Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
This book is lots of things: honest, funny, and ultimately heart breaking. I don’t remember how I came across it, but its a good read for when travelling as the diary format means you can put it down whenever you need to do something else. I’m left wondering how the Australian medical system compares to…
It was a bit surprising to me that Brian Kernighan self-published a book about Unix history with Kindle Direct publishing, but given how many other books he’s published he must have his reasons for not using traditional channels for this one. The book is an engaging read, with quotes which still seem timely today popping…
This book discusses science and technical communication from the perspective of someone who comes from professional theatre and acting. Alan explains how his accidental discovery of the application of theatre sports to communication created an opportunity to teach technical communicators how to be more effective. Essentially, the argument is that empathy is essential to communication…
Whilst the chemistry was sometimes over my head, this book is an engaging summary of the history of US liquid rocket fuels during the height of the cold war. Fun to read and interesting as well. I enjoyed it. Title: Ignition! Author: John Drury Clark Genre: Technology & Engineering Release Date: 1972 Pages: 214
Catherine and I have been huge fans of Adam Hills for ages, so it wasn’t a surprise to me that I’d like a book by him. As an aside, we’ve never seen him live — we had tickets for his show in Canberra in 2013, but some of us ended up in labor in hospital instead,…
A very well written tale of a Wall Street quant who left during the GFC to adventure in startup land and ended up at Facebook attempting to solve their monetization problems for an indifferent employer. Martinez must have been stomping around Mountain View because his description of the environment and what its like to work…
I found this tale of Bill Bryson walking the Appalachian Trail (rather incompetently I must say) immensely entertaining. Well written, interesting, generally exaggerated, and leaving me with a desire to get out somewhere and walk some more. I’d strongly recommend this book to people who already care about bush walking, but have found other pursuits…
I read this book while on a flight a few weeks ago. Its surprisingly readable and relatively short — you can knock it over in a single long haul flight. The book covers the memoirs of an oil rig worker, from childhood right through to middle age. That’s probably the biggest weakness of the book,…