Some ideas for 2021, books to read or to get, stuff to plant, exercise to do

Here are just some ideas of what I would like to do in 2021, these are all non professional goals if you will

Run 800 miles

I ran 800.3 miles last year, this should be easily doable, it's about 4 miles 4 times a week

Read 50 books

Last year I read 60 books.. I assume at some point, I will be back in the office two times a day or so, this will maybe bump it down to 50 books from 60 books

Books in the queue

These are  books I or my kids already own, some of these I have gifted to them this Christmas season (Masters of Doom, 1984, Brave New World, Infinite Jest, Pirate Latitudes)

I have not read any of these except for 1984 and Brave New World, I will re-read those, it's been 20 years or more since I last read those

Here is a picture of some of these books.....

Here is the full list, the titles link to Amazon so you can read the reviews there

• Hyperion by Dan Simmons
• The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
• The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons
• Endymion by Dan Simmons
• Philip and Alexander Kings and Conquerors by Adrian Goldsworthy
• The Prince by Macchiavelli  
• The Dutch Overseas Empire by Pieter C. Emmer, Jos J.L. Gommans
• 1776: The riveting story of George Washington by David McCullough
• The Great Bridge by David McCullough
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy by Michael Lewis
• The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton  
• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith 
• The Killer Angels: The Classic Novel of the Civil War Paperback by Michael Shaara 
• The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley
• How Computers Really Work A Hands-On Guide to the Inner Workings of the Machine by Matthew Justice
• Can't Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop's Blockbuster Year by Michaelangelo Matos
• Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula by Bram Stoker , Valdimar Ásmundsson, et al
• Black Box Thinking The Surprising Truth About Success by Matthew Syed
• Life on Mars: What to Know Before We Go by David Weintraub
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
• Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton 
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• 100 Things Millionaires Do Little Lessons in Creating Wealth by Nigel Cumberland
• Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson
• Where the Past Begins: Memory and Imagination by Amy Tan
• Gerald's Game by Stephen King
• If It Bleeds by Stephen King
• The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King
• The Dead Zone by Stephen King
• The Running Man by Stephen King
• Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner  
• SQL Server 2019 Revealed Including Big Data Clusters and Machine Learning by Bob Ward
• The Man In The High Castle by Philip K. Dick

18,300 pushups

Do about 100 pushups every other day.. this adds up to about 18,300 pushups for the whole year

10,000 in dividends

Last year I received 9551 in dividends, since companies increase the dividend payout usually every 4 quarters and since I reinvest them, I should be easily able to get 10K

300 Hours of Pluralsight watching

I plan to watch about 6 hours a week of Pluralsight content. About 1 hour at lunch time and then 1 hour over the weekend

Get 10 of these book in 2021

Get at least  10 9 books of the "wish list" below

I have heard about these from friends or family. I also might have heard about these books from the various podcasts I listen to

• The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz by Eric Larson
• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat
• The Lessons of History by Will Durant and Ariel Durant
• 1/1 The Prince by Macchiavelli  
• The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War by Peter Hart
• Hero with a 1000 faces by Joseph Campbell
• The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great by Steven Pressfield
• Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West by Tom Holland
• Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides
• Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne
• The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan
• Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary by Joe Jackson
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir by Haruki Murakami
• The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
• The Innocent Anthropologist : Notes from a Mud Hut by Nigel Barley
• Shogun: The Epic Novel of Japan by James Clavell
• Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
• Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
• The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 by John Toland
• Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway by Jonathan Parshall, Anthony Tully
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy 
• The End of October: A Novel by Lawrence Wright
• Change Agent by Daniel Suarez
• Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century by Barbara Tuchman
• Azure SQL Revealed: A Guide to the Cloud for SQL Server Professionals by Bob Ward

Plant all these peppers

We got the following seeds in December

The 3 packs on the left side are the Carolina Reaper, Trinidad Scorpion and Apocalypse Scorpion. These are some of the hottest peppers.... these things just look menacing, you can see they look spicy

Last year we planted 31 plants, you can those in the 2020 in Numbers... post

I am excited about the chocolate habaneros, those look pretty cool

Progress so far

Activity	Count	%
Pushups	370	2.02%
Run	22.17	2.77%
Pluralsight Hours Watched	2.13	0.711%
Books Read	1	2%
Dividends	$63.89	0.6389%

Done

Book Finished

Date    Title

-----    -------------------------------------------------------

Jan 3    St Petersburg

Pluralsight Course Finished

Date    Title

-----    -------------------------------------------------------

Jan 6    Optimizing Query Performance with Columnstore Indexes

2020 in Numbers...

I am glad 2020 ended and hopefully 2021 will be much better.  A couple of items on my list for this year got either postponed or will never happen.  I planned to go to the PASS Summit in Texas in 2020, that obviously didn't happen and it looks like it won't happen in the future either. PASS is no more :-(

Here are some numbers for 2020 that I put together looking at some sheets and journals

123,116
Calories burned running. I ran a little over 800 miles this year and burned what seems like a lot of calories. But since we are all home, the wife and kids did a lot of baking, this evened out the calories :-)

13,930
Pushups.  I try to do 100 pushups every 2 or 3 days, this is the total for the year

9,551 
Dividends. This is the total amount of dividends I received this year. All of these have been reinvested. Until I retire, I am doing a reinvestment into the same security

800.3
Miles run. My goal was 800 and I stuck to it... It's nothing major, about 4 miles 4 times a week

300

Days since I was last in the office

I told my wife when the office is open again, you won't see me for a month :-)

60
The number of books I read

Since there is no commute, I had some more time to read this year, I read about 5 books per month

Some of the book I read

Will have my 5 favorite books after the numbers list

40

Longest bike ride. 

Did this bike ride with my oldest son. We left around 6:40 AM because it went up to 95 degrees that day. I Also managed to get a flat tire 30 miles in :-(

After we came home we just sat on the couch for the rest of the day

31 

Number of pepper plants planted

We planted 31 spicy pepper plants. We picked a lot of the peppers, gave away a bunch, made pepper flakes etc etc

Here are some pics

The first one is the ghost pepper

11

Seasons of shows I watched and finished with my wife

Narcos Mexico II

Mr Robot I

Mr Robot II

Mr Robot III

Mr Robot IV

The Crown I

Succession I

Succession II

Succession III

Ozark III

Curb Your Enthusiasm X

0

Number of tables I dropped on the production database server

Best item purchased

Since I am working from home constantly, I decided to invest in a universal docking station. We got new laptops from work, they only come with 2 USB ports, and of course these are right next to the HDMI port. Using this USB docking station makes live so much easier

The one I picked is the Hiearcool USB C Hub,USB-C Laptop Docking Station,11 in 1 Triple Display Type C Adapter Compatiable for MacBook and Windows(2HDMI VGA PD3.0 SD TF Card Reader Gigabit Ethernet 4USB Ports)

And here is what it looks like, I included a mouse for scale (sorry didn't have a banana)

As you can see it comes with a nice pouch, it's really small and fits easily in your bag.

Best 5 books

Here are my favorite 5 books I read last year, I did not include books I re-read like The Stand and Fellowship of the ring

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg 

This is even more relevant now after the SolarWind hack

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow 

I admit I did not know much about Hamilton, this was recommended by my brother in law. This is a fantastic book about a man who was part of the beginnings of the US

The Terror by Dan Simmons

I watched the show 2 years ago on AMC, the show is really good... but the book is even better

Permutation City by Greg Egan

Will this be us in 100 years?

The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles Mann

There are two ways to go about things... either conserve.. or use technology to fix things.....

That's it for 2020......  I will be back in a couple of days to show my list of things for 2021....

Have a good 2021

Books I read in 2015

This year I read 20 books. Ten of these books were fiction and ten were non-fiction. The Game of Thrones books were a re-read, I already read book 4 and 5 of this series before..

Here  are all the books I read in 2015

A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire) by George R. R. Martin
The most boring book of the series, not much happens, this is also the reason HBO decided to combine book 4 and 5 into one season.

A Feast for Crows: A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) by George R.R. Martin
This is better than book 4, but it's not even close to book 3.

The Confident Speaker: Beat Your Nerves and Communicate at Your Best in Any Situation by Harrison Monarth
Got this from work, this book is pretty good, I used some of the techniques from this book to help me prepare for some presentations I had to give.


House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

The weirdest book I have ever read
One part of this book is about a house which is always changing and somehow the measurements inside are larger  than the outside measurements. There is are video recordings of what happens inside the house to the Navidson family as well as some people who are trying to help. The other part of this book is about Johnny Truant who discovers the manuscript written by Zampanò about the videos mentioned earlier, the Navidson record. I don't want to give you more info about the story, this way I won't spoil anything for you
This book has pages with text in circles, braille, upside down text, mirrored text and much more. Here is also a short video with some of the weirder pages of the book

There are also hidden messages in the book, the word house is always colored blue, some of the references are real, some are made up



To the Last Man: A Novel of the First World War by Jeff Shaara
This is a historical fiction book focusing on World War I. This book is very very good, I would recommend this to anyone. A big part of the book deals with air warfare, you will learn a lot about Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen and Raoul Lufberry. Another thing you will learn when reading this book is how the soldiers experienced trench warfare.

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender
This book is different than Isaacson book, plenty of quotes and anecdotes that have not been seen before, this book was also more focused on Steve Job's growth over the years.

George Washington's Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution by Brian Kilmeade
Learned a lot from this book, for someone who grew up in the Netherlands, this stuff is not taught in school.

Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain by Steven D. Levitt
Similar to freakonomins

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance
The Edison/Tesla of our time.... This book tells you how Musk grew up, started a bunch of companies and finally wants to be the first human who will travel to Mars. very fascinating character.


Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson
Excellent book, a non-fiction book that reads like a novel, I couldn't put it down. Amazon's best book of the month for March 2015. Here are just some highlights of what reviewers had to say.

Larson is one of the modern masters of popular narrative nonfiction...a resourceful reporter and a subtle stylist who understands the tricky art of Edward Scissorhands-ing narrative strands into a pleasing story...An entertaining book about a great subject, and it will do much to make this seismic event resonate for new generations of readers."
—The New York Times Book Review

"Larson is an old hand at treating nonfiction like high drama...He knows how to pick details that have maximum soapy potential and then churn them down until they foam [and] has an eye for haunting, unexploited detail."
—The New York Times

"In his gripping new examination of the last days of what was then the fastest cruise ship in the world, Larson brings the past stingingly alive...He draws upon telegrams, war logs, love letters, and survivor depositions to provide the intriguing details, things I didn't know I wanted to know...Thrilling, dramatic and powerful."
—NPR

"This enthralling and richly detailed account demonstrates that there was far more going on beneath the surface than is generally known...Larson's account [of the Lusitania's sinking] is the most lucid and suspenseful yet written, and he finds genuine emotional power in the unlucky confluences of forces, 'large and achingly small,' that set the stage for the ship's agonizing final moments."
—The Washington Post

"Utterly engrossing...Expertly ratcheting up the tension...Larson puts us on board with these people; it's page-turning history, breathing with life."
—The Seattle Times

"Larson has a gift for transforming historical re-creations into popular recreations, and Dead Wake is no exception...[He] provides first-rate suspense, a remarkable achievement given that we already know how this is going to turn out...The tension, in the reader's easy chair, is unbearable..."
—The Boston Globe

Finders Keepers: A Novel by Stephen King
Typical Stephen King story, you can't go wrong with Stephen King.

The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War I by Barbara W. Tuchman
Very good book about World War I, this book focuses on the first month of the conflict.

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough
Loved this book, anyone who travels by plane should read this book, you will appreciate what these two guys accomplished pretty much by themselves

Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson
Very interesting book, in my opinion way too long, Neal Stephenson could have cut the book in half and still make a very compelling story. I liked the story a lot, the moon breaks apart and there is only a certain time frame in which to save humanity.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson
Another book I enjoyed a lot. The most interesting part of the book for me was that you could see what life must have been in Chicago during the time period the book takes place in. The first time we had tall buildings, electricity and light bulbs, the first Ferris wheel. This book really contains two stories, one about the world fair, the other about a mass murdered.

Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute by Emma Craigie
Was disapointed in this book because it also covered a bunch of stuff that happened at other time...but I think if this wasn't done, then the book would have been 50 pages or so. Some interesting facts about what happened in the bunker and what it must have been like for the people inside that bunker.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
An interesting thriller set in England, this would be a good book to read on the beach or on your commute.


Robopocalypse: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) by Daniel H. Wilson
This was pretty good, the robots came alive and decided to eliminate most of the humans. Sounds similar to The Terminator and Skynet but it's nothing like it.

Robogenesis by Daniel H. Wilson
Follows the story of Robopocalypse but I was getting bored towards the end

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
Probably my favorite book of the year, Moby Dick was based on this disaster. An excellent story about tragedy and survival at sea. I didn't know much about whaling or whale oil, after reading this book I can only appreciate what a tough job that must have been.


And here are the 5 books I like the most from this list of 20 books

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance
To the Last Man: A Novel of the First World War by Jeff Shaara
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson
The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

My 2016 new year's resolutions

I decided to put some of my new year's resolutions down in a post. These are non professional goals, here is what my goals are

Learn a new language

I want to learn a new language in 2016. I already know Croatian and Dutch, in addition to those I can understand most of German, I also have some knowledge of Italian and Spanish. The more languages you know, the easier it is to learn another language. To make it more difficult for me, I am picking a non European language. I decided to try to learn Chinese this year. 

When I say learn, what I mean is that I must be able to communicate with a person in Chinese as well as being able to watch a movie in Chinese while understanding 80% of the movie. By Chinese, I mean Mandarin, it would be really funny if I picked a movie in Cantonese and then couldn't understand anything. 

I work with a bunch of people from China and Taiwan, so I can always check with them to see if I am pronouncing words correctly.

If learning the Chinese language goes well, I want to then learn these 4 languages the next 4 years following 2016: Greek, Japanese, Portuguese, Korean. 

Read 30 books

In 2015, I read 20 books, this year I want to read 30 books. I want 5 of those books to deal with American history, I have been living in the US for 20+ years and most of the history books I read were about European history or World War i and World War II history. I also want to read more technical books, so 6 of those books should be technical.

Do a handstand, walk 30 feet on my hands

I can barely hold a handstand for 2 seconds, this year, I want to try to improve on that. My goal is to be able to do a handstand and hold it for 30 seconds. I also want to be able to walk 30 feet on my hands.

Improve on lifts

I would like to be be able to bench press 200 pounds, squat 300 pounds and deadlift 400 pounds by the end of the year. All of the lifts should be raw.

Blog more

I want to write 100 blog posts in 2016, this should not be that difficult, it is only 2 fricking posts per week, but sometimes I don't write anything for 6 months straight. In 2016 this will change, one thing that will make this easier is I will document the progress of my goals, this will be mostly focused on my progress learning the Chinese language.

So there you have it, that is my list, seems very doable and I will keep you and me posted on the progress of these lofty goals.......

The curse and blessing of an hour long commute

At this time I live about 6 miles from where I work, this is of course nice because I can be home in 10 minutes. There was a time when I used to commute from Princeton to New York City. I used to take the Amtrak (clocker) or the NJ Transit express train. During my commuting days I would read about 60 books in a year. After I found work in Princeton the number of books I would read in a year would drop dramatically. There was also another factor involved…twins….we welcomed a set of twins in 2006 and that was pretty much the end of me reading anything for pleasure. Besides the twins we already had another child who was 2 years when the twins were born. Here is a picture of them from last Christmas: http://www.flickr.com/photos/denisgobo/3101785602/in/set-72157600873902525/

Now that the oldest kid is almost 6 and the twins are 3.5 years old it is getting a little easier to read. This year I read about 10 – 15 books, most books these days I get in audio format. The advantage of an audio format is that you can listen to the book where you would usually not be able to read the book. I find it is very difficult for me to read a book in a noisy environment, when listening to an audio book I don’t have this problem. Some audio books are also read by professionals and it makes the book so much better than a paper edition.

So I do miss my commuting days for the reason mentioned above but I do not miss it when a train breaks down in front of us, if there is a brush fire or when a major blackout happens like the Northeast Blackout of 2003. Yes I survived that one but didn’t take the train home till 4AM the next morning. On the Amtrak trains there was this funny conductor named Marvin who would say when there was a problem with the train that Amtrak guaranteed same day service.

During the last week of this year I will post a list of all the books I read this year and also a list of the books that I hope to read next year. At this moment I am reading House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street. This is a really interesting book and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to relive the crash of 2008. I also has the most F-Bombs in any book I read so far...kinda like the scarface of books :-)

Into the wild a great movie

I was flipping channels on the tv (this is something every man should do to annoy his wife) and saw that into the wild just started on showtime. I read the brief description and decided to watch 10 minutes or so to see if it is any good. My wife and I loved this movie; we were not going to watch the whole thing because it was getting late but of course we couldn’t just go to bed without watching the end. Of course we paid the price the next morning when the kids got up before 6.

The movie has a 8.2 rating on IMDB so that is pretty good.This movie is based on the book Into the Wild written by the author of Into Thin Air John Krakauer

Here is what the movie is about, I made only the first sentence visible because I don’t want to spoil it for you, you can highlight the text to make it visible.

After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature. Krakauer, a contributing editor to Outside and Men's Journal, retraces McCandless's ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer. Krakauer also draws parallels to his own reckless youthful exploit in 1977 when he climbed Devils Thumb, a mountain on the Alaska-British Columbia border, partly as a symbolic act of rebellion against his autocratic father. In a moving narrative, Krakauer probes the mystery of McCandless's death, which he attributes to logistical blunders and to accidental poisoning from eating toxic seed pods

Now that I saw the movie I want to read the book……don’t tell my wife I know, but something tells me that I will get the book as part of my father’s day gift this Sunday.

If you have showtime you can see when it will be on again here http://www.sho.com/site/schedules/product.do?episodeid=133208&seriesid=0&seasonid=0

Passive house and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer

I have just finished Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman, it was a very interesting book. Today the NY Times has an article titled No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in 'Passive Houses'

From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.

In Berthold Kaufmann’s home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house” and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer.

I wonder how that would work in Princeton where I live, we sometimes get 100 degrees Fahrenheit and 95% humidity in the middle of the summer. Could that house cool itself in that kind of heat? I doubt it.

All the interviews I did with the SQL legends

Yesterday in the Christmas Came Early This Year post I linked to an interview I did with Itzik Ben-Gan, today I decided to link to all the interviews I did

The first interview I did was with the late Ken Henderson, I owe so much to Ken and his Guru's Guide to SQL books, they made me a much better developer. I was a technical reviewer for the 2nd edition of his Guru guide to SQL book and I just hope that it will be published some time...
An Interview With Ken Henderson About The Forthcoming Book SQL Server 2005 Practical Troubleshooting: The Database Engine

Say all you want about Celko and his behaviour in the newsgroups, he does write some pretty good books
Interview With Joe Celko About The Forthcoming Book Thinking In Sets

Probably one of my favorite interviews
Interview With SQL Server MVP Louis Davidson: Author Of Pro SQL Server 2005 Database Design and Optimization

Inside SQL Server is a book every SQL Developer should have, it was an honor to interview SQL Goddess Kalen
Interview With Kalen Delaney About Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Query Tuning and Optimization

Adam's book is filled with really good advice, I keep coming back to this book all the time
Interview with Adam Machanic Author Of Expert SQL Server 2005 Development

If T-SQL is your thing then there is no one better that Itzik, his books will open your eyes to the world of T-SQL
Interview With Itzik Ben-Gan Author Of Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: T-SQL Querying

A nice interview about refactoring SQL applications
Interview With Stéphane Faroult About Refactoring SQL Applications

I am a fan of Scott's column in Dr Dobbs and was very excited he wanted to do an interview
Database Refactoring Interview With Scott W. Ambler

Who doesn't know Erland? His curse and blessing of dynamic SQL is a must read
Interview With Erland Sommarskog About SQL Server and Transact SQL

Jamie is a real SSIS guru and I was glad he wanted to do this interview
Interview With SSIS Guru Jamie Thomson

My second interview with Louis
Interview With Louis Davidson Author of Pro SQL Server 2008 Relational Database Design and Implementation

Christmas Came Early This Year

This just arrived in the mail.


A big thanks to Itzik Ben-Gan. I will put up a review in a week or so.
Now I have a big problem, should I watch the season finale of Californication or should I start beginning to read Microsoft® SQL Server 2008 T-SQL Fundamentals?

I will not tell you what I will do. I interviewed Itzik a while back about his SQL Server 2005 book, you can read that interview here: Interview With Itzik Ben-Gan Author Of Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: T-SQL Querying

How many movies do you know that are as good as the book?

How many movies do you know that are as good as the book? I can rattle of a humongous list of movies that are really bad but the book was excellent. Here are a couple of examples
Stephen King: The Stand, IT, Salem’s Lot
Michael Crichton: Sphere, Timeline, Congo

I always wonder how they manage to screw up so badly when making a movie from a book. There are times when a movie should not be made from a book. When I read Cold Mountain and then later I found out they made a movie I thought to myself that it has to be one of the most boring movies ever. I didn’t see the movie but cannot image it being any good, there really is nothing in the book that should make it to the screen. I can only assume that they added some stuff to make it watchable.

The Joy Luck Club
One movie which is as good as the book is the Joy Luck Club; this book is about four Chinese American immigrant families. It is a very interesting book showing you that the parents haven’t really assimilated and that the children are losing their heritage.

The Godfather
This is an awesome book and the movie is probably even better (I like The Godfather II better than the original).

Lord Of The Rings
Yes purist will say that there are whole chapters missing in the movies but I don’t care the LOTR trilogy is probably my favorite of all the movies I own. Of course you need to have the Extended Editions of these movies because 3 hours per movie is not merely enough.


Here are a bunch of books that I really like and I hope that someone makes some kickass movies out of them.
The Cobra Event
The Hot Zone
Prey
Digital Fortress
Angels And Demons
Cryptonomicon
Neither Here Nor There, Travels In Europe
Walk In the Woods