by lcreekmo on January 30, 2010
The Visual Miscellaneum is one of my favorite kinds of books. Though I’m in no way a designer, I am a very spatially oriented person. As much as I love words, I love the images that instantly tell the story a thousand words only begin to tell. So Strange Maps is a favorite website of mine, for instance.
When I saw this book advertised on Amazon back before the holidays, I quickly added it to my wish list. And I was incredibly disappointed when, after the NYC sister and her husband ordered it for me, it was backordered. I was so delighted the day it arrived about a week ago.
And I really wanted to rank this book as “Highly recommended! Don’t miss!” But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Because the only thing I can say is, I hope this was somehow rushed to press [though one of the charts in the book is a 4-page explanation of exactly how long it took to create the book, so that seems unlikely]. Because it’s riddled with errors — some small, and some more consequential.
In my case, the small ones are actually the more bothersome. Throughout the book, you’ll see two spaces randomly stuck in the middle of a sentence, kind of like this. I’m not sure the average reader will notice these, but I’ve proofread copy my entire adult life, and I can’t not see that dumb error. [I even notice when there are two spaces between sentences in printed works. Unlike what you learned in typing class in high school, one space is now the standard. It has to do with computer-based typography, but I won't bore you with further details.]
But the reviewers on Amazon point out that there are actually errors in the graphs as well, and for many people, that will be a bigger issue.
I would say, you’ll probably enjoy reading this, and you’ll learn a lot from the unique perspective McCandless brings to data visualization, but read carefully.
by lcreekmo on January 25, 2010
The Help has been getting a growing level of buzz over the past few months, and as soon as I heard about it, I knew I’d need to read it. But now I’m feeling a bit bereft because I need more people to discuss it with before I’m 100% sure what I think of it. So I’m hoping some of you have read it.
The book has been pretty widely reviewed, but in case you aren’t familiar with it: The Help tells the story of Jackson, MS, in the early 1960s through the eyes of a young white woman and several black women who work as maids. Skeeter Phelan is just out of Ole Miss without a husband or serious prospects, much to her mother’s dismay. She wants to be a writer, and she decides to interview local black women working as maids for her friends.
Reviews of this book tend to focus on whether or not the experience of the maids, and their vernacular, is believable and authentic. Let me first tell you that I don’t have a lot of way to know. I was born in 1971 and grew up in rural West Tennessee…which just isn’t the same thing at all as Jackson in the early 1960s. At the same time, I lived my childhood in the South just a few years removed from the height of the Civil Rights movement. I still don’t think I fully understand what I’ve seen and experienced in my lifetime. My views on race and the implications of race in politics and economics continue to evolve. I see my childhood and young adulthood through a different lens today than I did even 5 years ago, and a completely different way than I did at the time.
My family had a maid when I was growing up. Henrietta came to our house at least a couple of times a week throughout my childhood. She was our babysitter when my parents went out. She was a confidante to my sisters and me. And she loved us dearly, and we her.
I really can’t say our experience [either ours or Henrietta's] was like those described in The Help, despite the obvious similarities that we lived in the South, and that she was our black maid. The 10 years made a lot of difference, as did the distance between Jackson, MS, and my hometown. Henrietta worked in the produce department at my dad’s grocery store the other days of the week. I’ve never heard my parents use the n-word, and they were saddened by racist attitudes that were common in our hometown. I know their attitudes — probably not the majority views of white people in my hometown at the time, to be honest — were critical in shaping the way I viewed race.
And yet.
I find the book incredibly believable. Every bit of it. Stockett didn’t set out to write a social history, but a novel. And I find her novel to be one that speaks to an ugly but awakening time in our history with an authentic voice.
by lcreekmo on January 24, 2010
We’ve all suffered through horrible PowerPoint presentations, and too many of us have even created them ourselves. In Presentation Zen Design, Garr Reynolds gives you several principles to simplify your presentations, and improve the design — and therefore make them more effective.
Of course, the challenge is in executing his simple principles. Reading this book reminded me that so often, the PowerPoint we see is just the second or third draft — not a final presentation. I’ve been guilty of this in the past myself. I get all my thoughts out in PowerPoint and then I tweak them a bit, and I act like I’m done.
But Reynolds [who authors a popular blog on the same topic, Presentation Zen] reminds us that PowerPoint [or Keynote, or any other slideware program] is meant to be a presentation aid — the presenter is supposed to share the information. If you can most effectively share your information via the slides, why would you do a presentation at all? Couldn’t you just forward the slides and save everyone from a needless meeting?
Instead, Reynolds wants your slides to augment the presentation you’re making. So, no more itsy-bitsy type, no more 10-bullet-point slides, no more boring images or poorly designed tables. Instead, he wants you to figure out what the essence of your presentation is, and put that on your slides. And that’s the work that many of us never do.
The real takeaway in this book is that you should be working harder on almost every presentation you make. If you can commit to doing that, Reynolds can give even non-designers some basic design principles to make your point more effective.
[Thanks to Michael Hyatt for this book recommendation. If you are in digital media or publishing and not reading his blog, well, fix that right now!]
by lcreekmo on January 10, 2010
I loved Freakonomics, so I was expecting to enjoy the sequel, and I did.
The criticism leveled at this book [and somewhat at its predecessor] is that the authors are too clever by half, and they are more interested in telling a good tale than in elucidating the solutions to any vexing problems facing our society. And that perhaps they’re distorting the truth a bit to make their stories entertaining.
I guess my question to those critics is, what are you looking for? I certainly can’t speak for the authors of this book, but I would think their point is more to encourage us to think in new ways, and not to just take the conventional wisdom for granted. Many things we assume to be true — even based on “evidence” — simply aren’t.
So I like books like SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, that make me review why and how I believe what I do.
by lcreekmo on January 3, 2010
I’m off on a quest to read a book a week in 2010. In classic overachiever mode here, I’m going to start with the book I read the week of Christmas 2009, In Defense of Food.
Some of you may be shocked I haven’t read this book already, since it ties in with a lot of what I believe about how we should eat. Honestly, when it came out, I read the reviews and thought, Yep, I agree, and didn’t feel the need to read it right away since I suspected Michael Pollan was just preaching to my choir.
But Ashby received the book for Christmas this year, and I quickly appropriated it.
I did enjoy it, and I highly recommend it to you if you are interested in the food-industrial complex or if you’re trying to eat healthy and local. Pollan does a nice job of de-myth-ifying lots of what we believe about food, showing us how conventional wisdom came to be — why we think eating low-fat is good, or why we think carbs are bad — and showing that many of these common assumptions are half-truths at best.
I found one thing frustrating about the book, though. While Pollan spends a lot of time debunking common food assumptions, he does not devote time to his own original research about food. And he’s up front about that, by the way — it’s not a hidden agenda. But I just found myself wanting the same rigor applied to what we ought to know about food, as he applies to that which we think we know, but don’t.
Ah, but part of his point is that we haven’t done the research, and/or don’t yet have the technology, to understand how food really works. At any rate, I found this book a nice companion to Marion Nestle’s What to Eat
, long my bible for food-related questions.
by lcreekmo on December 19, 2009
I am an honest-to-goodness freak about food safety. I am incredibly particular about how I handle and cook meat and egg dishes in particular. I’ve even been known to throw out my favorite leftovers if I realize I’ve let them sit on the counter just 30 minutes too long before refrigerating them.
And so for years, I have not made my favorite childhood dessert — lemon icebox pie. Because the recipes I’ve found for it all called for raw eggs. Try though I might to convince myself, I knew that the 15 minutes in the oven to brown the meringue weren’t enough to cook the eggs in the pie underneath, as well. [Though they are enough to make the egg whites in the meringue safe.]
That’s why I was so delighted to stumble across this article from the Louisiana Extension service — it tells you how to adapt traditional recipes with raw eggs for today’s salmonella-laden world.
It may be December, but I’m thinking I’ll give lemon icebox pie a try next week. It’s been way too long!
by lcreekmo on December 17, 2009
I moved into this house 4.5 years ago. It was a pretty easy move, stuff-wise, because I hired movers. And though they did tear up the floor at my old house getting the washer out, they only messed up one of my possessions — they broke one caster on a 2-drawer filing cabinet I have.
It’s a cabinet I actually use as a desk drawer, so I open it several times a day. And for 4.5 years, it’s wobbled every time I do that.
Because it wasn’t until today, when I was at Office Depot picking up a new filing cabinet [because I have even more stuff to file than before] that I realized that I could just remove all of the casters from my broken cabinet. Thus un-breaking it. It’s not like I even needed to roll it anywhere.
I hate to admit things like that out loud. All I can say in my defense is that I never have actually thought directly about it before, beyond thinking [every single damn time I open and close the drawer]: That sure is annoying.
by lcreekmo on December 16, 2009
Yesterday, the 4yo shared this Christmas story with me. I thought you might like it, too.
Mama, did you know Santa was born in Guatemala? Just like me! He lived there before his mama came to pick him up. And then she did, and he lives at the North Pole now.
In fact, I got to visit Santa at the North Pole before you came to pick me up. [Ed. note: Plausible, since he was born in July and came home in March....he had to celebrate that first Christmas somehow, right?] I took the Polar Express to the North Pole and then came back to Guatemala. My foster mom went with me.
Merry Christmas!
by lcreekmo on November 28, 2009
I asked Ashby a couple of weeks ago what he wanted for his birthday, and all he said was, “Red velvet cake.” I figured out some presents, but I knew we had to deliver on that cake, as well.
As much as I love red velvet, I’m not sure I’ve ever made it before. I may have made it one other time…I have some vague memories of not being entirely pleased with a recipe. However, I do remember soliciting red velvet cake recipes several years ago, and my friend Summer sent me her mother’s.
I spent some time on Thursday comparing 3 different red velvet recipes I have. I ended up deciding Summer’s mom’s was going to be the best. But she had a buttercream frosting recipe with it, and I knew Ashby loved cream cheese frosting, so I substituted that from another recipe.
The cake was a big hit. Here’s how we did it.
Red Velvet Cake
2 sticks butter
1 1/2 c. sugar
2 eggs
2 oz. red food coloring
1 t. vanilla
3 T. cocoa powder
1 t. salt
1 c. buttermilk
2 1/4 c. flour
1 t. baking soda
1 t. vinegar
Cream sugar, eggs and butter. Mix in food coloring and vanilla. Mix together cocoa, flour and salt. Beat in buttermilk and flour mix alternately. Combine soda and vinegar and mix in. Beat 2-3 minutes.
Bake at 350° for 30 minutes in 3 8″ well-buttered pans. Cool completely in pans before frosting.
Cream Cheese Frosting
1 stick butter
8 oz. cream cheese
1 lb. powdered sugar
1/2 t. vanilla
1 c. chopped nuts
Cream butter and cream cheese. Sift in powdered sugar and beat well. Add vanilla and nuts [which we didn't use].
by lcreekmo on November 27, 2009
When I started this blog, I was looking for a topic unrelated to my work that I could write about every day, so I choose cooking. For a long time, I wrote almost exclusively about cooking, sharing lots of recipes and my thoughts on food in general.
In the past couple of years, I’ve been a lot more sporadic about blogging here, for several reasons. I’m using Facebook for lots of friend connections [and indeed, I cross-post Fixin' Supper there and often get more comments there than here on www.fixinsupper.com] and Twitter for daily commentary. I’ve moved my professional blogging to my company site, Creekmore Consulting. And I’m really busy, what with having 3 kids now and running my own company.
But I’m reluctant to let this go. So now I’m thinking hard about what to do with Fixin’ Supper. I’m contemplating returning to my roots and focusing lots more on food and cooking again, perhaps with a regular publishing schedule. If you’re out there reading this, I’d be curious about your thoughts. What makes you read Fixin’ Supper? What do you like best? What do you dislike? [You can comment below or email me at lcreekmo at gmail dot com.]
Thanks for any ideas you want to share. I’ll keep you updated on my thoughts.
