Mid-December Grab Bag

I don't have a real topic today. I haven't been compelled to blog much these last few weeks. Maybe it's just me subconsciously getting into holiday vegetation mode or perhaps it's my general torpor -- lack of exercise, lack of sleep, you know the deal. Anyway, there are a number of things keeping me interested enough in my own life to write about, so here it is from the top.

I am reading a lot. Now I enjoy the printed word as much as anyone, but never this much. I'm reading 4 books at the moment, with a 5th on the way care of Mr. Postman and Amazon.ca. I don't think I've concurrently read 4 books before, but it's kinda fun to swap one out and resume reading another. It keeps things fresh.

First up is William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I've been picking away at this one for months now and I've reached that nasty stopping point of dwindling interest. There's only about 50 more pages to go, but it's sort of lost its magic for me. It is very much vintage Gibson, where there are some interesting ideas at play, but the general storyline just seems like 'much ado about nothing'. It's a similar experience to reading Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties. Pattern Recognition gets credit for being Gibson's easiest read to date and the protagonist-guru this time is a woman, but the man still loves describing EVERYTHING. This normally wouldn't be a problem if he would not rehash the same jargon and metaphors over and over again. After awhile, his meticulous descriptions of things starts coming across as filler prose.

When I started to feel creatively inspired again a month ago, I picked up Problem Solved, by Michael Johnson, from my local Chapters. This is a textbook which surveys common design and advertising problems through out the last century. I'm only two chapters in and I am quite impressed with the information presented so far. The author tries to cover a lot of ground, so I don't expect to be getting the nitty-gritty of the design process but instead the larger brush strokes behind the trends we've seen in the world of advertising. I didn't want to get another web/graphic design "how-to" or something that was too specific to my own line of work, so Problem Solved fit the bill perfectly. It approaches creative design with a broad enough perspective so that almost anyone who works in design could get something out of it.

As mentioned in a previous post, I've also been reading Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami. I'm about 1/3 a way through this short story collection and I have to say I am fairly underwhelmed. Some reviews have warned that Murakami's writing quality peaks in the latter stories, so I'm holding out for the bigger payoff. So far, his stories have been well-written and easy to read, but strangely boring. He manages to infuse all his stories with this strange dream-like quality, which makes you forget that his characters a little lifeless and have unclear motivations. It may also distract you from his sometimes overwrought descriptions and metaphors that don't quite hit the mark, not to mention the abrupt, open-ended conclusions that leave far too much to the reader's imagination. Murakami also has a habit of telegraphing every subtlety through exposition, causing large chunks of his prose to seem redundant and simplistic. Yet... I am compelled to read on. Despite my complaints, the writing has a graceful, simplistic charm to it and some of the stories contain a certain emotional calmness that is hard to describe. Murakami also indulges in some magic realism, which to his credit, works wonderfully in a couple of his stories.

The 4th book I have on the go is also the most technical. It's DOM Scripting, by Jeremy Keith. This is basically a primer on modern Javascript programming geared for the non-programmer. In my 5-6 years of web design, I've always just sort of "gotten by" with knowing very basic Javascript and never put in the time to fully understand the Document Object Model. Well, Keith's book has been lauded by the web design glitterati as THE primer to get you up to speed on writing Javascript for our modern, web standards-obsessed world. I am roaring through the
review chapter on Javascript syntax and cannot wait to dive into the tutorials. I may finally get a handle on this elusive skill after all.

Well, it looks like this post actually had some focus. There isn't much more to report, I suppose, mainly because my mind is swinging back into getting some work done in the office. Oh, yes, the office. We moved into our new digs a couple weeks back. I've been adjusting very well. I now have my own brightly lit room which I share with our Russian contract programmer. We are situated within a grim industrial complex sadly, butI have a decent view of some trees and the main thoroughfare here in the 'burbs. The office space is about 5x larger than our old place. We actually have a full kitchen, a playroom which houses a TV and Gamecube (and soon to be adding our newly acquired Playstation 3) and some extra rooms that we plan on renting out to other small businesses. One of my bosses has brought in her swank Starbucks espresso machine which I now use to make myself a white chocolate or vanilla latte every morning. Yeah, things could be a lot worse, work-wise.

But I digress. I've been writing for over half and hour and now my lunch break is approaching. Maybe I should get some work done?