[Book] Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve

Book cover Over a thousand years before the book's present, there was a war that effectively destroyed all of society.  Picking up the pieces of the technology that was left behind, London was put onto treads, run by steam, so that it find and consume other towns for resources and, ultimately, more fuel to keep moving. Over time, other towns and cities did the same, while another group, called the Anti-Traction League, created a defensive wall across the only pass in a mountain range to keep these traction cities at bay on the other side....

20 Mar 2019 · 3 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Movie] Won't You Be My Neighbor (2018)

Movie poster This is a documentary film about Fred McFeely Rogers, who was on a popular children's program called Mister Rogers' Neighborhood from 1968 through 2001.  The movie starts his career with a children's show that he produced before Neighborhood, the Children's Corner, though skips his earliest work for NBC. Won't you be my neighbor is a very well paced, carefully timed, and beautifully edited documentary....

9 Mar 2019 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink

Managing Difficult Problems

I can no longer count the number of times that I've been able to re-invigorate a problem investigation, even if I have zero visibility on the actual problem.  This takes some self-discipline that doesn't come easy, especially during an urgent investigation. Here's that one weird trick:I do the depth of reading myself.  If I see multiple threads, I'll read all of them.  Then I will write as short a summary of all of the facts that I can....

9 Mar 2019 · 4 min · Gary Allen Vollink

[Book] Fear by Bob Woodward

Book cover I haven't been sleeping well.  A good friend of mine suggested that my reading this book may be one of the reasons.  I can't dispute that directly.  As I write this, right before New Year's 2018, I'm actively looking for employment, and that is stressful, but this book definitely hasn't helped. Subtitled Trump in the White House, Fear is about the presidency of Donald Trump and written by the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward....

6 Mar 2019 · 2 min · Gary Allen Vollink