.

Hey, guess what? I read lots and lots of books and I currently don’t have a TV for most of the week and when I’m at home on the weekends we sometimes manage to spend it nearly entirely without watching. I’m still able to stare in amazement at some of the crappier shows and love every minute of it without being ashamed to talk about it.

In her reply to the comments Bellafante writes:

At the same time, I am sure that there are fantasy fans out there who may not know a single person who worships at the altar of quietly hewn domestic novels or celebrates the films of Nicole Holofcener or is engrossed by reruns of “House.”

I’m not sure what counts as quietly hewn domestic novels, and I think I have seen nothing by Mrs. Holofcener, but I really love watching „House“. I also watch „How I Met Your Mother“ and „Grey’s Anatomy“ and „Psych“ and „Parenthood“ and „The Chicago Code“ and „Supernatural“ and „Dexter“ and… yeah, you get the picture. (Too many shows, basically.) My last books have been some fantasy and science fiction novels, but also some classic children’s books (The Enchanted Castle and Anne of Green Gables), Room by Emma Donoghue and the heart-breakingly sad and charming The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Yes, I enjoy fantasy and science fiction. I might enjoy them a tiny bit more than lots of other genres, but that doesn’t mean I’m a fantasy and sci-fi fan. I’m a book fan. I’m also a music fan. And a TV fan. And a movie fan. And the only reason why I don’t watch horror movies anymore is not because I think they’re stupid, but because I won’t go through another week where I have to get up at 3 am to babysit my TV to make sure that no goddamn girl crawls out of there. I also watched only about half of I Am Legend because for the other half of the time I had my hands before my eyes. I like horror films, I’m just not very good at dealing with them.

But I’ve watched plenty of artsy French movies from the 60s as well as Japanese anime, comedies of all kinds (the romantic and the funny), thrillers, dramas, and I still think that Twister is really cool and Con Air is freaking awesome. I can do all these things.

I guess my issue with Mrs. Bellafante’s review and the quote isn’t even that she seems to be looking down on fantasy fans. That is bad enough by itself. What’s even worse is that she cannot seem to imagine that you don’t even have to be a fan to like reading fantasy. I’m not a fantasy fan per se. There is a lot of what is probably essential fantasy that I haven’t read and don’t currently plan to. I just like it a lot.

One reason why I enjoy fantasy and science fiction literature so much is that the really good stuff is mind-blowingly inventive. The nature of these genres allows them to go to places other literature can’t easily go as the authors are free to make up a world entirely of their imagination. But that doesn’t make the genre any better or worse than other books. (And it’s not that I’m saying other books can’t be imaginative and inventive, but it’s somehow different there. Read The Eyre Affair or Un Lun Dun or Neverwhere if you want to know what I mean.)

What I do take pride in is that I never let any label determine whether I like something or not. I feel that as an intelligent woman I can just read and watch and listen to anything I like and I don’t need to care if it’s considered good or bad or high-brow or low-brow or if it has any label attached to it. I assume that I can decide for myself whether I like it or not and that others are entitled to their own opinion and that we can happily agree to disagree.

The notion that we are divided into genre-lovers disturbs me on a level I can’t quite explain. Basically it sounds incredibly stupid to me. But that’s the subtext I read in the articles of Ginia Bellafante. First she says she doesn’t know any female fantasy lovers. When called upon that she admits that there might be some, but automatically adds that there is a chance that these fans might not be interested in what she’s interested in.

When I felt offended it wasn’t as a fantasy fan, it was as a girl who enjoys reading fantasy books among others and doesn’t like to be assumed to fall into any category that defines what she should and shouldn’t like. I was offended as a person who enjoyed reading GoT and other „books like Mr. Martin’s„. And I was offended by a lack of professionalism and respect for other people which resulted in a review like that.

What Developers Do

Okay, so here’s what I think a lot of people might think developers do: Write code.

If you know a bit more about the job, you might also know that we write some documentation, test a bit and fix them bugs.

But there’s quite a lot more that makes up the day-to-day life of a developer which most people not acquainted with the pitfalls of this lovely job might not know about. So, here’s just a selection of stuff I find myself confronted with regularly.

What Developers Do

Install Stuff

It takes hours. It’s not particularly fun either. But we do it. We install stuff. And then we update it. And then we install some more. And then we restart. And then two hours have gone down the drain because we had to install stuff and couldn’t really work on anything else in a concentrated productive way. But there’s no way around it and when that stupid Service Pack for Visual Studio is released we cannot really refrain from installing it, even though we know that it takes two hours and we need to close Visual Studio, so we cannot really do any coding in the meantime. Yes, it sucks and yes, we sometimes don’t realize what we’ve just started, until it’s too late, but it happens. It’s not an excuse for slacking time, it’s a fact of life.

Stare

Developers stare a lot. We stare at screens. We stare out of the window. We stare at the ceilings. We stare at the door. Don’t assume that we’re not working. Chances are we’re thinking. No, really.

The fact is that if developing software was just as easy as typing commands, you wouldn’t need specialized people to do it. Unfortunately (or for developers: fortunately) it’s not that easy and there are these times of the day where we just stumbled upon a problem that we have to really think about before it’s actually worth typing one more line of code.

Don’t mistake staring for doing nothing. And for developers, if you work somewhere where staring is commonly misunderstood for doing nothing, get the hell out! Anyone working with software developers needs to understand that part of our job is to think about what we’re doing. And while it’s nice to quickly draw something up on the whiteboard or have a lively discussion with another developer, some problems will only be solved by staring.

Marvel

Marvel is pretty similar to staring as it involves the former, but for another reason. Plus, staring usually involves some kind of vacant expression while marvelling involves a kind of irritated, slightly crazy grin or something similar.

The best kind of marveling I know is when you fix a bug and realize that the code should never have worked in the first place. This isn’t as absurd or uncommon as it sounds. It has happened often enough to me. There are other kinds of marveling: incredibly good code, incredibly stupid code, a bug that just shouldn’t happen,… you name it.

Marveling might not be as critical to our job than staring, but it’s usually more fun.

Be Annoyed/Irritated/Totally Surprised

This might be the other side of marvelling. Where marvelling revels in the joys of an obscure bug, being annoyed or irritated just hates the bug for existing in the first place.

There are other reasons to be annoyed though, and bad code or stupid bugs are just a small part. There’s crashing IDEs for example, or slow data connections. There’s the one configuration setting you always, always forget to change and spending an hour to debug until you realize it’s THAT THING AGAIN.

Being annoyed is the part of the developer’s life where we start to rant. It might even be that the time we need to vent off and be done exceeds the actual time we spend being annoyed, but so be it. We’re just people, too. (Maybe a bit geekier.)

Play Around

You can try and stop us and maybe even be successful, but you’ll take half of the fun out of our job.

On the plus side, developers tend to play around with stuff that might actually prove to be useful to their work, so unless you have serious doubts that they’re just goofing off getting nothing done, just let us play. We’re just trying out a little tool or playing around with some cool new technology anyway.

Fuck Things Up

We do that, too. Sorry.*

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*One of the worst things I have had the pleasure to experience first hand (though I didn’t do it) was when a fellow developer accidentally overwrote one of our development web servers. And no, of course, there was no backup. On the other hand: there’s nothing like the sight of a developer with panic written all over his face. We recovered after the initial shock, and then at least you have a story to tell.

Developers vs. Testers

I recently got an email from a developer/tester from Norway asking for an opinion about the typical relationship between developers and testers and any advice for testers on how to work together with developers.

Let me start by saying: I think it’s complicated.

The first job I had, there weren’t any testers. Naturally, there weren’t any testing processes. There were no development life cycles. There was a whole lot of nothing where you got some kind of requirement, worked on it, fixed your bugs and hoped and prayed that it would work.

The second job was completely different. We had a test department with three full-time testers and a few students working part-time. There was a development life cycle supported by the tools needed to get a requirement all through from specification to implementation to testing to bug fixing to release. There was not a feature going out, not a bug fixed that didn’t go through testing first. This also meant that testing (together with product management) had the power to stop a release from happening.

Of course, there was more involved business-wise, but from the development’s point of view, the testers job was just as important as the developers. I’m not saying that testing is more important than writing code. It’s as important. You don’t have one without the other. If you do, you’re doing something wrong.

I hope I’m not speaking for myself, but I’d say that there was neither rivalry nor one role looking down on the other. We worked as a team trying to release a product and we had to work together to do so successfully.

So, that’s how it should be.

As a developer I’ve worked with pretty amazing testers. The kind you give your feature to and know they will come back to you with bugs you never could imagine. The kind you trust to test your feature so well that it really will come out with as little bugs as possible (because as we all know, there’s always one more bug). The ones that will save you from utter embarassment because they will remember what you forgot before it gets released to customers.

There are a couple of things I am thankful for in testers:

a) They’re doing something for me that I don’t want to do. Testing is not for every developer. Some are crappy at testing, some are doing a fine job, some are actually pretty good at it, but still don’t feel especially thrilled when having to do some testing.

b) They’re my net of safety. I would like to say that when I’m done with a feature it is ready for release, but I know that it isn’t. There is one basic rule that you should never test your own code and that rule is there for a reason. But it also helps if you have dedicated testers instead of developers, because they don’t have the same impatience that developers do. Give a developer something to test and they want to be done with the testing and move on to the next feature to implement. Give a tester something to test and they want to FIND. THE. BUGS. Of course I’m generalizing here, but I think I’m not too far off.

But it remains that there are a lot of developers who seem to NOT be thankful for testers. Or – equally worse – those who look down on testers as second-rate teammate just doing the monkey work that nobody else wants to do. Having seen a development cycle were testing as well as testers were taken serious as hell, this screams utter bullshit to me.

Sure, release testing is a tedious, tedious thing that everyone hates. EVERYONE. And writing up a test script and ticking it off isn’t something that sounds especially awesome.

But here’s something that a tester from my last job told me: It’s like actively and creatively destroying something that wasn’t meant to be destroyed. It’s taking apart something that should hold together. And as a developer and a quarter-time tester (thanks to Scrum) I must say that I know the tickling feeling when you found a bug that was carefully hidden, but you still managed to drag it out into the open and smash it.

The same tester also said that sometimes it is hard working with developers. As a tester you can’t help but telling someone they made a mistake. And developer’s seem to be a sensitive species who like to take criticism of their feature rather personally. Instead of „I found a bug here“, they might hear „You did something wrong, stupid“. Which is not what the tester said, but still.

Developers might see a tester as an obstacle to having their fine and working code released. I’ve actually had consultants try to circumvent testing because it took too much time and the customer wanted that feature NOW. Well, the customer unsurprisingly always wants their feature NOW, but they also want it to work. Naturally, features who don’t go into at least a somewhat proper testing phase will always be buggy and in the end will cost you more time than if you had given that tester the extra day they said it would take them to test it properly.

Now as to the actual question on how to approach developers as a tester, I first want to give the advice one of our QA managers said I should give: He called it The Mom/Dad Approach and it boils down to somehow making the developers understand that you really mean them no harm, you just want them to be better and you want the feature to be as bug-free as possible. (Hint: Don’t be patronizing though. Developers will pick up on that and hate you for it.)

Also, make sure that you understand the technical side. You might not have the same technical background and you might not understand the details of the implementation, but try to understand that there is something technical going on and the small bug you just logged might mean a load of work for the developer.

Maybe offer to sit down together and look at what you found together (this might also help you weed out the „works on my machine“ replies). Communicate. Ask.

After all, you are working towards the same goal. Nice, working software. It’s a mystery why some managers and developers think that this can be achieved without testers, because it can’t. Testers are testers because they think differently. Because they are willing to dig deeper into the software than everyone else. And because they take a job that will piss off others by nature.

There was an awesome web comic I found once about typical developer replies to bug reports, but I can’t find it again. Instead, have fun with this one, it’s equally close to reality:

by David Wilborn / www.urbanjunglecomic.com

Kindle – First Impression

Not nearly two weeks ago I finally ordered my Kindle. I’ve been wanting one since last year, but with the new job, the move and everything I pushed it further and further. I had convinced my husband that it would be a nice idea when we were still busy packing up box after box of books and bringing them to our storage. It’s very easy to convince your better half of the advantages of a device that is supposed to hold up to 3,500 books when you have been busy filling more than fourty boxes with books. (Actually, I don’t know how many boxes with books we have, but there are a lot of boxes in storage and I’d guess about 80 percent are filled with books.)

So. On that famous Thursday in February I finally went ahead and did it. It was delivered the very next Monday, which is pretty fast, considering it went all the way from the US to Germany and I immediately picked it up and loaded The Name of the Wind on it. (Mostly because I had listened to an interview with Patrick Rothfuss on the Sword and Laser podcast and he talked about Joss Whedon which is the maybe easiest way to make me like you.)

I was afraid that reading on an e-book reader wouldn’t be my thing. I thought that I might miss the feeling of a book in my hand. Miss actually buying books or having them sent to me in neat little packages and looking at the covers. Afraid that I liked the way a book’s weight changes from one side to the other while you’re reading it.

Fortunately, all this isn’t the case. Or, maybe it’s the other way round, I enjoy the advantages of the Kindle so much that I don’t have time to miss the real book feeling.

Let me first say that the screen is perfect. It really looks like a writte page, perfectly clear and readable in sunlight. There are a couple of reflections when bright light shines directly on it, but that’s all. When I first held it in my hand I was amazed at how small it is and even more, how incredibly light it is. You can hold it comfortably with one hand and press the next page button with your thumb to read practically anywhere.

It took me a couple of pages to get into it, but I very soon forgot that this was not an actual paper book I was holding. It might have helped that The Name of the Wind is such a great read, but I figure it is just that you need some adjustment time to get used to the feeling of an e-book reader. Then you easy like it or not.

I will keep up with more impressions or remarks as I continue carrying my Kindle around with me, but for now, here are a few early comments on the experience:

The delivery was awesomely fast. I expected at least two weeks, and it got here in five days. You pay for customs on checkout so that it gets through quicker. Very smart.
It is very comfortable to read with, mostly because it’s so light and you only need one hand to hold it and turn the pages. Which makes it easy to pretty much read anywhere, even standing up in a bus or so.
Can’t say much about the battery time, but there’s plenty. I have WiFi on all the time, which is supposed to drain the battery somewhat faster. I have charged it once since I originally got it (and not counting the first time I charged it), but that was mostly precautionary.
PDFs work okay. I haven’t tried the convert feature so far, just loaded some PDFs I had on my laptop to check how they looked. The font is usually smaller, but it looks generally okay.
Most of all: I love reading on it. I was afraid I wouldn’t, but I do. I hope it’s not just enthusiasm, but given that I read nearly 700 pages in less than a week, I’d say that it’s a pretty neat device to read on.

The only irk I had and sometimes still have is a usability issue that I think I just need to get used to (and probably already have). I used to press the „next page“ button on the left side to go back a page every now and then. Somehow the feeling of using a real book got mixed with how the buttons are adjusted. But I also realized that I like the fact that I can hold the Kindle with either hand and just keep turning the page, so I think this is really just something that you need to get used to (if you even have that problem to begin with) rather than faulty design.

Now I’d like for more and more books to be released as e-books as well as Amazon rolling out German books for it. I know there are already some available, but I couldn’t find any current books that I would like to read. And now I’d like to snuggle under the covers and continue reading The Passage.

Best Books of 2010

So, here’s the thing. I normally round up my top ten of the books and sometimes in the past years it was harder and sometimes it was easier. I didn’t read quite as much in 2010 than in the years before nor did I keep track as meticulously as I did before, so I don’t know exactly when I read what and there might even be one or two books that I forgot in my booklist.

I though that this might make it easier to come up with my favorite books of the year 2010, but going through the list I realized that while I only read about half as many books as I used to, most of them were actually pretty good. So while the quantity left something to desire, the quality did not so much.

I find it very hard to come up with a top ten, but I’ll try. I have no problems however to name you my favorite book of the last year. That is such an easy decision, it’s ridiculous. Even half way through the book in question I knew that it would be nearly impossible to find a better book. That has been the case with „The Time Traveler’s Wife“ and „The Raw Shark Texts“, and it was the same here.

So, let’s see what I can offer you for this year. And don’t focus too much on the order of the lower ranks, I just to come up with an order and it doesn’t mean too much.

10. The Woman in the Cage by Jussi Adler Olsen: So apparently the Scandinavian crime phase didn’t stop with finishing the Millennium series in 2009 for me. I originally bought this for my husband, who is a more avid thriller reader than I am. He recommended it, though, and it was actually really good. There are a couple of clichées that are a bit annoying, plus about every review I read shared the feeling that halfway through the book you just know what the supposedly big twist is. But that didn’t really disturb the reading experience so I would just let it slide and say that it’s a pretty good thriller from the small country of Denmark.

9. Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by Michael Lopp: Maybe a bit strange choice, but I really enjoyed reading this. I didn’t know Lopp’s blog Rands in Repose before I picked up the book. Though the book is intended for software managers it really also is a good read for everyone in the software business who’s not a manager and would like to know about the many, many problems a manager might face when having to deal with these strange creatures called software developers. It’s a quick and fun read and highly enjoyable.

8. Light Boxes by Shane Jones: I read this in about one day, which is understandable considering that the book is pretty short with even shorter chapters. It is also strange and I wouldn’t swear that I understood all of it. But then again there might not be anything to understand. If you want a summary, it’s a modern fable about a village where flight has been forbidden since the village has been taken by the mean and cold month of February. Yeah. Huh? You gotta read it, I guess.

7. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers: I will read anything by Dave Eggers, I think. Anything. I just love him so much and I love most of what he writes (his short story collection wasn’t that amazing, though). Zeitoun is a non-fiction story about the family of the protagonist Zeitoun who are caught both in the middle and in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. The book is just amazing on so many levels that I wouldn’t know where to start.

6. Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist: Again with the Scandinavians. And again I got this for my husband, not really remembering what I had read about it. It’s hard to describe, but it ultimately is a vampire story, but it might also be a sociocritical drama. Or a crime story. Or a horror story. Not sure. we both liked it so much that we also got the movie (pretty good as well). (And my husband made it all the way through the book, although vampires really aren’t his things. Or so he says.)

5. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane: I have yet to see the movie which is supposedly awesome, but the book is awesome as well. So there. I might have decided to rather read the book than watch the movie, because movies scare me easily and the trailer looked like I would be hiding my eyes behind something for about half of the duration of the movie. So, does anybody still need to know a summary of the story. Detective story in a strange asylum for the mentally ill on a spooky island. There’s your summary. Now you just need to read it.

4. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood: Apparently I dig post-apocalyptic settings. I didn’t realize halfway through the book that this was the setup to Oryx and Crake but to my defense I would like to add that it’s been three or four years since I’ve read that one. There’s just so much post-apocalypse and dystopy and science-fiction and awesome weird stuff in here, there’s no way I couldn’t enjoy this immensely. That reminds me that I wanted to re-read Oryx and Crake.

3. Perdido Street Station by China Miéville: Yeah. Miéville. He can name his cities whatever he wants, I still see some messed-up version of an upside-down London there. This is one of these books where there’s nearly too much stuff in there and too many characters to keep track of. You also have to get through about 400 pages before you actually get a glimpse of where the story is going. Not Miéville’s best one (though apparently one of his most famous ones), but still pretty good.

2. Anathem by Neal Stephenson: Might be my favorite Neal Stephenson book, if only for the strange way he manages to create a world in which scientists live in seclusion like monks, while the technology is seen for the common people. Plus, a book which has its own glossary can’t really be bad, can it? You have to excuse my lack of better summary, because there’s a) too much going on in a Neal Stephenson book and b) it’s been almost a year since I read it. It’s a Neal Stephenson book. It’s pretty terrific science fiction. It’s Anathem. Do you need any more?

1. The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway: Oh my god, what an amazing book. And it had everything. Everything. Like science fiction. And strange wars. And drama. And story twist that actually were unexpected. And the scene with the sheep. I LOVE the sheep. This book is amazingly fantastic and funny and sad and full of surprises and… did I mention amazing? This was by far the best book I read and there was never a question about it. In fact I might want to read it again soon. If just for the sheep.

So, that was it. I’ll give you the other categories soon. But don’t expect too much, since I have a limited list of books to pick from this year. As long as you pick up The Gone-Away World, all is fine by me, though.

American Idol and Its New Judgery

My husband and I started to watch American Idol again yesterday. We were unsure whether to tune in after Simon Cowell left, but we gave it a shot.

I must admit that we were pretty impressed with the way it worked. While we both miss Simon a bit, both Steven Tyler and Jennifer Lopez work extremely well as jury members and Randy seems pretty content on Simon’s seat. I never really missed Paula abdul after she left and Kara was getting on my nerves for a couple of seasons now. I liked Ellen a lot as a person, but unfortunately she didn’t really have anything remotely relevant to say.

I was initially surprised by the choice of the new judges, actually I was unimpressed if not mildly disappointed. Season 9 started with guest judges for each audition and I particularly loved Neil Patrick Harris and Kristin Chenoweth and hoped that either one if not both of them would be considered as a permanent judges. On the other hand, who knows how busy they are with their other projects, so they might be a thousand reasons why they are not sitting in a judge’s chair now.

It doesn’t matter so much now, because as I said, both my husband and I were pleasantly surprised by the new judgery. A few things I noticed though and then we’ll wait and see how the rest of the season turns out.

1. It seemed like they put through a lot more people than in the seasons before. There were a couple of people who I think wouldn’t have made it past Simon Cowell’s approvement, sometimes for good reason. I’d write this off as the new guys trying to settle down in their new role and am not particularly unhappy with it.

2. On the plus side I noticed that there’s no more „A million billion percent yes!“ anymore. I didn’t notice how much this had bugged me until it was simply gone this season. Mostly it’s just „I say yes!“ and we’re done with it. Although I agree that Steven Tyler needs a new word for beautiful somewhen soon.

Mostly I’m glad that the departure of Simon Cowell didn’t ruin AI for us. So that’s something and we’ll see how the rest of the season will go.