Gray Wolf Blog

Clara Rinker is back and the bodies are falling left and right.

Mortal Prey

This book is more relevant for large companies with large budgets. Covers all types of events, where I was looking for more trade show specific information.

The Event Marketing Handbook : Beyond Logistics and Planning

A serial killer is loose and Davenport is on the case. Not my favorite genre but hard to put down, nonetheless.

Chosen Prey

Lucas hits the fashion scene and tries to manage three women vying for his attention. Mike Hammer never had it so good.

Easy Prey

Interesting case studies from ten different companies ranging from the Grateful Dead to EMC. Some decent food for thought. Boston Beer story was illuminating. I never knew Sam Adams was made in contract batches at other breweries.

Radical Marketing: From Harvard to Harley, Lessons from Ten That Broke the Rules and Made It Big

This is a useful function for downloading files. I use it a lot when downloading files from protected directories.

1. Public Shared Function DownloadFile( _
2. ByVal Server As HttpServerUtility, _
3. ByVal Response As HttpResponse, _
4. ByVal strFileName As String) As Boolean
5.  
6. Const adTypeBinary = 1
7. Dim strSql As String
8. Dim strFilePath, strFileSize, strDownloadFileName, strFileType As String
9. Dim objFileInfo As FileInfo
10.  
11. Download this code: Download.txt

RegEx can be a bit complex, but it sure can do a lot with just a few params. This function will strip all html tags in a string and return the enclosed data. | is the default delimiter.

1. Public Shared Function RemoveHTMLTags( _
2. ByVal strText As String, _
3. Optional ByVal strDelimiter As String = "|") _
4. As String
5.  
6. Return Regex.Replace(strText, "<(.|\n)+?>", strDelimiter)
7. End Function
8.  
9. strData = RemoveHTMLTags("<td>1</td><td>2</td><td>3</td>")
10.  
11. strData equals "1|2|3"
12. Download this code: RemoveHTMLTags.txt

Lucas keeps on going. Sandford manages to give glimpses of Davenport’s more human side without making that the focus of the book. There is something to Sandford’s cadence and pace that makes these books hard to put down (IMHO).

Sudden Prey

Secret Prey (Prey Series)

Sandford doesn’t hold back and this book can make you flinch at times. Looking forward to reading all I can get my hands on. This guy can write.

Mind Prey

One of the most difficult things about Holocaust literature is that the experiences are so brutal as to convey a sense of disbelief. Oswald Rufeisen was a Jewish boy who was able to pass as a Christian and to survive through a combination of luck and smarts. Because he could speak fluent German, he ended up working as an interpreter for the German police and the Belorussian collaborators in 1942 in the city of Mir.

He used his position to help notify nearby villages that they were targeted for liquidation. When he helped orchestrate the escape of over 300 people from the Mir ghetto, his cover was blown. He managed to escape and ended up hiding in the monastery that was right next to the police station. He was then forced to flee into the forests where he was almost executed by the partisans, until people he saved came forward to vouch for him.

By this time he had converted to Christianity. After the war, he became a monk, moved to Haifa and met with the pope. Really interesting discussions on how his conversion was received by others in his family and on his thoughts regarding the evolution of Christianity and its alignment with the Roman Empire.

In the Lion’s Den: The Life of Oswald Rufeisen

Detailed account of OSS activities directed towards infiltrating agents into Germany. Efforts had mixed results. Greatest success appeared to come from one German civilian who had access to secret documents and provided them to the OSS. Interesting discussion on the counterfeiting and forging process as well as the plane based radio communication with agents on the ground.

Piercing the Reich: The penetration of Nazi Germany by American secret agents during World War II

I found the “No Comments” link on my WordPress site to be a bit annoying. Disabling comments is easy enough under Options / Discussion, but I wanted to remove the actual links from the page.

This proved pretty easy. You just need to edit comments.php and index .php and comment out the following line:

comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »');


Third in the Davenport series. A few surprises, not all of them pleasant. Updated intro by author which sheds some light on his writing habits. Some of the drug descriptions go a little overboard, but I didn’t find myself skimming.

Eyes of Prey

Pulled this off the library bookshelf and the first couple pages hooked me. Deviates from standard cop/murder genre by opening with the murder from the omniscient narrator’s perspective. Sandford doesn’t seem to get hung up on his success and need to prove just how clever he is. Looking forward to reading the entire Davenport series.

Certain Prey