Look what I found lying around at National Bookstore, Cybermall:
Actually, it was waiting for me. I was just supposed to kill time, waiting for my passport photos to get developed (I looked particularly icky in those pictures).
I would have gone back upstairs to the office, but the photos would only take 30 minutes, so it wasn’t very “efficient” running back and forth like that. Well, I *did* go up before that, because I couldn’t wait for the bank teller to return to her desk so I can ask for a bank statement. Then after logging in and checking some mails, I went down again, got the statement (very quick, that one — she didn’t even ask for my account number, just my name), and had the passport photos taken.
And so… While killing time, I dropped by NBS, and there it was, this beautiful thing wrapped in plastic, mint condition. I would have promptly bought it, but I still had plenty of time, so I browsed the stacks. I found a few nice titles (Vintage epic books, retelling classics by Virgil (Aeneid becomes The Fall of Troy), Homer’s Odyssey (to The Return of Odysseus), among others. Pricey, though.), and the usual paperback sellers. But I kept ‘The day…‘ close to me, and so when the 30 minutes had elapsed, I went to the counter, paid for it, and went out to claim the photos (which looked absolutely horrible — not that I’m vain or anything).
We had our team’s Christmas dinner at Twist (which, incidentally, was the caterer for the company Christmas party in Speedzone, The Fort, last Sunday). The food was great — loved the roast beef, and oyster (the hollandaise was a bit icky, though). And for Php500++, the buffet was a steal.
We exchanged gifts, basing on the gift registry wiki we set up. Here’s what I got:
Before the dinner, we had our year-end team performance report. Guess who came out on top. 
And for those endless parsing of log files and lab-environment setup, I got a rip-off iPod nano. Yay. 
(I’m having it replaced with a real one, hopefully. Hehe.)
Elmore Leonard (”Be Cool”, “Get Shorty”, “Outtasight”, among others) has written a New York Times essay on his 10 rules on writing.
“Being a good author is a disappearing act,” he says. The rules are not for those who love the sound of their own voices, but for those who want to “show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story.”
Now, I don’t pretend to be a writer — and even if I was, I’m sure not a good one — but Leonard’s tips, like his writing, are easy enough to understand and follow.
And what is “hoopteddoodle”, you ask? Let Steinbeck tell you.
I found a copy of The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court by Bob Woodward (All the President’s Men) and Scott Armstrong in a second-hand-books sale.
It’s a bit outdated — it portrays the Warren Court in the 1970s during the Nixon era — but it makes for an interesting read of landmark Supreme Court decisions of those days. Written in Woodward’s classic journalistic style ala-All the Presidents’ Men, it relies heavily on “background” sources that can at times sound too much like office gossip. The sourcing is understandable, though, since the US Supreme Court has a long tradition of not showing its hand, of making its decision processes a secret. In the introduction, the writers say that no other institution has controlled the way they are viewed by the public.
IANAL, but this makes for a pretty interesting read. Besides, for Php50, this one’s a steal.
There’s this local bookstore here in the province that sells real cheap books — is Php30 cheap enough for you? Okay, so they’re second-hand books, and Booksale prolly sells them for a lot less, but with the prices of brand new books nowadays — and paperbacks at that, not even the nifty (*and* hefty) cloth- or hardbound stuff — I’ll take whatever blessing comes my way.
But I digress: so there’s the cheap-book store and I rummaged through their stocks, which were in dusty boxes all over the place, and here are my finds:
- John LeCarre’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Saw a DVD of this on evilBay, starring Alec Guiness, I think.
- The Falcon and the Snowman. Spy-stuff yet again. And a book-to-movie, too.
- White Light by Rudy Rucker. One of his early “Transreality” novels. Trippy, this one.
- A collection of Thomas Mann’s stories, including Death in Venice. Heavy stuff: after The Magic Mountain, I dunno if I can take one more Mann. Heh.
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. …
These now become part of my ever-growing reading list, included in which are O’Reilly’s Practical PostgreSQL, the IKEA 2005 Catalogue, and the UP Filipino-English Dictionary (for the localization stuff I’m working on).
