The Sift (July 25, 2014)

Happy Friday. As always, five stories that caught my interest.

WEB URBANIST -- Shape-Shifting Furniture: Interactive 3D Surfaces from MIT

LIFEHACKER -- Build a DIY Sliding Door Bookshelf to Hide Your Secret Lair

ENDGADGET -- New York's next big neighborhood is its smartest

WEB URBANIST -- Gritty City: Dark Oils Capture Essence of Bustling Urbanity - neat artwork

HUFFINGTON POST -- 'Calvin And Hobbes' Kid's Bedoom Makes Us Want To Be Little Again (PHOTO, VIDEO)

Book Recommendations

I've been asked a few times recently for a list of books I'd recommend. Here's my current recommended list. These are all YA fiction unless otherwise noted.

The 5th Wave - Rick Yancey - Aliens (I just finished book 1, I think book 2 is out now but book 3 hasn't been released yet)

Divergent - Veronica Roth - post-apocalyptic Chicago, people live within four "factions" (books 1 and 2 are good, I'd skip book 3) - good pairing along the Hunger Games vibe.

Shadow & Bone (Grisha Trilogy) - Leigh Bardugo - Warring kingdoms separated by an artificial rift. A ruling class with special powers. Have completed books 1 and 2, will be reading book 3 next.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone (Smoke and Bone Trilogy) - Laini Taylor - a girl with a really odd job discovers that just about everything she understood about the world is wrong - these are amazing, each one an epic and really long. I'm on page 400 (out of 600) on book 3 currently and there's still new things being introduced, but in a way that makes sense, not as revisionist. Amazingly original.

Ruby Red (Ruby Red Trilogy) - Kerstin Gier - time travel runs in the family, attempting to unravel a mystery in multiple times

The Enemy (The Enemy series) - Charlie Higson - was supposed to be 3 books, but so popular that it's been expanded to 7, only 5 of which are out so far. Everyone over the age of 16 has become a zombie. Book 5 wasn't as strong as the previous 4, but they're hard to put down. Takes place in London so you can creep yourself out by going on Google Maps Street View and finding the places mentioned. We're thinking of bribing our friends in the UK to mail us copies since they'll get the new books many months ahead of the US release.

Enclave (Razorland Trilogy) - Ann Aguirre - really, book 3 could have been two books. Small pockets of humanity exist, eking out a meager existence in a world filled with zombies. I don't know if Charlie Higson's Enemy series had any influence on this, but the two worlds go well together without Razorland feeling like a derivative or rip-off. Solid.

The Looking Glass Wars (The Looking Glass Wars Trilogy) - Frank Beddor - The premise is that there really is a dangerous and mysterious place called Wonderland, that there was a girl named Alyce and that she was forced to flee to England. But Louis Carroll took her stories as fantasy, watered them down and profited from them as his own. An incredibly imaginative series.

Lexicon - Max Barry - words have power. People have learned to harness this power for good and evil. One phrase exists so powerful that if read or spoken aloud, it can kill. (Adult)

The Fear Index - Robert Harris - the investment firm's newest autmoated stock trading AI is so powerful that it's making trades before events occur. Or is its trades causing the events? (Adult)

Enchantment - Guy Kawasaki - A wonderful guide to influencing others without it being so overt. (Non-fiction.)

You can reviews for all about Looking Glass (not sure why I never reviewed LGW) here: http://tvjames.blogspot.com/p/books.html - I try not to spoil.

What about you? I'm always looking for recommendations. Please post them in the comments below!

How To: Delayed Sending for Outlook 2011 for Mac

All of the "Getting Things Done" time management experts will tell you to stop checking your email. (They'll also tell you to turn off the little alarm and any other popups or indicators that you've got new mail.)

This is all well and good... unless you work in a place with lots of email.  I would constantly find myself working through some email, and then new email would come in and I'd pop over and read and handle that and then get back to the rest of my email.  I've worked on some other tricks to help me prioritize (like using categories or moving email out of my inbox and handling it in a different folder) but still, new email would come in.  Another trick I'd use was to compose my message and save it as a draft to send later.  That would prevent someone from replying immediately like a hot potato, but it did nothing to stop the flood of new incoming email and worse yet, sometimes I'd forget to send the outbound email.

We recently transitioned to Outlook and with its connection to Exchange, mail delivery is near instantaneous, regardless of what the schedule says, new mail is pushed right away.

Delaying outbound email had several benefits - I could make changes to an email after I'd hit send and sometimes I'd rethink the entire email and delete it altogether.

I researched but could find no method for delaying email in Outlook 2011 for the Mac until I stumbled upon some AppleScripts.  With a little research, I stumbled upon a method that's worked really well for me.  I created a small script that sets Outlook into Online mode, syncs with the server, waits 5 seconds, flips into Offline mode, waits 600 seconds (10 minutes) and repeats the pattern.

This is a bit of a cheat - it means I could send an email and have it delivered seconds later if I sent it right before the sync. But it's good enough - new emails don't go out right away, new emails aren't pouring in constantly.

I just plugged this into the AppleScript editor and hit Run. I haven't done anything fancy with it, but it gets the job done.

repeat 100 times

     log "Sync at - " & (current date)

     tell application "Microsoft Outlook" to set working offline to false

     tell application "Microsoft Outlook" to sync

     delay 5

     tell application "Microsoft Outlook" to set working offline to true

     delay 600

end repeat

Caveat: If you're trying to schedule a meeting with someone or book a conference room, you'll need to flip back into Online mode first to see availability.

If this works for you, or if you have other suggestions, please leave me a comment!

Book Review: The Fallen

The Fallen by Charlie Higson

Review by James Lamb (July 20, 2014)

I feel like this should be a short review. By now we're up to book 5 in the series. If you've read the first four, you'll probably read this one. If you haven't read the first four, I wouldn't imagine anyone want to join the series already in progress. That would be silly. Go read the other ones first.

Plus, I don't think this was as strong an outing this time around. The events in this book happen immediately after the events of the first book and at the same time as the events of the fourth book. That might be all well and good if were binging, reading them altogether. But, spread out over time, you forget some of what's happened. And because it's happening at the same time, you end up with a disconnect because the characters that you were just following in the other book aren't in this one.

I think three things set this book apart from the others: first, less travel. There is a journey, but I didn't find it to be tense. I don't know if it's just the nature of the kids getting better and smarter or what. Second, a new plot device. I don't want to say much about it, except that I understood why it was employed before it was explained which caused me to start alternating between fear and smugness at my perceived cleverness. Third, the book begins to explore the cause of the zombification of the adults. The explanation felt way too similar to the genesis of The Passage by Justin Cronin (My Review) except with zombies instead of vampires but one of the outcomes/discoveries in this case was really disappointing, but it's hard to say more without spoiling it.

I will definitely keep reading, but, yeah, there were whole sections of this one that I felt should have been better and too many times where the children only survived because the zombies were seemingly less intelligent than we've seen them be.

The Fallen - Amazon



The Sacrifice (book 4) - Amazon / My Review



The Fear (book 3) - Amazon



The Dead (book 2) - Amazon / My Review



The Enemy (book 1) - Amazon / My Review

Amazon links contain my affiliate code. Thanks for supporting my blog.

The Sift (July 18, 2014)

Happy Friday! Here's a few things of interest I felt like sharing.

PITCHFORK -- Station to Station: The Past, Present and Future of Streaming Music - deep article, fascinating presentation

TOO MUCH JOY -- My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement

EXCELJET -- How to use Evaluate Formula to step through complex formulas

DILBERT -- "Business Plan"

YOUTUBE -- Imogen Heap - Gloves (Dara O'briains Science Club)

Themed Party: Woodland Explorers

My wife enjoys hosting, planning parties and creating elaborate themes. She's really creative, often with some really tricky constraints, such as:

• It's a party for children who won't notice all the hard work and effort. 
• There's not a lot of time to plan. 
• There's no budget.

So... don't kill yourself going overboard. (Don't get Lori started on some of the "1st. Birthday" boards she found on Pinterest. Or do get her started, it could be an amusing post on her blog.)

Here's a recent party she put together for our daughter's birthday. By planning ahead, she was able to use the theme for both a family party and a friends party and we actually still have the 15+ foot tall tree in our dining room.

First, it started with a theme. Rachel and Lori have been reading through Red Wall. Rachel's been re-enacting scenes with her stuffed animals and beginning to write her own stories featuring the characters or characters of her own creation. To make the theme more approachable to children who didn't know Red Wall, they simplified to a more general "Woodland Explorer" theme.

Book Review: The 5th. Wave by Rick Yancey @RickYancey

The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey

Review by James Lamb (July 13, 2014)

It seems that most of the YA genre goes for supernatural or dystopia - not a lot of aliens. And it's no wonder. Aliens are difficult. But Yancey pulls it off masterfully. In The 5th Wave, we find ourselves on a planet that's been through four very difficult "waves" at the hand of aliens that have systematically killed most of the human population, an electromagnetic pulse has disabled all electrical devices, then waves and earthquakes, then a pestilence and finally cold-blooded killers who might be humans but who are bent on killing any humans they encounter - usually from a distance with a sniper rifle.

The story begins, following a young girl named Cassie struggling with a new world where nearly everything is an either/or choice, almost all answers are wrong and you have to think quickly or you're dead. In time, we learn more about the four previous waves and why survivors are really on edge, waiting for that fifth shoe to drop.

It's hard to say much about this book without giving spoilers, but the one thing I wish I had understood before I started was that the book is divided into acts. The book follows several different characters, so each act is switching over to another person's part of the story. I was surprised when I got to the end of the first act and suddenly the story wasn't about Cassie anymore. Ultimately, that's fine, but it was just a surprise right when I was bonding with the heroine. (Overall, the book has 13 acts, 91 chapters and was 471 pages in the hardbound copy I was reading. Am I the only one for whom a very well known line from "South Park" popped into their head at the very end of chapter 57?)

So I guess this will be a brief, but yeah, thought it was very well done. Looking forward to books 2 and 3 of the trilogy. (Note: This book is currently being made into a movie.)

The 5th Wave (Amazon.com)