Y: The Last Man Review

For the past seven months I've jumped back into reading comics and graphic novels. I used to read them a lot when I was a teenager, but just lost interest by the mid/late 1990s. I find myself struggling to enjoy reading monthly issues and going to the comic book shop every week-- or even getting them online via Comixology.

The problem I have is that I don't like reading them month to month-- it's too little to read bit by bit. I prefer reading a story arc in a sitting or two. My taste is turning more towards graphic novels and/or completed series-- just like I did when I was a teenager.

Don't worry, this review is spoiler-free.

So I recently finished reading Brian K. Vaughan's and Pia Guerra's, Y: The Last Man graphic novel series. I really enjoyed the books. The story is pretty solid and artwork pretty consistent.

This is how I would sum it up:

The story is about the world where one day, all the men and animals with a Y chromosome drop dead, except for one guy, Yorick Brown. This is his journey through a world with only women in charge. 

It's got a bit of romance, science fiction, adventure, politics, action, and all around good story-telling. Each volume has 100+ pages, and I generally read about two volumes at a time. This book does involve adult content, so I wouldn't recommend it for anyone under the age of seventeen. By movie standards, it's R-rated.

That said, there are certain parts-- or rather characters hard to believe in. Just some. It nags at my brain a bit, but I generally suspend disbelief and let it go. A few chapters does jump around a bit to the past a bit, so readers should keep in mind the numerous characters.



Here's are links to the full set of books (paperbacks):

1. Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1: Unmanned
2. Y: The Last Man, Vol. 2: Cycles
3. Y: The Last Man, Vol. 3: One Small Step
4. Y: The Last Man, Vol. 4: Safeword
5. Y: The Last Man, Vol. 5: Ring of Truth
6. Y: The Last Man, Vol. 6: Girl on Girl
7. Y: The Last Man, Vol. 7: Paper Dolls
8. Y: The Last Man, Vol. 8: Kimono Dragons
9. Y: The Last Man, Vol. 9: Motherland
10. Y: The Last Man, Vol. 10: Whys and Wherefores

They are available in hardcovers too, but I just prefer softcover format because it's lighter to carry around and read, especially in bed.

I can see this graphic novel being adapted into a TV show. Maybe HBO or Starz can pick it up? I can see this kind of story compete against True Blood or even The Walking Dead. The drama is that good. 

If you enjoy Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead comic series (currently ongoing) and other post-apocalyptic stories, you should give Y: The Last Man a try.

The Design of Everyday Things

The Design of Everyday Things comes highly recommended on Coding Horror's recommended reading list as well as many other software developers. After giving it a read, I thought it was good, relevant today, but slightly dated with their examples.



After reading the book, I am reminded of the light switch to my bathroom in my current apartment in Los Angeles. See below.



It's such a horrible design! The left-most button, which is red, is for off. And then there are three switch combination to turn lights on. Three. It's just, awful.

Anyway, I got the book as an ebook from Amazon for my Kindle Fire. The book has some good examples of common design issues in today's world, but some of them are a bit dated. An example would be the hardline telephone. I haven't used one of those in such a long time since we currently live in an age of smartphones.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book:

"... websites are often unusable, cellular telephones grow ever more complex, and automobile dashboards look like airplane cockpits. The new products impose themselves upon us in the bedroom, in the automobile, while walking down the street. As each new technology emerges, the companies forget the lessons of the past and let engineers build their fanciful creations, driven by marketing insistence on a proliferation of features. As a result, confusion and distraction increase."

"Technology may change rapidly, but people change slowly. The principles, the examples, and lessons of The Design of Everyday Things come from an understanding of people. They remain true forever."

"But what good is technology if it is too complex to use?"

"The same technology that simplifies life by providing more functions in each device also complicates life by making the device harder to learn, harder to use. This is the paradox of technology."

"But human thought-- and its close relatives, problem solving and planning-- seem more rooted in past experience than in logical deduction. Mental life is not neat and orderly. It does not proceed smoothly and gracefully in neat, logical form. Instead, it hops, skips, and jumps its way from idea to idea, tying together; forming new creative leaps, new insights, and concepts. Human thought is not like logic; it is fundamentally different in kind and in spirit. The difference is neither worse nor better. But it is the difference that leads to creative discovery and to great robustness of behavior."

I recommend the book for designers and developers, but not as an ebook format. It doesn't translate well from paper to digital for my Kindle. A lot of examples and pictures did not fit well on the screen and really was a distraction in the reading and flow of things. As for the content, I think developers should have some idea how things are designed with the user in mind, thus I agree with many high-profile developers that recommend this book.

Food Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots

As a foodie and photography enthusiast, I found Food Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots to be a good read, mostly. Although, I did find myself skimming the later chapters as they deal with post-processing using Adobe Photoshop.

The first three chapters on fundamentals, equipment, and lighting I thought were the best for foodies interested in improving their skills as a photographer. The chapter on framing and composition is good too. These chapters I think are the best chapters to read for foodies looking to improve their skill on taking pictures of food.

The rest of the book talks about styling/props and the post-processing, which may be a bit much for those not interested in doing studio-like setups. To be honest, when I take pictures of food, I don't cook it myself, I don't have a setup in place, and most importantly-- I plan on eating the food I take a picture of!



I do have a food blog over at Foodishappiness.com. Please check it out!

Finished reading: In The Plex

I just finished reading In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives on my Kindle Fire.

Overall it was a good book with some insight into Google, but I wouldn't say that the book was well-written. It does jump around a lot and the material wasn't presented chronologically in story-fashion. It's currently the most up to date book on Google as it includes recent stuff such as Android, Eric Schmidt's stepping down as CEO in 2010, and it's failures to enter as a social network. There are a lot of Amazon reviews giving praise to the book. I think it's a little over-rated, but still informative. I just can't get over how the writing wasn't fluid.

The last techie book I read was, Steve Jobs biography. It's interesting to contrast the companies such as Apple and Google. The former, Apple, very much treats the work they do as an art form, as beauty and simplicity. While the latter, Google, treats everything based off of numbers, as data-- science.

I wouldn't strongly recommend this book if you've kept up on Google through blog posts and editorials online over the past five years. I have read up on them, and I found myself skimming certain sections just because I was familiar with it already.



Other books I've read on Google:

• The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
• The Google Story

My next book to read is The Design of Everyday Things.

Steve Jobs biography

I really enjoyed reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. I bought both the hardcover and the Kindle book version. Isaacson's writing is superb and flows very well. However, if you read articles or even watched some Steve Jobs documentaries, it covers a lot of similar ground. I am reminded of the TV movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley. If you haven't watched it, I highly recommend it.

I think it's fair for people to compare him to Thomas Edison, as Jobs was our modern day inventor and businessman-- a visionary if you will. Perhaps it's a stretch to even consider him an inventor as he was more of an innovator. I personally find that Jobs gets a little too much credit, considering all the people he used and collaborated with, to get Apple to achieve the success it's found today. That's something that does bother me. That and the fact that he was an asshole to quite a few people throughout his life. But I suppose, as humans, we're all assholes at some point in our lives.

Apple does owe everything to this man and his vision. I consider Steve Jobs to be the greatest CEO to date. I think Apple today can survive without the business savvy of Jobs, but we'll see where they are at five years from now. I personally think Steve Jobs should have been Times Person of the Year 2011.

Here are a few of my favorite Steve Jobs clips from youTube:

Reading List for Summer 2011

I have selected the books I'd like to complete before the end of Summer/Fall season. I think it's a nice set and variety of books.

• The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
• Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun
• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
• Eloquent Ruby by Russ Olsen
• Four Steps to Epiphany by Steven Gary Blank
• The Camera by Ansel Adams
• Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

The Green Lantern: Blackest Night graphic novels below I already finished. Good stuff.

Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

A few months ago, Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, offered free copies of his new book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose via his twitter.  I hopped on it right away and got myself two copies of it by using two different email addresses.  I gave one away to a friend and kept the remaining copy to myself to keep and read.

I really enjoyed this book.  It's inspirational how Tony Hsieh started his company out, taking the big risks he did, despite the economic conditions of the Dot Com bubble burst.  It was pretty amazing how he built the culture around his company and the success that followed thereafter.

The reading is pretty light and casual.  If anything, it may be a little too casual as Tony Hsieh noted he wanted to keep it very basic and like a conversation.  I think it could have used a little help from an editor, with a little bit more formal editing, but maybe at the risk of losing what makes Tony Hsieh a great CEO of the greatest online service store that happen to sell shoes.

Coincidentally, I am at a point in my life where I'm making a lot of changes to my professional and personal life.  This book has definitely helped me put things into perspective.  It was great timing for me to pick up and finish reading the book when I did.  Delivering Happiness is a fantastic book to read if you want to see how a great company was formed and sustained-- but also for personal growth to find happiness.

Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

I finished reading Rework by the founders of 37Signals.  I really really enjoyed the book.  The chapters were concise and to the point.

Here are my favorite chapters:

• Learning from mistakes is overrated
• Planning is guessing
• No time is no excuse
• Outside money is Plan Z
• Embrace constraints
• Focus on won't change
• Interruption is the enemy of productivity
• Meetings are toxic
• Your estimates suck
• Underdo your competition
• Say no by default
• Emulate chefs
• Drug dealers get it right
• Do it yourself first
• Everybody works
• They're not thirteen
• Don't scar on the first cut

I highly recommend people to pick up a copy if you are at all interested in how a great business should be run.

Coders at Work and Duct Tape Programming

I finally finished reading Coders at Work!  I really enjoyed the interviews with Jamie Zawinksi, Douglas Crockford, Brendan Eich, and Ken Thompson.  I wasn't too interested in compilers and the much older systems some of the programmers once developed in.  I must admit, I had a short attention span reading over those sections.

Anyway, the reason I picked this book up was because back in late September to early October 2009, I remember reading several blog posts on duct tape programming.  They all pointed to Joel Spolsky's blog post: The Duct Tape Programmer.

The quote was from Jamie Zawinkski, on his pet peeve of developers who over-engineer:

At the end of the day, ship the fucking thing!  It's great to rewrite code and make it cleaner and by the third time it'll actually be pretty.  But that's not the point-- you're not here to write code; you're here to ship products.  --Jamie Zawinkski

My first reaction after reading Spolsky's post was with some disgust.  The word that came to mind was: Grief.  Software developer grief.  Let me explain.

I define software developer grief as the unhappiness a developer gets from inheriting badly written or non-functional code from another developer.  I have felt this grief a few times.  I've had to work with code where it's been released out to production, where the code doesn't even function properly and hasn't, EVER.

Now I'm not aware of what the development conditions were like when those kind of coding projects were in place.  But, the code, definitely shouldn't have shipped.  In these cases, duct-tape or band-aids were used instead of a functioning wheel to the go-cart; because the go-cart just wasn't doing what it should have been doing.

But after reading Uncle Bob's response, it made more sense what Spolsky was talking about.  The spirit of what they're both preaching, is to ship working code, it doesn't have to be pretty or perfect, just make it work!  The clean-up can, and should occur later.

That, I agree with.

Get the book on Amazon:

Finished reading the Groundswell

I just finished reading Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Probably one of the best books I've read this year thus far.

What Is Groundswell?
It's a book by two Forrester analysts with practical, data-based strategies for companies that want to harness the power of social technologies like blogs, social networks, and YouTube. (source: Forrester)

I absolutely love reading case studies in these IT Business books. I finished my MS in Information Systems 2 years ago last month. I'm a little disheartened that I have yet to fully utilize my skillset at my current employment. But I am currently writing up a paper on how my company can utilize some of these social trends/methodologies and put them to good use internally.

My plan isn't about using any of these technologies/methodologies for the sake of using something cool, but rather from a problem/solution point-of-view. What is the problem? What is a potential solution?

Reading some Books on Web 2.0 & Generation Y

I want to share some books that I've read or am currently reading. The general theme is Web 2.0 and Generation Y. These topics are so interesting to me because the concepts and the generation behind it is my generation. I barely made it into Gen Y instead of Gen X. Whew!

I just love how my generation likes to solve problems more creatively and more efficiently than previous generations using technology. As more Gen Ys enter the workforce, I think corporate America will need to do some adjusting to how they manage this new breed of workers. I will blog more about the specifics in future posts.

Books I've Read:

• Wikipatterns
• Millennial Leaders: Success Stories From Today's Most Brilliant Generation Y Leaders
• Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide

Books I'm Reading:

• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
• Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers

Programming Books I'm using:

• Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed (WPF) (Unleashed)
• Programming WPF