Dan Mayer's Blog

Can you tell the difference between Bud light, Miller Light, and Coors light?

We had a party and asked 8 people to try and I will briefly present the result to you. I don't think it really helps to tell you which beer is better than one another, but it is interesting none the less.

4 of the 8 people could pick out all three beers correctly.
1 person only identified Coors light correctly
1 person only identified Bud light correctly
1 person only identified Miller light correctly
1 person didn't get a single beer right

So draw the conclusions how ever you wish, but I will still hold that all beer is pretty much gross, and as my mom likes to describe it, "tastes like petrified piss!"

I finally finished reading Getting Things Done. I have been trying to implement parts of the system into my life while reading through the book. I have a filing system up and running. I have been carrying around little notebooks with me everywhere to jot down my ideas. I have been going through all my items and trying to decide next actions, and move them into projects, my inbox, tickler files, and such. I think the little parts I am following will help a lot, I doubt I will ever fully buy into the entire system, but honestly you don't have to and you will still see some great benefits in your organization and productivity.

I can't claim to have done the best job of getting done, with Getting Things Done. I started and finished 5 other books during the time I read Getting Things Done. Why you ask, because this book is about organization skills and business, it is painfully boring and repetitive. I found myself hiding the book in drawers just so I wouldn't have to read, sort, clean, or follow any more of the books tips. If you can make it through the book it really is worth it and the last 50 pages are some of the best in the book. So if you want to be more effective at everything you do, your next action should be acquiring or start reading Getting Things Done.

Now I guess to continue accomplishing and finishing tasks I set for myself I must finish one other book that I started and have slowly been reading. I have finished 8 other books since starting. Programming books are even more boring to read than business books.

I really enjoy board games sometimes. I think they are a great way to spend some time with friends. Everyone can chat, play, drink, and generally be merry. Anyways I created my own list of my favorite board games and I want to get everyone else's opinions. So that means of course I created a Best Board Games list on Seekler. Check it out and add your favorites or rank the games you love that are already on the list. Anyways almost everyone loves board games, so rank them for me...

Best Board Games

Three Cups of Tea - One Man's Mission to Promote Peace... One School at a Time.

This true story motivates you and makes you wish you were doing more for others in the world. It also goes into detail and the root causes of terrorism and fighting it with education and economic development, instead of only with weapons and war. I think the strongest part of this book are the examples that show how education empowered the people so much in ways that they always wanted to use that education to help their people. It shows how knowledge and understanding can spread peace at a time when there is so much deception between what is going on with governments and there people.

The quick summary of this book is that Greg Mortenson made an attempt to climb K2 on of the hardest peaks to summit. He failed and almost died on the way back down. Finding himself separated from his group and wondering in the frozen wilderness, he stumbled of the path only to find another one that led to a remote village that wasn't even on the map. The village nursed the sick Mortenson back to health and returned him safely to the base camp he was originally attempting to find. Mortenson after seeing the poverty and struggles of the mountain village promises to return and help them. Ever since he has been building schools all across the middle east, that educate and don't teach any religion.

The story takes awhile to get moving and the author twiddles on and on about every little person that is somehow helps in the process, but it is still pretty powerful and moving to see what one man has started. So if you want some alternative views of how to help improve foreign relations between the world and the US, this book is a good place to start. If you want an inspiring story about a flawed man giving his best, I would recommend this book.

I just posted quick review of Mavericks at Work over at the Pretheory blog. This means I am down to currently only 4 books, most of which have less than a hundred pages less. I am really looking forward to finishing off this group of books, so I can get my head into some new stuff. I expect to finish another one by the end of the day. If your interested in business and entrepreneur books our blog has started to put up a growing list of recommendations.

Book review of Mavericks at Work

I really enjoyed the first novel I read by Dan Brown, that was Davici Code. So I decided to give him another shot. I grabbed a copy of Deception point. It was another really fast read that you just wanted to see what would happen next. The problem with this one was it didn’t seem to really make any sense the more you learned about the plot the more holes it had in it from the beginning. They had a huge scientific discovery and act like long as everyone believed it for the first week no scientists would ever return to the site and never verify anything. That is just not true. Then the main thing motivating you to read further is just descriptions of something amazing about to show up or be told to you and then chapters later it is still vaguely described and you don’t know what this important thing is. By the time you are finally told whatever it is your waiting to find out it is almost certainly a let down. Also, another very Dan Brown thing to do is have a series of coincidences each less probable than the last work out so that the story can continue. It is also really easy to predict the fate of most of the people in the book. First most characters are either perfectly good or perfectly bad. Then if any good character comes in and has some small task they help the “good team” with the will certainly die quickly after helping out. Also, it seems that it wouldn’t be a Dan Brown book with out a strong smart woman quickly falling for a man in about 24 hours because of his caring tenderness and brilliance. I guess at this point I just don’t feel there is a need to read any more of his books as you can come up with some extremely unlikely problem and then a never ending series of improbably happenings and then the two good guys fall in love at the end of the story. I felt I had to finish the book but by about halfway through I just couldn’t wait for it to end.

To sum it up I would say Dan Brown is a master at making you wait, and wait you will if you read his book just to see what happens even when you stop caring.

What the Bleep do we know?

This was a very interesting movie that i have thought about several times since I first saw it. The basic idea is that it is about quantum physics. It tries to show how they truly break all laws of the world, but at the same time govern everything we do. So if we base so much science of what happens with out knowing the under lying principles ... truly what do we know. It then goes on to discuss bigger and more important issues about life that can be thought of and related to quantum physics. It is half documentary, mostly involving interviews with prominent researchers. It is half fictional story about working through the struggles of life, and how your thoughts effect you. Overall I liked it, it needed some editing work, some parts get a bit repetitive. It had interesting points and a good story as well. Since so much of it is interviews that are almost lecture style thought, you can't go to this movie as you go to others. You can't expect to go and be entertained, you have to go and purposely be trying to learn something and to gain from the experience. You should think of it more like going to visit a very interesting guest lecturer. They will be interesting and have a lot to say, but some of it might be over your head, and some of it may not interest you.

If your not interested in science or questioning religion, I wouldn't both going to this film because you wont like it... But you might learn something... hehe

I will give a short but sweet review of this book. I know this book was really big a little while ago and I am a late comer, but I normally don't read a whole lot. So i just finally got to this book after being interested for awhile. I liked it a lot, it had some flaws and problems but over all I thought it was a great experience and kept a wonderful pace. When ever you felt like the book was slowing down a bit to much and nothing was happening it would jump forward a bunch real quick and keep the story moving. It might have started to have a bit to much fall into place for the ending for me, but it was still great overall. It is pretty critical of the catholic church, but seeing as that is mostly about documents the church wont release and whatnot, I am fine with that. I think all information should be released and then the public can choose how and what to interpret. Anyways if you like detective type of stories where great clues are laid out and solved, this would probably interest you as well.