Sir Les Patterson is known globally for his tireless championing of Australian culture in all it's forms. This book is a photographic journey through the great man's native land, accompanied with rhyming couplets from the quill of Sir Les himself.

A member of the Australia Council for the Yartz since it's inception the sumptuous black and white photography depicts Les getting to grips with macrame, porcelain production and draughtsmanship.

In the film section there is a rare photo of Lois Patterson, O.B.E.. Who knew that Sir Les even had a sister. With his life being an open book we find that there is still so much that we don't know.

The Friend of the Famous section has a beautiful photo of Sir Les relaxing on set with the cast of The Sullivans (ask your parents).

This publication is just chock-a-block with photos of Sir Les in high profile governmental meetings, at cultural functions, enjoying ethnic cuisine and perusing the native art scene, or Abo Art, as it is known locally. Sir Les is also a committed conservationist and can be seen getting up close and personal with the creatures of his home land.

After leafing through this tome you marvel at the drive and the commitment of this great Australian. Whether it's relaxing over a long lunch with one of his government sponsored research assistants or sat in the bosom of his family, Gwenneth, Craig and Karen, Sir Les is a people person. And I'm not just saying that because he's my Uncle.

Question: What do these people have in common - Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver, Philippe Petit and Gary Vaynerchuk? They have passion. They are intensely passionate about what they do.

When I think about wine appreciation I think about the Fraiser episodes with Fraiser and Niles squabbling over who deserves to be 'Cork Master'. They're dressed in business suits and they're in a cellar with racks of dusty old bottles. Wine Library TV, the online video show that Gary set up, is the exact opposite of that. From the few that I've watched, it's filmed in an office under florescent lights with a New York Jets labelled spit bucket. But it's Gary's enthusiasm for wine that smashes through the screen and hits you between the eyes.

The book describes how Gary became an internet phenomenon. He says himself that he can't write, which is why the book was dictated and transcribed. This makes the book really easy to read because the writer isn't showing off with flowery language, using words that no one uses in everyday speech, he's just getting the message across.

A customer had complained that her white wine hadn't been delivered. It was December 22nd so the store was crazy busy with orders. Because it was only a case of wine and because she wasn't a big, or regular customer the complaint had been ignored. Gary set the tone for the store by putting a case in his trunk and delivering it personally. Driving for 3 hours, out of state, in snow to deliver the wine. Yes, he could have spent his time better being in the store instead of off the radar for 6 hours but it put out a message to his staff that every customer and every order counts.

There must be a term for that kind of service. It certainly works, even if the woman who ordered the wine didn't tell all her friends how it was delivered personally, it's a positive message that spreads like wildfire.

There is just one problem and it's not with the book. I can't think of anything that I'm all that passionate about. Gary says that you have to have 50 ideas for blog posts on your chosen subject. I just can't think of anything. To be honest I don't even know of anyone else who has an all consuming hobby or pastime.

After reading the book I'm certainly on the look out for new ideas.

Update
The Thank You Economy

To say that this has taken quite a while to finish is something of an understatement. Considering that I received the book as a Christmas present and started reading it at the beginning of the year. The problem has been trying to concentrate enough to read a full page without having to re-read sentences and paragraphs. Not that the text is difficult or that the concepts and ideas are hard to understand it's just that my mind would wander. I'd read a sentence, then I'd start thinking about other things, work, my career and so on and become angry. I'd keep going over things in my mind, recalling conversations, thinking about what should be said and what should be done. Then I'd remember that I was reading a book, I'd start the paragraph or the page again. After half an hour trying to read a page or two I'd give up.

What I've learnt is that I can't be angry over something that I have absolutely no control over. It's like being angry at the weather, there's nothing you can do about it. You just have to accept it and move on. But the act of being angry over something or someone is just the beginning of a downward spiral. It just feeds itself. The more angry you get the more you find things to be angry about. Eventually this self inflicted torture will manifest itself physically, chest pain, headaches, shortness of breath, high blood pressure, thankfully I haven't suffered from those symptoms.

So receiving and reading the book happened at just the right time. I don't think that anyone could read it and not get something from it. You can train your mind to be happy but it has to be a sustained effort. It isn't something that you can just switch on, it will need determination and time to achieve.

I've been using Git since March 2008 and have owned this book since the beginning of the year but have only just got around to reading it. It was a case of knowing enough to use it for personal projects but really needing a book to fill in the knowledge gaps.

After using CVS and Subversion for work, and having read both Pragmatic Version Control books, I pretty much knew what was involved. Although Git is the first version control system that I've come across that is distributed it can still be run from a central repository like Github. This is only a slight difference if you've CVS and SVN before. The whole of your projects repository is held locally and even better it is all held in the root of your projects tree structure. So, if you're without an internet connection you can still add and commit code to the repository and push the project to a central area to share it with others.

Code branches are mildly painful in Subversion. Without the Pragmatic Version Control book I wouldn't have known where to start. At work I've written Rake tasks for the development team to make generating ticket branches easier, another task to end the branch and yet another task to merge the code into the release branch. With Git it's a breeze, just a single command to create a branch, a command for switching and another for merging. Git will even warn you if you're going to delete a branch that hasn't been merged. Because creating branches is so simple you'll want to create them all the time to test out new ideas.

The book, as with the previous volumes, describes version control systems, set up and project creation. Once you have the test examples working, or git cloned the example repositories from Github, you'll be guided through a typical working day :- adding, committing, branching and managing conflicts. The later chapters deal with change history, remote repositories and more technical commands like rebase and reflog.

If my experience with the SVN book is anything to go by then the quick reference/recipe section in the back is going to be worth the purchase price alone.

Yet another book that I wish had been required reading when I was getting my diplomas.

It actually turned out to be a different book than I expected. I thought that it was going to describe ways of remembering class methods, design patterns and logic but it's more general purpose than that. The book details how the brain works, the R-mode and L-mode stuff, and how switching to a more abstract, physical way of problem solving can help you. For example, many times people that I've been working with have come back from the toilet and said, "I've just thought of a way around that problem!". Just the act of walking away and doing something else unblocks certain neural pathways. Before I had never understood the difference between mazes and labyrinths, and yes there is one. A maze is a puzzle to be solved. A labyrinth is a path that you walk around whilst thinking of a problem but only on a very shallow level. Just keep it in your thoughts but don't let it be the focus of your attention. One similar mind trick is if you are trying to remember something and it's just on the tip of your tongue, then recite something that you know, the names of the seven dwarves, and the answer with pop into your head.

There's a chapter on learning deliberately and using SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-boxed) objectives, having a Pragmatic Investment Plan and reading with SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite and Review). That's certainly a chapter I'll be reviewing shortly as these reviews of technical books that I've read seem to be getting harder to write.

The Anne Lamott concept of the Shitty First Draft was mentioned and, until now, I always thought that it only applied to creative writing. The principle is that you don't strive for perfection straight away, that you rattle off something quick, you're not under pressure and you can just scrap it because you know that it's shitty. In the Ruby and Rails worlds I think that there is too much pressure to do something absolutely correct and right. If you're going to write a Rails application then you could spend months reading blog posts detailing the best practices for every eventuality. But isn't it better to just start and get something working even if your methods are more than 10 lines and you have a HTML tag in your controller. The same with tests, yes, tests are a brilliant idea but if you don't know how to do the actual coding how are you going to be able to write tests for it.

The book also covers screen set-ups (dual screen if you can get your boss to pay for it), virtual desktops, meditation (something that I've started, again) and how to focus and work free of distractions. I mention that because at work I have, on occasion, set my email client so that I have to click 'Get Mail' when I'm working on something that require concentration. But even then I get an IM or a phone call asking if I've seen the email. I'm sure my colleagues have their mail clients checking for new messages on five minute intervals or less. No wonder everything takes so long to complete.

With new programming languages, frameworks, databases and techniques being created and popularised every day this book should help you stay on top and be current. You can't just learn Cobol and expect a job for life.

Being such a fan of Penn & Teller buying this book was an easy decision, but instead of learning more about Teller, the magician and the person, this book is about his parents, more specifically his father. It reads as if it's based upon a visit that Teller made to his parents house in Philadelphia. His Pad and Mam start to bring out boxes of letters, photographs, cartoons and other artwork that has been kept over the years. This starts Joe and Irene reminiscing about their youth, Joe's trips around the country and how they met. The book includes lots of cartoons that Joe had drawn, hoping to make a living from it, and oil paintings by both Joe and Irene. The Kid, Teller, even tries his hand at painting to see if the artistic gene has been passed down to him.

Looking back at my grandparents the only psychical records we have are albums of photographs. As far as I know none of them kept journals of any kind. When they died all their tales and experiences passed on with them. But for the next generation all they'll need to do to find out what Uncle Carl got up to is to do a Google search or look at photos on flickr. The question is would they want to?

If you've ever wondered how web-sites can suggest other books, music or movies that you might enjoy then this book will tell you. It's packed with code for grouping, clustering, filtering and analysing information. If you use Python and you either understand, or want to learn more, about Bayesian and Decision Tree Classifiers, Neural Networks, Support-Vector Machines, k-Nearest Neighbours, Clustering, Multidimensional Scaling, Non-Negative Matrix Factorisation and Optimisation then this book could well be for you.

But, if you're like me and use Ruby and aren't a maths wizard then most of the content may well pass at great height over your cranium. Yes, I did read it all, if only to try and glean more of an understanding of the techniques involved. It started well, discovering groupings in RSS feeds, then the concepts became trickier to grasp. I think the only thing that kept me going was one of the last chapters on evolving intelligence. Being a developer of software I've often wondered how you can write something, given specific rules, that can develop it's own intelligence. Especially when these things can play games with themselves and learn as they go.

The only chapter that I'm certainly going to re-read and look into is the one on discovering groups. My idea is to add a related posts, and possibly even unrelated posts, section under each post on this web-site. From what the book says this would look at the text of each post and find ones with similar words and counts of words. I may even be able to plot a dendrogram showing clusters of topics.

Barry McKenzie's Song
"The Old Pacific Sea"

I was down by Bondi pier, drinkin' tubes of ice-cold beer
With a bucket full of prawns upon my knee
When I'd swallowed the last prawn,
I had a technicolour yawn
and I chundered in the old Pacific Sea

Drink it up, drink it up,
Crack another dozen tubes and prawns with me
If you want to throw your voice,
mate you won't have any choice
But to chunder in the old Pacific Sea

I was sittin' in the surf, when a mate of mine called Murf
Asks if he can crack a tube or two with me
The bastard barely swallowed it
When he went for the big spit
and he chundered in the old Pacific Sea

Drink it up, drink it up,
Crack another dozen tubes and prawns with me
If you want to throw your voice,
mate you won't have any choice
But to chunder in the old Pacific Sea

I've had liquid laughs in bars and I've hurled from moving cars
And I've chuckled where and when it suited me
But if I could choose the spot
To regurgitate me lot,
then I'd chunder in the old Pacific Sea

Drink it up, drink it up,
Crack another dozen tubes and prawns with me
If you want to throw your voice,
mate you won't have any choice
But to chunder in the old Pacific Sea

It was this delicate pean to the liquid laugh, to crying Ruth, to parking a tiger that stuck in my head whilst perusing the cartoons. Chug-a-lug! Chug-a-lug! Originally it was the fact that Sir Les Patterson wrote the preface that lead me to buy this book. I didn't have much of an interest in reading a book of cartoon strips, but the one thing that kept me going was trying to decipher all the slang contained in the speech balloons. Thank goodness for the comprehensive glossary in the back. The one omission seems to be 'the hard word' which I still can't quite figure out.

Looking at the artwork over the ten years you can see a progression from the fine black lines, through the lighter grey shaded era and back again. Barry still has the same chin, wide-brimmed hat of course and always sports a tie and a double breasted suit. To think that such a book was considered so risque that it could have been banned in Australia. Reading it today it does seem quite tame.

Reading it from cover to cover possibly isn't recommended. It's more likely to be something that you should just dip into. Although having read it all I can certainly see where Uncle Les got some of his sayings from.

My oath I'm Australian. It's the greatest little humdinger of a country in the world. You poor old poms don't know what you're missin'. Beaut sandy beaches, lovely juicy steaks, big shiny cars, decent church-going buggers all over the place, and gorgeous clean livin' sheilahs, who root like rattlesnakes and can't pass a prick!Barry McKenzie - on his homeland

Isn't it funny when you come to think of it? A bastard tucks away a few jars of ice-cold, it's only in his ned kelly for a few jiffs, and then, when he has a decent hurl, it comes out all thick and different somehow. Isn't nature bloody marvellous!Barry McKenzie - on his favourite pastime

Whacko-the-diddle-oh!

Viktor Frankl spent three years in Auschwitz, Dachau and other concentration camps during Second World War II. The first half of the book describes his experiences. The brutality of the Capos, who were prisoners themselves but on a level slightly below the SS. Because Viktor was young he was spared a visit to the gas chambers. If you looked fit enough to work then you would stay alive. Not that life was easy, walking miles in freezing temperatures, digging the solid earth to create ditches, trenches and to lay water pipes. Such physical labour fueled each day by only bread and thin soup.

He was moved from camp to camp during this time. Once transfered by train through Vienna past the street where he was born.

Being a doctor he was given a chance to look after the sick in the camp. Certainly an easier life than working outside and on one occasion he had a chance to escape with a fellow doctor. Viktor chose to stay with his patients. Before he tried another escape a delegate from the International Red Cross arrived and all the sick were moved to hospitals in Switzerland.

The second half of the book describes logotherapy, which is considered to be the "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy" after Freud and Adler, and focuses on the 'will to meaning'.

It's the first half of the book that I enjoyed the most. Certainly the two halves are linked. If a prisoner had a firm belief that his wife or children were still alive then that force of will would keep him alive. It is only when you read a book like this that your life is put into perspective. Yes, you may dislike you job, but you aren't starving, you aren't being physically and mentally abused each day. At least I hope not. You still have enough to eat, sometimes too much, and yet we rarely have something concrete to aim for. To give our lives meaning.

A review for a book that I haven't read.

David Lynch created an exhibition for the Foundation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris from March to May 2007. As well as being a film director, for which his fame is well known, David also sketches, paints and photographs. This all seems to have started from an early age and must have been something that his parents obviously encouraged.

The book includes two CDs of audio conversation that art critic Kristine McKenna had with David Lynch discussing the art work. Of course they are constantly mentioning in the page numbers, so that you can follow along with the book open, and also because very few of the pieces have a title. What I wondered was if the book hadn't been published how would they know which art was on which page. Anyway, it's this hour and three quarters of chatter that bring the art to life. In the book the work isn't described in any way other than it's size and the occasional title. Nothing to note the time period that it was created in.

Lynch has used many different types of media. Post-it notes (you'll recognize the shade of yellow on the book's cover) of different sizes, used match books, serviettes from coffee shops, index cards, plain paper, lined paper, notepad paper, then later canvas when money permitted. It's amazing that all this was kept and catalogued. Some sketches on note paper still had names and phone numbers.

As you can imagine the work is quite dark, very much in the same vein as Francis Bacon (who gets a mention in the audio). Also included are stills from all of David Lynch's films, yes, even Dune. These just seem to be taken by the set photographer and look like standard publicity stills. Photos by Lynch himself are shown towards the end :- old German/Polish factories, nude women and snowmen.

If you're a fan of David Lynch, and art in general, then this is a fine book to add to your collection. I've been hoping that the exhibition will eventually come to London. After Paris it didn't seem to tour anywhere else until this year when it opened in Moscow. There's certainly hope yet!