I’ve read four of the Joe Pickett novels. Usually breaks down to three sections: Joe and his search for the killer, Joe and his family and Joe and the bureaucrats. I wouldn’t call the writing gripping, but it isn’t offensive. Easy to skim the parts you are not interested in. Good for a night when you just rather stay home.
A series of presentations from the Gettysburg conference for Lincoln’s 175th birthday. Many topics and contributors. A bit too academic in places.
The Historian’s Lincoln: Pseudohistory, Psychohistory, and History
A disappointing sophomore effort. Overall premise is weak with Reacher getting caught up in a kidnap of an FBI agent. Half the book deals with the FBI investigation effort to find the missing agent. Boring! On the plus side, it allowed for easy skimming.
I really was hoping that Lee Child would be different from the other “best seller” formulas of wowing the reader with an inundation of technical detail on weapons systems and “secret” practices. No luck. Last book I read by this author.
Money isn’t a sure bet, but it’s the closest to God that I’ve ever seen in the world.
Be always drunken. Nothing else matters. That is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
You can’t quantify reward. You can quantify risk.
We have to be continually jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
Be regular and orderly in your life so you may be violent and original in your work.
The first of the Jack Reacher series. Grabs you from the start. I don’t usually like the ex-military superman genre but this was ok. As you near the end, some twists seem forced but the writing is interesting enough to keep you involved.
ArticleDashboard.com is another big dog in the AD world. Hundreds of other sites use the AD software to run their own directories. Interface is easy to use.
| Directory: | ArticleDashboard.com |
| Interface: | Good - clean interface |
| Internal stats: | Excellent - Downloads, emailed, and rating |
| External stats: | High PR and Alexa |
| Review time: | Very Good - usually within 48 hours |
| Communication: | n/a - have not had any reason at this point |
| Account required: | Yes |
| Automation: | Yes - There are hundreds of sites using this software. Will post a list of the ones I have looked at. |
| Overall Rating: | Very Good |
| Personal Results: | 12 articles have resulted in 800+ downloads. Some traffic from links. |
The .Net Random class works well on its own, if you just need one random number. By default it uses the system time for the seed value. Where problems occur is when you need multiple random numbers inside a loop.
When I called Random.Next within the loop, it would always return the same number, as the seed value was always the same, even using the millisecond property of Now().
My solution was to multiply the Random seed (milliseconds) by the loop value which resolved the issue.
Public Shared Function GetRandomNumber( _ByVal iLowerBound As Integer, _ByVal iUpperBound As Integer, _Optional ByVal iSeedMultiplier As Integer = 1) As IntegerDim Random As New Random(Now.Millisecond * iSeedMultiplier)Return Random.Next(iLowerBound, iUpperBound + 1)End FunctionExample:For i = 1 To 5strKey = i.ToString & "|" & GetRandomNumber(1, 10, i).ToStringNextWeighing in at 600+ pages, this book has three separate sections: pre, during and post civil war. Provides a good deal of insight into Davis’ personality, but I was hoping for more information on his relationship with his western generals. Because so much of his and the confederate government papers went up in flames, there are definite gaps. Davis’ post war life was difficult and he endured a great deal of personal loss and tragedy.
Peace will not come until we have mastered both sex and war. And, to master war, we must study it with at least the diligence of Kinsey or Masters and Johnson. Every society has a blind spot, an area into which it has great difficulty looking. Today that blind spot is killing. A century ago it was sex.
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
In my opinion, ezinearticles.com is the best article directory. It has not been thrown together trying to capitalize on the AD craze. The gui is easy to use and has a nice template feature for the author signature. Stats are detailed and useful.
| Directory: | http://ezinearticles.com |
| Interface: | Excellent - clean, easy to use |
| Internal stats: | Excellent - detail, sorting, export |
| External stats: | Great PR, Alexa and site stats |
| Review time: | Excellent. Once you have submitted 5+ articles it will usually be within 24 hours and usually much sooner. |
| Communication: | Great. |
| Account required: | Yes. |
| Automation: | Possible, but probably not worth it. |
| Overall Rating: | Excellent. The best of the bunch. What all other ADs should use as a model. |
| Personal Results: | I have had very good results. EZ is always the top referring site and the articles get the most views. |
If we had to offer the briefest explanation of all the evil that men have wreaked upon themselves and upon the world since the beginning of time right up until tomorrow it would not be in the terms of man’s animal hereditary, his instinct and his evolution. It would be simply in the toll that his pretense of sanity takes as he tries to deny his true condition.
Religion springs from the collective belief in immortality; art from the personal consciousness of the individual.
Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it. And, once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.
Long Day’s Journey into Night
Who knows who might be the target of the well read man?
Fahrenheit 451
Death solves all problems. If there is no person, there is no problem.
