Friday, November 17, 2006

Reading Update

Unfortunately, it looks like the Permian post is delayed again. No later than Wednesday, that's for sure. I have a coworker that I am helping with their GPFS 3.1 testbed that's taking a little longer than planned. These things happen and we can't always anticipate them. Wednesday ought to be pretty quite though, so I should be able to get to it then.

I have been reading two books recently. One at home. One while I worked out and had quiet times at work or in places that lugging the first book around wouldn't be so advantageous. The first book, the great tome, was Architectural Working Drawings and the second was Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages. I am pleased with both of them.

Architectural Working Drawings was excellent. If you want a good guide on how to do working drawings, this is really it. Caution, you do need to have had at least a little bit of a drafting background to read this one. This isn't about the history of drafting. This isn't about the history of drafting, but a step by step, sheet by sheet instruction on how to do this. It isn't a textbook with quizes at the end of each chapter either (Hooray!).

Frozen Earth is a good book. I can't say that it's a great book. The problem is that like so many science books that are published these days, far too much of it is spent on writing about the history of the theory of ice ages. While this was fine for me because I knew only a touch of it - none at all about Croll and some of the others - I was really hoping to read more about the ice age science than was encapsulated. I had a foul taste in my mouth after he talked about evolution and the ice ages: this is often a problem when experts step out of their area of expertise though. The major disppointment was when the topic of future ice ages was touched on. It was a VERY brief chapter at the end of the book. Very very disappointing.

Next up will be Foundation Design: Principles and Practices and In Search of Maya Sea Traders. I'll follow Traders with a book on Putin since I'll finish that before the book on Foundations.

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