Reading List

With proper credit to my brother Alan, following is a list of books he recommended at my request when I started spending 4+ hours per week on an airplane. I've read a fair number of them and continue to work through it. Books I have read are in bold. Feel free to comment or give some other recommendations. And yes, I feel superior because I no longer read fiction (although I do feel slightly dumber for having read Glenn Beck's An Inconvenient Book).

Revolutionary Era

Mayflower (Philbrick)
The Founding Brothers (Ellis)
Benjamin Franklin: The First American (Brands)
Benjamin Franklin (Isaacson)
His Excellency (Ellis)
Washington’s Crossing (Fischer)
1776 (McCullough)
The Glorious Cause (Middlekauff)
John Adams (McCullough)
Alexander Hamilton (Chernow)

1800s

Andrew Jackson (Remini)
Andrew Jackson (Brands)
Team of Rivals (Goodwin)
Abraham Lincoln (Donald)
The Battle Cry of Freedom (McPherson)
Manhunt (Swanson)
The Devil in the White City (Larson)
Titan (Chernow)

1900s

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Morris)
Theodore Rex (Morris)
No Ordinary Time (Goodwin)
Freedom From Fear (Kennedy)
Truman (McCullough)
Master of the Senate (Caro)
President Kennedy (Reeves)
Robert Kennedy: His Life (Thomas)
The Best and the Brightest (Halberstam)
Simple Justice (Kluger)
First In His Class (Maraniss)
My Life (Clinton)

Middle East

The Six Day War (Oren)
From Beirut to Jerusalem (Friedman)
Guests of the Ayatollah (Bowden)

Sports

When Pride Still Mattered (Maraniss)
Luckiest Man (Eig)

9/11 - Afghanistan

Ghost Wars (Coll)
9/11 Commission Report
The Looming Tower (Wright)

Iraq

Plan of Attack (Woodward)
Cobra II (Gordon)
The Assassins’ Gate (Packer)

Other Good Choices

Black Hawk Down (Bowden)
Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner)
The Prize (Yergin)
The World is Flat (Friedman)
Longitudes and Attitudes (Friedman)

Wal-Mart

Last Saturday, Jeanell and I happened to catch a documentary entitled "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices." Now we probably have a little different feeling about Wal-Mart than some because Jeanell has been employed there for the past seven years. There are definitely accusations made against Wal-mart that I am in no way qualified to respond to, particularly related to human rights and the environment, but I did want to comment on an area where I feel Wal-Mart is maligned a bit unfairly.

We constantly hear about how many Wal-Mart employees are paid a wage that puts them below the poverty line. The thought that comes to my mind is how many of these positions are intended to be "primary bread-winner" jobs? It seems the vast majority of jobs in retail pay a wage that would not support a typical family of four. I realize that my experience is anecdotal, but Jeanell has looked at various employment opportunities in our area including Old Navy and Vulcraft (where I work) and was able to make a higher wage at Wal-Mart than either of those places. I guess it just seems to me that most jobs in the retail sector will provide supplementary income, but will not work as the only source of income for a family. I would doubt that a cashier or stocker at Target or Albertson's is paid sufficiently to support a family either.

So is Wal-Mart just picked on because of its size? Is it easier to group all the Wal-Mart employees together and make generalizations about them than to compare them objectively to the retail sector as a whole? Or is the argument that employees in the retail sector used to make a reasonable wage before Wal-Mart came into the picture?

I don't know the answer, but wanted to see if any of you had any strong feelings one way or the other about Wal-Mart or if anyone could show me where I'm wrong.

Diet and Exercise

Unlike many Americans, I have put on a little weight over the past seven or eight years. In fact, I'm probably fifty pounds heavier now than when Jeanell and I married in 2001.

Well, the past few weeks I've tried to increase my exercise amount from zero to little in an attempt to maybe shed a few of those extra pounds. (According to the Wii Fit Jeanell gave me for Father's Day, my ideal weight is ~154 lbs. I'm thinking I probably won't get there.)

It's been three weeks and I've done fairly well with doing some jogging (started at two miles, worked up to three) at least five nights/week. Unfortunately, when I weighed in yesterday, I was two pounds heavier than when I started this increase of exercise.

I guess that's the problem with exercise as a weight-loss tool. It takes hours to burn off calories through exercise that it takes minutes (for me, seconds) to eat.

I've decided one of two things (or probably both things) need to happen for me to lose some weight. First, I need to build up my stamina so that I can exercise for longer periods of time and at a higher level. And second, I need to eat better.

Eating better is where I always seem to run into trouble for a few reasons. One is that I have a deeply ingrained psychological need to finish whatever is placed on my plate. I rarely bring food home from a restaurant despite the excessive size of the portions and I'll generally make myself sick rather than admitting I can't finish something and throwing it away. Another problem I seem to have is that most of the eating I do is because I enjoy the flavor of the food rather than simply to satisfy hunger.

A Few Tips

Because I work in the IT world, people often ask me questions about what computer to buy, how to solve common computer problems, etc. I thought I'd go ahead and share a few tips, tricks, and hidden gems.

If you're looking for a good search engine, jot this url down: www.google.com. While not yet a household name, Google can help you find whatever you are looking for on the Internet with surprising accuracy.

Interested in buying and selling things online, keep this name in mind: EBay. Never used it myself, but I hear that lots of people become millionaires overnight with EBay. I believe my brother Scott used to date someone that had a whole business plan that revolved around selling Guess jeans on EBay. Don't know whatever came of that (or her, for that matter), but I'm sure EBay did it's part.

Still using the Internet browser of the Evil Empire (aka Microsoft). Maybe it's just my crappy computer, but Internet Explorer seems to take forever to load. Give Mozilla Firefox (www.mozilla.com) a try.

Looking for a new PC or laptop, here's a company that you may not have heard of: Dell (www.dell.com). I hear they have some really great deals.

Can't find enough sports news and opinions on the Internet. Give this url a try: www.espn.com. I especially enjoy the columns and podcasts of The Sports Guy, Bill Simmons.

Don't know what a url is? Try typing this address into your Firefox address bar: www.wikipedia.com. From there, you can search the site to find out what a "url" is. Or, thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can just click here. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia created by the collaborative effort of all of humanity. Well, at least all of humanity that has a computer and an Internet connection. Well, I guess you really need to have a lot of time on your hands as well. One thing you don't need is to know what the hell you're talking about. You can add whatever crap you want to any article.

Well, hopefully these tips will help many of you to get more comfortable with the Internet. Let's hope so, because Web 2.0 is already upon us. (I have no idea what that means).