Review of "The Mourner" by Richard Stark

"The Mourner" is another in the Parker series of novels by Richard Stark (one of the pseudonyms of Donald Westlake). Parker is once again faced with the task of pulling off a difficult heist. In this case he has even more incentive to succeed in liberating a valuable statue as he's being blackmailed with evidence of a previous crime.

The Mourner sets out at a fast pace early on and doesn't slow down. If you like a quick, fast read that involves a good dose of action and suspense then The Mourner is for you. While the books are a little dated in terms of age Westlake's writing is skillful in avoiding getting caught up in a specific era and unnecessarily dating the book. Overall I'd recommend grabbing a copy of The Mourner it offers a quick enjoyable mystery as we follow Parker in the pursuit of yet another major heist.

Leopard - Useful new feature Webclips

One useful feature that is included as a native part of Leopard is the ability to build a custom widget that is displayed in Dashboard. In Safari v3.0 a new icon appears in the toolbar
(a pair of scissors with a dotted box) that once clicked on allows you to select an area of the current web page to be monitored. Once you've selected the area you click the ADD button which puts a new Widget on your Dashboard. There are limited formatting options at this point in terms of the type of box that the web clip is displayed in. One thing that would be useful would be the ability to label the Widgets.

Overall, a small feature that previously you needed to use third party software and a couple of hacks to have this functionality. At this point I'm still experimenting with web clips having setup two 1) to monitor the current inventory of refurbished Macs on Apple's online store and 2) to monitor the ongoing auctions of vintage Macs on eBay.

"Secrets of Mental Math" by Arthur Benjamin & Michael Shermer

After watching an interesting presentation from Professor Arthur Benjamin on the TED.com website who claims to be a mathemagician I was prompted to get a hold of a copy of "Secrets of Mental Math". The book is interesting in that it has forewords by "The Amazing Randi" (aka James Randi) and "The Science Guy" (aka Bill Nye).

I've spent the past month working my way through the parts of this book that intrigued me and must say that the tips and tricks really do work. I'm not the a math nut by nature but something about the video struck me and indicated that I should pickup a copy of Secrets of Mental Math. The good news is that Benjamin and Sherher approach the topic with a light hearted easy to follow style that makes it easy to understand how to perform these calculations in your head. My goal in starting this book was to sharpen my math skills so that I spent less time calculating and more time thinking about what the result of the calculation meant to the situation I was considering.

The only thing that I wish the book focused more on was the ability to retain and remember the products of the calculations you're working on. Typically, the techniques involve simplifying the problem at hand into a series of smaller problems - the only hitch with this is that you can end up getting thrown off course its often hard to remember the interim by-products meaning you need to start all over.

Bottom-line I HIGHLY recommend this book for anyone that wants to be sharper on their feet and handle calculations without being reliant on having a pencil & paper or a calculator at hand.