Summary 2007
December 31st, 2007 at 6:58 amProfessional
* At work things were quite disorganized this year. Projects began, ended, were delayed, canceled, and so on. I did many small things, but nothing big from beginning to end. The next year should be better in this respect, and I hope that the important work I’m doing now will have satisfactory results.
* I finally ended my involvement with ESMS. It was becoming a burden, and isn’t as popular as before because of big online leagues that provide the same services.
* My love affair with Ruby ended as quickly as it began. With no ESMS to use it for, I realized I really don’t have any reason to use Ruby in my daily life. Perl does the work for me when I need things done at work (besides, I spent a considerable time spreading it around at work, teaching other people using it, etc), and for exploring new languages and techniques, Lisp is much better.
* So I started another project – an ambitious one. To read SICP, solve most of the exercise in it and write down notes and solutions to the exercises. So far I’m quite successful, and am already approaching the middle of chapter 4 (out of 5 chapters in the book). This is taking a lot of time but I’m very consistent in it, making a good progress. Since it’s such a big job, it outshadowed all other hacking activities. However, SICP is so multi-faceted that I’m not getting bored by reading it, as I’m learning a lot going through it, and getting more experienced with Scheme and Common Lisp.
* Somewhere in April-May I decided to try RentACoder. I did a few jobs there, got high grades and earned about $300. It was an interesting experience.
Reading
Here’s the list of books. Some of them were read during the vacation and have no reviews.
1. “The grapes of wrath” by John Steibeck
2. “The return of Sherlock Holmes” by Arthur Conan Doyle (Audio)
3. “The hummus king and the bathtub queen” by Ilan Heitner (Heb)
4. “The sign of four” by Arthur Conan Doyle (Audio)
5. “The Haj” by Leon Uris
6. “Galapagos” by Kurt Vonnegut
7. “Suite Francaise” by Irene Nemirovsky
8. “RAFAEL” by Munya Mardor (Heb)
9. “The memoirs of Sherlock Holmes” by Arthur Conan Doyle (Audio)
10. “The 25 Best Time Management Tools & Techniques” by P. Dodd and D. Sundheim
11. “The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Heb)
12. “Beautiful Code”, edited by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson
13. “The adventures of Sherlock Holmes” by Arthur Conan Doyle (Audio)
14. “Q & A” by Vikas Swarup (Heb)
15. “The Undercover Economist” by Tim Harford
16. “Mila 18” by Leon Uris
17. “The equation that couldn’t be solved” by Mario Livio
18. “The memory keeper’s daughter” by Kim Edwards
19. “Countdown to Spanish” by Gail Stein
20. “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins
21. “The Elements of Style” by W. Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
22. “Hackers” by Steven Levy
23. “The mystery of capital” by Hernando De Soto
24. “The story of language” by Charles L. Barber
25. “Road fever” by Tim Cahill
26. “The emergence of man” by John Pfeiffer
27. “A tale of two cities” by Charles Dickens
28. “Big Bang” by Simon Singh
29. “Ruby Cookbook” by L. Carlson and L. Richardson
30. “The mismeasure of man” by Stephen Jay Gould
31. “Freakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
32. “Billions & Billions” by Carl Sagan
33. “Space” by James Michener
34. “Gideon’s spies” by Gordon Thomas
35. “Being Here, Shaping a preferred future” by Christine Loh
36. “Baghdad without a map” by Tony Horwitz
37. “Spy catcher” by Peter Wright
38. “Adventure Capitalist” by Jim Rogers
39. “The journey of man – A genetic odyssey” by Spencer Wells
40. “A history of the middle east” by Peter Mansfield
41. “From Beirut to Jerusalem” by Thomas Friedman
42. “The Time Traveler’s Wife” by Audrey Niffenegger
43. “World war 1939-1945” by Peter Young
44. “The bride stripped bare” by Anonymous
45. “Following the equator” by Mark Twain
46. “Electric Universe” by David Bodanis
47. “Longtitude” by Dava Sobel
48. “The six day war” by Randolph S. and Winston S. Churchill
49. “The prince and the pauper” by Mark Twain
50. “Terra incognita” by Sara Wheeler
51. “Once while traveling” by Tony and Maureen Wheeler
52. “Exodus” by Leon Uris
53. “1421” by Gavin Menzies
54. “The island of lost maps” by Miles Harvey
55. “One L” by Scott Turow
56. “Questioning the Millennium” by Stephen J. Gould
57. “Why in the world” by John Demko
This year’s reading was unusual in several respects. First of all, almost half of these books were read during the vacation, in which my reading pace has been very fast. Second, at some time I decided to quality reading instead of quantity reading, and my pace slowed down towards the end of the year. I also reread a few books I liked, and since they’re not new I didn’t include them in the list.
In addition, I began “reading” audio-books on my Palm, mainly on the way from work home. So far it’s been quite a pleasant experience, and I finished 4 books about Sherlock Holmes, the 5th being on the way.
All in all, the language blend has been: 4 books in Hebrew, 53 in English. No Russian and Spanish this year – I hope to fix this for next time!
My favorite non-fiction was “Hackers”. Although it’s a reread, I wrote the review this year. It’s an amazing book. The favorite fiction goes to “Exodus”, with “The grapes of wrath” following closely behind. I’ve only read two technical books this year, and both of them weren’t amazing, so no nominations in this category.
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