My Life in MiddleMarch

About Maggie's house - "ight linens on one's table while alive and the right comestibles at one's funeral when dead.

loss of one parent .. regarded as a misfortune, but whose loss of two looks like carelessness

Successful Metabook.

You must have come across questions like if you could dine with one author, who would it be? Interspersing an Eliot's creation and her thoughts, author Rebecca Mead has brought Eliot almost alive.

A book on a book is hard to read if you havent read the book on which it is based. Despite that in-built slope, author Rebecca Mead hooks the reader into three yarns of lives of the George Eliot's Characters, George Eliot's and her own life. Bringing the writer, her fiction and the reader self onto a single page, the author has successfully elevated the fictional characters to real life likeness, bridged the chasm between the writer and reader(self) through the common instrument of life and its vagaries.

In high school, we had a small chapter called 'Maggie cuts her hair' from 'Mill on the Floss'.

Seven thousand ways to listen

Poetry lessons from Excel

1.  Flash fill
Excel is smart enough to recognize the pattens in columns and fill them in the remaining columns.
Your poems have a pattern. Tease it out.

2.  Daffodils by Wordsworth happens to be my introduction to the word pensive. Tabulate the literary ironies in your poetic life.

Best New Poets 2013

Best New Poets 2013
Fludde
Taker of the Temperature
An Apology 
Just Try
Benjamin Sutton, “from Footnotes on the City”
Cori A. Winrock, “Débridement” 

Our yard

has a Gold Medal Rose.

It also has an odd huge rose. I looked at the tag, it said 35-40 petals. And then I saw Dolly Parton. It figures.

Plant Therapy

This dainty plant on the pedestal is so relaxing. It is in a tea cup style container. the tiny container simplifies the the image of the plant and exalts the leaves.

Edible

Girl meets Bug

100 Works of Art that will define our Age

Consumed

Mahagreen Farms
Sustainable Food for a finite planet
C4 chlorophyll corn

The Genious of Japanese Carpentry

Woodworking

What the Hell is Justice?

In books on people, it must be quite a task for the author to portray the activities of the subject. The way Paul Hoffman has done it of the trials of criminal lawyer Jack Everstoff, reminds me of jockey Edgar Prado melding with Barbaro.

Hoffman every now and then tells, how things would be different in a trial if it were handled by defense lawyers.

Without fail, for each of the case about to be narrated, Hoffman explains why as a reader should we find it interesting. What is Plea bargaining? How is an appellate process different?

It can be a little unsettling if you come to think of defence and justice.

June 7, 2009

Alphabet Workshop

I have seen Alphabet House by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace, an alphabet book with house-hold objects that start with the same letter on a page. So what is different about this book? Its best put in the book description

"Steampunk is fun!
Steampunk is imaginative!
It's making something new out of something old.
It's dressing up in clothing from long ago.
It's inventing machines out of hardware and found objects.
It's creating a make-believe world!"

If you had to tell the behind the scenes workings of alphabets or their nativity story, the Workshop is a good place. The big pictures of the alphabets are fun to watch and decipher what they are made of.
I like the F faucet , J with the trumpet design in it. My daughter keeps asking for the hickory-dickory dock clock in G. while you are on a page identifying the objects that begin with that letter, you can introduce the baby to other interesting objects too.
The mice are cute with their antics.
The book has an artistic quality to it with its mix and match style.

Flamingo Sunset

A Flamingo is an exotic bird. It is similar to other birds in nesting but its nest is not in a tree nor made of leaves and twigs. This beautiful book with its spectacular pictures of colonies of flamingos shows the life-cycle of the bird.
The lines with simple words and trailing lone sentences at the bottom of the page add to the story without being intrusive .

To Big Data or Not

I heard about Hadoop at a party. So yes Big data is discussed at cocktail parties. Have you ever tired of clicking on the people you know on LinkedIn. That feature is possible with the analytics from Big Data. You must have read about how often retailers change prices. All that processing uses Big Data.
Without scaring the readers about It, author Thomas H Davenport introduces the readers to the industries that will be transformed by Big Data, How should managers decide if they need to embrace Big Data. The author intends the books for executives with a ‘To Big Data or not’ dilemma but any reader with inquisitiveness about what is Big Data, who can make sense of it will find the book a good introduction to the companies already on the track with new job profiles of Chief Data Officer.
The author starts with a disbeliever, not sold stance. It is good to share the transformation path but as a reader I felt that the captain wasn’t sure if we should be going on the Big Data journey for a little while in the intro.

Salesforce CRM: The Definitive Admin Handbook Second Edition

This Salesforce CRM: The Definitive Admin Handbook Second Edition book is helpful in understanding the options available to an administrator but is not enough to prepare for the certification.